Yahidne basement – In Ukraine’s Yahidne, 27 days of confinement in a school basement still shape how survivors want the world to remember. Three years after liberation, grief, resilience, and unresolved questions of ownership collide with a slow-moving museum reconstruction—whil
The first thing people in Yahidne do is wait. Not for a press conference, not for a ribbon-cutting—just for the war to end.
“ We are all waiting for the war to end. ” says Valerii Polhui. a resident of Yahidne. a small village in Ukraine’s northern Chernihiv region. In the spring of 2022, Russian troops confined 368 people to the basement of the local school. Almost the entire village community—pensioners and children included—was held there for 27 days as human shields. while Russian forces set up headquarters in the school building above. Ten people died in the basement under inhumane conditions.
Now, more than three years later, Valerii is calm and collected. He speaks with the controlled steadiness of someone who has learned to manage what can be managed. In July 2024. he sat in a circle with other survivors as journalists from Public Interest Journalism Lab—an Ukrainian NGO that co-founded The Reckoning Project and has been documenting war crimes since early 2022—convened a meeting to understand how residents see the preservation of memory. It was the kind of gathering that normally would have happened in a familiar local room. In Yahidne, there is no place left where neighbours can ordinarily gather, discuss and remember together.
Only 90 minutes’ drive from Kyiv, Yahidne has become a frequent destination for foreign journalists and international delegations. Residents have been drawn into a role they never asked for: unwitting guides who explain. again and again. what was done in their school. Even the door from the school basement—where villagers marked the days they were confined—has been taken to New York for an exhibition held just 100 metres from the UN headquarters.
Yahidne has no formally appointed spokesperson. Valerii. a local council member in his early forties who assumed responsibility for communicating with Russian soldiers in 2022. speaks more openly and directly than many others. After several hours, with careful moderation, pensioners, students and former teachers begin to articulate what happened. At first there is silence. Then people start talking—because they want the story to land the right way.
An elderly man cries from time to time, but not from memories of captivity. He remembers what life used to be: “Yahidne was a place where everything blossomed and berries grew.” Now it is known for its occupation. Even then, despite the humiliation and torture villagers endured, they do not want to be remembered as victims.
“We survived. We made it out of that basement. That is what they should remember,” says one participant, as if responding to someone arguing back.
“Freedom is something to be celebrated,” says another.
“You cannot understand it unless you have lived through captivity.”
Many describe their release from the basement, after Russian forces hastily left the village, as the greatest moment of their lives. But there is no celebration locally. “The war is still ongoing. We will celebrate when it’s over,” Valerii says.
For more than three years, that basement has remained a physical wound—and the memory of it is still alive in the village, in bodies and voices. The meeting returns repeatedly to the same question: what deserves to be kept, and how.
The cramped space was herded into through armed guard. Villagers recall overcrowded conditions, the pitch-black room covered in mould, and the way dust and condensation became part of breathing. Adults lit candles to calm frightened children. Everyone sat constantly. Legs swelled from immobility. Skin cracked and began to rot. They slept sitting down. They died sitting down.
Even now, some residents say, locking someone in darkness and preventing movement would still never fully convey what they went through. “We didn’t know when we would get out – or whether we would get out at all,” says a middle-aged woman.
They remember that Russian soldiers offered freedom in exchange for singing the Russian national anthem, and no one agreed.
In the conversations, the most painful details are not only about what captors did; they are also about what the villagers tried to do anyway—how they kept children together, how they offered comfort, how they held onto ordinary routines when ordinary life had been erased.
“I kept the children together — they stayed close to me like little chicks,” says one of the older survivors. “They played games and learned to play cards.” She worked in a kindergarten for 35 years, and she says that experience gave her comfort when she needed it most.
Among the captives were 69 minors. The youngest, Alisa, was just six weeks old at the time. Overwhelmed by the lack of air, dust and hunger, at times Alisa and other children stopped responding to their families. Parents begged Russian soldiers to let them take their children outside so they wouldn’t die. Valerii recalls the response: “The Russians said, ‘Let them die.’”.
Laughter comes, too—sometimes unexpected, sometimes sharp. When residents describe a local woman, Iryna, who managed to find food for the villagers and risked her life to bring it to the basement, the room brightens.
They recall how shells were exploding all around while Iryna pushed a cart with potatoes and canned meat towards the schoolyard. “Where are you going, we’ll shoot you!” the soldiers warned. “I’ve got a job to do. I have to feed the people!” she said, ignoring the threats.
Resilience, in Yahidne, isn’t a slogan. It is something people insist on while they talk.
The meeting’s facilitator. Maksym Yelihulashvili—who is a member of Ukraine’s expert community on memorialization—keeps a flip chart and writes down what residents stress is important to remember about Yahidne. Words fill sheet after sheet in colourful marker, top to bottom. He says the process will hopefully be considered in memorialization and other activities related to the Yahidne case. and that it may well become history.
But he also believes memorialization during an ongoing war is not about preserving memory for decades to come; it is about grief. “This is a tactical decision — a way to hold on,” he says.
After the meeting, Maksym looks at choices made daily on both sides. “Russian soldiers chose day after day to abuse civilians. The residents of Yahidne, meanwhile, were also forced to make daily choices – and showed resilience in … the routines of everyday survival,” he says.
He remembers one episode tied directly to Valerii’s presence in the basement. Russian soldiers were searching for local council member Valerii Polhui. “He was sitting there in the basement, but no one gave him up.”
Later, Maksym adds that moving communities into a proactive role is difficult. “People have already done the most important thing – they survived. What more can be demanded of them?. It is the task of the authorities to organise both existing and future cultural institutions to help communities structure real. meaningful cooperation with one another – not an imitation of it.”.
His thinking sits alongside a familiar sentence from Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychotherapist and Holocaust survivor: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
In the end, the survivors in Yahidne want something very specific. They want the memory of captivity—and their choices inside it—to remain under their control.
Memorialization becomes, for them, a form of narrative ownership.
And right now, that ownership is colliding with time.
When residents decided what to do with the destroyed school where almost the entire village had been held in the basement. one approach was first considered: seal off the school and preserve the basement as it was. Parents said children could not be allowed to study there. From that disagreement, the conversation turned toward building a museum instead of a monument.
Officials moved to implement the idea but became stuck in bureaucratic procedures. By October 2023—one and a half years later—the Restoration and Development of Infrastructure Service in the Chernihiv region. the agency responsible for pooling funds for postwar reconstruction. announced an architectural competition to design a memorial.
The winning proposal came from the architectural firm Derbin Arch. It was selected by an 11-member jury of prominent Ukrainian architects and local officials. Community leaders Olena Shvydka and Valerii Polhui represented Yahidne on the jury.
During the competition, Olena and Valerii voted for the only proposal that met Yahidne’s residents’ demands: preserving as much of the building as possible and leaving the basement unchanged. For the villagers, it was a key condition.
“Money would be needed both to preserve the building and to construct a museum,” Olena says. “It’s better to build while Yahidne is still in the public eye. Otherwise, the memorial might never be built. There’s nothing more permanent than the temporary.”
The museum proposal is concrete. It will consist of a cube made of weathered steel enclosing the central part of the school. Water will run down the cube’s walls, and an observation deck will be created on top. Russian military equipment will be placed in the schoolyard to recreate the events of the occupation.
The school’s basement will sit at the core of the museum and be preserved exactly as it was during the occupation. Upper floors will house exhibition spaces, a cinema and a lecture hall.
Construction work began in autumn 2024, but progress has been slower than it should be. Building crews are short-staffed, with many workers mobilized since the project started. At the same time, international delegations, journalists, officials and tourists keep visiting Yahidne.
The basement is shown during those visits, with debris—desks, blackboards, chairs and textbooks—covering what was once a schoolyard. Until the museum becomes reality, preserving the space itself, and the objects inside it, is left to the occupation’s survivors.
That is where the human cost becomes visible in a different way: not just in what happened in 2022, but in what it demands every week since.
Most local residents try to stay away from the school, especially from going down into the basement. “Why retraumatize yourself?” says Olha Shvydka.
Yet Valerii’s father, Ivan Petrovych Polhui, who recently turned 65, is often at the site. He fastens his jacket against the basement’s damp and cold with practiced quiet. He gives a polite smile and brushes off questions about his health—affected by the month in captivity and also by the physical demands of the work.
“Someone has to do it. People need to know,” he says.
Ivan never expected to become a caretaker of war crime memories. He raised three sons and has two grandchildren. For more than 30 years, he worked at a sawmill on a horticultural farm, cutting timber for construction and orchards. Five years before the invasion, he took a job at the local school, responsible for maintenance and security.
After the village was liberated and residents decided to create a museum in the basement, Ivan was asked to guard the site. By agreeing, he became both its caretaker and, unexpectedly, its guide.
Every week, Ukrainians and foreign visitors come to the school. Ivan has led tours of the basement for President Volodymyr Zelensky. EU High Representative Josep Borrell. Council of Europe Secretary General Alain Berset and former US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. along with journalists and experts from the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.
When Ivan goes down into the basement, few people ask how it makes him feel. After he shows it to people, he says, “I don’t sleep for days. I live with this all the time.”
Sometimes even visitors cannot withstand the account. “Recently. businessmen from Arab countries listened to him for 10 minutes and then asked to go outside for some fresh air. ” he recalls. “Outside, they were crying.” They couldn’t understand “how something like this was possible in the twenty-first century.”.
Ivan leads others down into the basement and the suffering is etched into his memory in thousands of details. Three years later, he remembers exactly where everyone had rested their heads and where their legs had been. He points to four chairs and sits down.
“This is where I sat. My wife was across from me. A pregnant woman was next to me,” he says, as if reenacting an investigative reconstruction.
The basement remains damp—if not outright wet. Mold covers the walls. It is creeping toward the drawings children had made during captivity: hearts. cats. blue-and-yellow flags and the words “no to war.” Nearby. adults had scratched their names into the walls and written down the dates of neighbours’ deaths.
Ivan fights the damp with dehumidifiers, but he says the battle is one he is losing. Belongings remain wet and covered with a white residue.
Staff from the Vasyl Tarnavskyi Chernihiv Regional History Museum wanted to treat the items with a special protective solution, but they were unable to find a dry space large enough in the village to do so. The region has been devastated by shelling.
Workers have left tags with inventory numbers on every item in the basement. Lists have been compiled for a future exhibition. But who will ultimately own it—whether the Chernihiv museum. the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War. or a future local museum—remains unclear. Until the museum is built, there is only hope that the process of cataloguing will prevent further loss.
“I’m really looking forward to the day the museum is built. I want to show it to people, especially foreigners – so they know that Russia is evil, so they have no doubts and continue to support Ukraine,” Ivan says. He has no plans to give up the work, even though it leaves him sleepless.
After 27 days in the basement, Ivan’s eyesight began to deteriorate. Over the past three years, he has undergone four operations, but his condition continues to worsen.
“Everyone who came out of that basement lost their health,” he says. “But as long as I can still see, I will keep on doing this.”
Yahidne Chernihiv region Russian occupation basement captivity war crimes memory Ukraine museum memorialization Public Interest Journalism Lab The Reckoning Project Valerii Polhui Ivan Polhui