by Yuliana Skibitska, project partner, journalist and editor, Kyiv, November 2024

When I was a child, I had a vivid dream.

I saw war raging in my backyard in Zaporizhzhia, a provincial city in south-eastern Ukraine. A real war, with tanks, Maxim machine guns, howitzers and mines. My childhood friend, who lived across the street, had a similar dream — the same yard, the same weaponry.

We’d never seen combat, but our young minds conjured these scenes, shaped by Ukraine’s deep connection to World War II memory — viewed then through the Soviet lens of the ‘Great Patriotic War’. Twenty-five years later, Russian forces occupy most of the Zaporizhzhia region, bombing my hometown daily. The bitter irony: the very nation that built its identity on defeating fascist aggression has become the invader.

Our understanding of history depends on whose stories are told — and whose remain hidden. Among the long-absent voices are those of queer people, though this is slowly changing through initiatives like the memorial work at Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen, Poland’s first queer museum in Warsaw, and — as we hope — our own project.

For this work, History Unit gathered like-minded people from Poland, Ukraine, Germany and Belarus. Our aim was to immerse independent journalists and activists in places and stories that paint a fuller picture of past injustices against queer people. We visited Auschwitz and Buchenwald, had in-depth learning sessions on queer history and met grassroots activists and queer media representatives. Again and again, we analyzed the mistakes of the past to better understand present-day challenges.

There is a war in Ukraine. The dictatorship in Belarus is taking an unprecedented crackdown on dissent and queer communities. The conservative government in Poland that introduced ‘LGBT-free’ zones and banned abortion is gone, but the new cabinet appears reluctant to fulfil its election promises. In Germany, the far-right, with its distinctly queerphobic agenda, is winning an increasing number of elections.

We have now collected our participants’ stories. These accounts document the LGBTIQ+ community in Ukraine fighting for its rights under missile attacks, queer people navigating conservative Catholic society, major Holocaust museums overlooking queer victims and the troubling rise of neo-Nazi movements.

Read these stories. Support us by sharing them to expand our community. It’s crucial to us — and we believe it’s equally important to you.