Dr. Tetiana Hranchak

Dr. Tetiana Hranchak is a professor at Syracuse University's Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs, a libraries expert, a member of the Ukrainian Library Association, and a new American from Ukraine 

The Ukrainians suffered a powerful blow from Russia. Nowadays, our people are facing destruction and heavy losses. Our communities and people's lives are being destroyed and we need support and protection more than ever. We are alive and we are looking for places where we would be safe, we are looking for shelter, a point of support that would help us not to get lost in this mess and not to lose ourselves.

Libraries, created thousands of years ago to support the vitality of communities, today help Ukrainians to survive in war conditions and provide protection: physical, informational, psychological, spiritual.

Beyond the fact that many libraries are literally providing physical protection as bomb shelters, many of them from the first days of the war also became hubs of volunteer activity, help displaced people find temporary housing, find work, get information about their rights and ways to use them, renew social ties, get access to the Internet and computer equipment to continue studying and work, attend language courses, improve and acquire IT skills, etc.

By helping the physical and social preservation of the community, libraries as spaces of memory also contribute to the preservation of its identity. Continuing their daily work to preserve the historical and cultural heritage of the people of Ukraine, libraries become custodians of national memory and help us not to lose our understanding of who we are.

Given that the Russian war against Ukraine has an identity and civilizational dimension, libraries have become the target of Russian aggression.

Many libraries have suffered due to the war. A lot of libraries' funds were lost, buildings were destroyed or damaged. Due to the Russian aggression, numbers of public libraries are completely destroyed, heavily damaged, and more than 4,000 are under occupation.

The war changed the contours of our libraries, our spaces were transformed – into virtual worlds, bomb shelters, volunteer centres, and support circles. Our professional spaces fled into virtual environment.

But the resilience of our librarians is heroic. According to the words of our colleagues from the Luhansk Regional Universal Scientific Library, who twice found themselves under occupation, twice escaped and started their work from scratch, who now work in the format of a traveling library without funds, "We think. We laugh. We dream. We live Instead of producing the syndrome of delayed life... We are slowly finding an internal resource”.

We deeply appreciate any help and support that Ukraine receives, our librarians are grateful for the assistance of our colleagues from the American Library Association, who launched the Fund for the Support of Ukrainian Libraries.

We thank the organizers of the exhibition for the opportunity to present our libraries to the residents of Syracuse and to all those who came to the exhibition today and are concerned about Ukraine.