World War II, Uncontrived and Unredacted: Testimonies from Ukraine

The war separated families, took lives, broke fates ... It is very important to know and remember it at any time. Even many decades later, new details, memories, and testimonies appear.







This book gathers several fascinating, true family stories written from accounts of parents, grandparents, etc. The authors, whose articles were collected with the help of the popular scientific publication Historical Truth, tell us about the worst war of the 20th century, about the fate of those people whose lives were divided forever into “before” and “after.” Here we can find first-hand accounts about Ukrainians who fought in various armies, about the lives of deported people, about the fate of people taken to compulsory labor camps, and about the men and women who remain in our memories forever.



Vakhtang Kipiani, born in Tbilisi in 1971, is a prominent Ukrainian political publicist as well as editor of the popular Kyiv Internet magazine Istorychna Pravda (Historical Truth). As a student in 1990, he was an active participant in the "Revolution on Granite" (so named after the stone in Kyiv's Independence Square), the after-effects of which eventually led to Ukraine's independence in August 1991. After studying history, he worked for several Ukrainian newspapers and television stations and as a lecturer in journalism at the Ukrainian Catholic University. Kipiani's research interests include the illegal press as well as the dissident movement of the Soviet era and manifestations of extremism in today's media. His previous anthologies include The Case of Vasyl Stus (Vivat 2019), on the Soviet trial of the eminent eastern Ukrainian poet, and A Country of Female Descent (Vivat 2021), featuring testimonies of significant 20th-century Ukrainian women.