We spoke with the Museum’s collection manager, Oksana Lepesiienko, about the specifics of her work with children’s experiences and gained deeper insight into the Museum’s archiving practices. 

Read more below.

What does the process of acquiring and cataloging a new object for the WCM Ukraine collection look like?

The process begins during the interview, when participants donate personal objects to our researchers. Each object is assigned a unique ID in our digital system, where I record its description, dimensions, materials, and condition.

Physical objects are photographed, labeled, and packed using archival-grade materials: Tyvek for 3D objects and acid-free envelopes for 2D items. They are then stored in coded boxes for precise tracking (cabinet, shelf). Digital objects are kept in organized cloud storage. Ultimately, every object receives a comprehensive digital “passport,” allowing us to locate it within the collection instantly.

What are the main challenges of working with the collection in wartime?

Safety is our priority: we focus on physical preservation, digital security, and reliable backups. While these are standard archival practices, they have become vital in Kyiv today.

Faced with frequent Russian shellings and power outages, our team strives for maximum autonomy to ensure work continues regardless of external factors. Archiving in wartime requires a constant balance between professional standards and daily adaptation. Because the Museum documents the very war it is living through, we feel a profound motivation to protect this history despite the instability.

Name three of the most unusual conservation challenges in your collection.

From a conservation perspective, the most unusual challenges are food items: a poppy seed bun, a Snickers bar, and a small bag of dried bread rings (sushky).

These objects require special storage conditions to protect the rest of the collection. For instance, the Snickers wrapper is no longer airtight due to a damaged seam. To ensure their preservation, we keep such items in isolated, transparent, airtight packaging and inspect them regularly.

Which objects were the most difficult to archive?

The process is simple but time-consuming, especially when archiving entire personal collections. Large digital sets, such as dozens of photos, videos, and scans, or numerous small physical items, like tokens or seashells, require the most effort. However, these collections are the most engaging to work with, as they demand a thoughtful approach to systematizing them as a cohesive whole.

At the moment, War Childhood Museum Ukraine has an exhibition open in Chernivtsi, in the South-West of Ukraine, titled “Books That Walk With You Through War,” featuring 15 stories of children and adolescents for whom books became a way to cope with the experience of full-scale invasion.

In our collection, children and young people across different conflicts have described how reading helped them endure moments of isolation, displacement, and danger. We invite you to read some of these stories below.

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole

I learned to read because of the war. I devoured books, one after the next. Ironically, the war, and the time spent in our basement shelter, led to my love affair with the written word. I guess it was an escape from the reality of war because life in books was happier and safer than the one we were living. I imagined my friends and myself as the characters in these books. Each hour spent reading was an hour spent without war… Even if it was only in my head!

Azra, b. 1982, Bosnia and Herzegovina

There Was Only a Book

I woke up on the 24th at 7:30, saying to my mom, “Let’s get ready for school, we are going to be late. Class starts already at 8.” She said, “There will be no more school. There’s a war.” The shooting started, and I heard a machine gun. It frightened me. I would lay in bed, not knowing what to do. Later, we went to my grandfather’s basement. There was a TV, a kettle, a sofa – it was a cool basement. Our cat Glasha was with us in the basement.

In the spring we moved to western Ukraine. My father’s sister lives there. We read this book on the sleeper train on the way there. They had given these out to us at school not long before this. Such an awesome book! While we were on the way, I read it from start to finish – it’s 95 pages. At home, I read it a couple more times – I didn’t want to lose any battery life. There was no internet anyway, so there was only this book.

Nastya, b. 2011 , Ukraine

My World, as Discovered in Books

The war began when people wearing camouflage uniforms rang our doorbell and said my dad had to come with them. I was in the living room, watching them through the glass panel door as they gave my dad instructions on what he can and can’t bring with him. Those stern men, who wore trench coats and took dad away on that day, marked the beginning of the war for me. It was in 1999 already – when dad was drafted for the second time – that a great fear of death got hold of me. At that moment, everyone had their own way of surviving—the books were my escape. Since everyday life wasn’t so colorful and full of possibilities, I immersed myself in books and all the worlds I could explore through them. I worried deeply that I would never get to visit London and Paris, and see that world I discovered in books. I kept a lot of objects from that period—my diaries, notebooks with a lock, scented stickers, letters, Barbie dolls. This drawing, which I did in art class, shows my imaginary room—a room I wanted to play in. Back then, playtime was, next to books, my only escape, and a lifeline.

Bojana, b. 1983, Serbia

Love Stories and Poems

Poems and stories were a form of escapism from the wartime activities happening all around us. I borrowed scrapbooks and notebooks from older children in the neighborhood and copied what was in them into this notebook, which I received in a humanitarian aid package. I filled the pages with the usual doodles, but I would also paste in various pictures cut from old magazines, pre-war cassette tape and record sleeves, and wrappers from chocolates we used to buy at the market. Instead of glue, I used old nail polish or a mixture of flour and water – confirmed to be the best improvised glue we had access to!

Amina, b. 1980, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Grandfather’s Memento

This Quran has a long and storied family history, having once belonged to my grandfather. He was forcibly expelled from his home and village. When the soldiers broke into his home, this book was among the very few things he managed to grab before he was expelled. 

After my grandfather’s passing, the Quran remained within our family, serving as a memento of him and a reminder of our ancestral village. 

These days, I often feel scared of something bad happening to me, but my family, particularly my mom and dad, comfort me and help me feel safe.

Salwa, b. 2006, Palestine

Among the 6,000 personal objects and stories from more than 20 conflict-affected contexts in our collection are many memories children shared about their teachers. In honor of this year’s World Teachers’ Day, we invite you to explore some of these stories.

Frightened Teacher

I learned to write during war. I started elementary school in September 1992. The classes didn’t take place inside a classroom, but in the Šehić family grocery store. Shelling was an everyday thing. On one such day, I was finishing a drawing on the theme of “Happy Family Away from War” and then came the call to evacuate. Half-way on the path to safety, I managed to free my hand from the teacher’s. I was dead sure that on my feet were magic slippers that would help me outrun shells and sniper fire, and so I went straight back to the store to grab my notebook, because I wanted to finish the drawing. Nobody would ever yell at me the way that frightened teacher did when she was trying to explain to me that I don’t have magic slippers and that my reckless escape could have cost me my life.

Mersiha, born 1987, BiH

The Best Student

I was in the sixth grade of primary school, and the only student in my class who was of a different ethnicity. The other kids often got nasty; they would draw nationalist symbols on my notebooks and atlas or just taunt me directly. The teachers were the same, all of them aside from my Math teacher, Mara Torbica. She was always thoughtful, and in situations where I was in danger, she would send me home and write absence notes. 

In Geography class, we learned about the territories that were home to one people only, and on tests we praised the military successes and territorial expansion. Because of my immense desire to maintain all A’s, I would write the “correct” answers on tests—I was hoping that I would be declared the best student at the end of the year. At the end of the year, as we were standing in front of the teacher’s room, my teacher Mara hugged me tightly. She told me that, despite my good grades, I could not be declared the best publicly. It was only later that I cried my eyes out over it.

Ornela, born 1980, BiH

The Ugly Duckling

My grandma taught the Serbo-Croatian language, and my grandpa worked as a teacher. During the war, the two of them helped brighten up my childhood. In the evenings, when we had no electricity and could hear shooting outside, my grandma and I would read stories by candlelight. These were usually Grimm’s Fairy Tales, stories by Ivo Andrić and Branko Ćopić, or Andersen’s “The Ugly Duckling.” Thanks to my grandma and her stories, as well as my grandpa who taught me how to read and write in wartime, and of course my parents, I grew up knowing that there would be happier and more beautiful times again.

Darija, born 1987, BiH

School Photograph

During the war I attended primary school in Srebrenica. Students from a few different grades attended classes in the same classroom, which was under constant threat of shelling. Despite that fear, our teacher always did the best he could.  

The photograph I’m giving to the War Childhood Museum is a memento of mine from the first grade of primary school. We didn’t have many opportunities to take pictures during the war, which makes this photo the first and only memento of my school days.

Dželaludina, born 1984, BiH

Ballet Online

I remember school stopped for two weeks. But not ballet. The full-scale war started on the 24th, and by the 27th we already had Zoom conferences where we practiced ballet. Our teacher stayed in Kyiv and didn’t go anywhere. She conducted classes online every day, and those who could, joined. We worked on our technique and did stretches.

These conferences weren’t just for our studio. Children from any city could join us. We would log in, talk a bit, ask how everyone was, where they were, if everything was alright. I remember one girl from Odesa; we were in the middle of a class when suddenly her lights went out.  We heard an explosion, and she, without turning off her camera, ran for the basement.They were shelling during our class.

Sofiia, born 2009, Ukraine