Karazin Students Participate in the German-French-Ukrainian Exchange Program “Dialogue of Traces (Spurendialog)”

From October 18 to 25, 2025, students of the School of History took part in the first stage of the German-French-Ukrainian exchange program “Dialogue of Traces (Spurendialog)”, dedicated to the topic of forced labor during the Nazi era, with particular attention to the stories of French and Ukrainian forced laborers.

The main organizer of the program is the Association for Child and Youth Exchanges “Kijuga e. V.” (Berlin), in cooperation with the French organization ECCO (Donchery).

The project partners include the Department of History of Ukraine of Karazin University and the Department of Modern and Contemporary History with a focus on Eastern European History at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg.

The program is funded by the Franco-German Youth Office (DFJW/FGYO).

The university group consisted of seven undergraduate students of the “History and Archaeology” program: Oleksandra Ivaniuk (1st year), Diana Kobzar (2nd year), Viktoriia Lashchenko, Vladyslava Riznichenko, and Anastasiia Zvada (3rd year), Yelyzaveta Spasonova and Yelyzaveta Malik (4th year).

The group was led by Associate Professor Yevhen Zakharchenko from the Department of History of Ukraine, School of History.

The first stage of the program took place in Germany. Participants from France, Germany, and Ukraine visited museums, archives, memorial complexes, and documentation centers dedicated to the study and commemoration of forced labor under the Third Reich in Berlin, Erlangen, and Nuremberg. They also took part in specially organized workshops on the study of ego-documents of Ukrainian forced laborers, held at the Documentation Center of Nazi Forced Labor (Dokumentationszentrum NS-Zwangsarbeit) in Berlin and at the Department of Modern and Contemporary History with a focus on Eastern European History at Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen.

As part of the program, the participants visited the historical centers of Berlin and Nuremberg, the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Memorial and Museum, the Erlangen City Archive, the Nazi Party Rally Grounds Documentation Center in Nuremberg, and the Memorial House of the Nuremberg Trials.

The next stages of the German-French-Ukrainian exchange program “Dialogue of Traces (Spurendialog)” are scheduled to take place in France (April 2025) and Poland (July 2025).