EVERYDAY LIFE OF VOLYN JEWS IN THE INTERWAR PERIOD (ACCORDING TO THE HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM IN THE USA)

The interview is an important historical source of studying the problematic issues of the history of Ukraine in the XX century. The interview has a lot of factual materials, interpretations, impressions, observations, and development of the interviewees about the described events. Between the two world wars, Western Volhynia remained a part of Poland. About 10% of its population was Jews. This article examines historical evidence of the life of the Jewish population in the cities of Volhynian Voivodeship in the interwar period from the collection of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). USHMM documents, studies, and interprets the history of the Holocaust. The mission of the museum, due to the museum's strategy, is to help citizens of the world to fight hatred, to prevent genocide, to promote human dignity and to strengthen democracy. Interviews from the USHMM collection are semi-structured and focused, thus aimed at studying a person’s "experience" of individual historical divisions and situations that arose. The examined memoirs show the construction and spread of Jewish public cities of Volhynian Voivodeship, which was inhabited by about two-thirds of their inhabitants. Education issues are most often addressed to in interviews for those reasons that the interwar period lead to the formation and maturation of respondents. The articles describe the construction, professional employment, religious and social life, as well as the perception of urban space. The analysis of memories gives us idea of a young resident of the Jewish community. On average, this was a person from a religious family which had own small business. Such person attended public and religious school, had acquaintances or friends from different ethnic groups, knew several languages and was not interested in politics at all. The material presented in this article represents the experience of Holocaust victims. Attention of the researchers in this group is evidence of one-sidedness — one of the main methodological problems of oral historical research. The exploitation of traumatic experience in this article is changed due to the chronological limits of the interwar period. Despite the above problem of oral historical research, methods permit us to add some kind of personal to the general narrative.