The Russian-Ukrainian war has put every Ukrainian family before a difficult choice: to stay in their hometown or to move abroad or to safer domestic regions? And the next question is how to balance the interests of all family members? How long will they have to live in a new place? Under what circumstances does it make sense to return home?

In the summer of 1941, the inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine faced similar challenges. Of course, citizens of a totalitarian society were more limited in their right to choose a strategy for their own behavior - the state solved problems or imitated their solution. How the evacuation of Soviet people was organized, what risks displaced people were exposed to, what had to be put in an evacuation suitcase – all this was discussed in a lesson by the Museum's researcher, Dr. Olena Ishchenko.

The lecturer paid special attention to the evacuation of Jewish families: which Jews had the right to receive evacuation documents, why the relocation of Jews to the interior of the country was not organized - after all, Moscow had information about the anti-Semitic policy of Nazi Germany but did not inform its citizens about the threat. Therefore, many Jews (especially middle-aged and older) did not fully realize the danger that lurked in the case of passive expectation and hopes for a repetition of the quiet Kaiser occupation, for the arrival of “civilized Germans”. O. Ishchenko focused on several stories recorded by Museum employees and published in the collections of memoirs “Revival of Memory: Memories of Witnesses and Victims of the Holocaust”. Testimonies about childhood spent in evacuation were also heard from the Lecturer’s listeners – Lyudmila Lysenko, Rakhila Dubnytska, Faina Gaiduk, Larisa Karpenko, Zhanna Arkhipova. They told how, together with their mothers, they survived the wartime hardships in incredibly difficult living conditions, without proper food, clothing, or medical care. This is how the ability of an entire generation to maximum self-restraint, everyday unpretentiousness, the habit of helping others and sincerely rejoicing in every little thing was formed. Everyone present agreed that evacuation was the most successful life strategy of Soviet Jews. After all, almost all those who remained in the occupied territories were destroyed in the first months of Nazi rule.