During World War II, the Nazis carried out brutal punitive actions in Ukraine, destroying entire villages in retaliation for resistance to the occupation. According to various estimates, more than 300 settlements were burned, and their inhabitants were either killed or deported for forced labor.
The third part of our graphic, created jointly with the NGO After the Silence, is dedicated to one such village— Luchanky in the Zhytomyr Oblast'.
In December 1942, German occupiers burned Luchanky to the ground and deported more than 120 residents for forced labor.
Eighty years later, the After the Silence team found one of the last surviving eyewitnesses of these events—Mariia Nevmerzhytska. Drawing on her memoirs, we have prepared a comic strip illustrated by Hanna Haiunova.