Municipal institution “Vysokopillia Local History Museum”, Vysokopillia, Beryslav district, Kherson region

The museum was founded in 1980 on the initiative of Oleksii Pushkariov on the basis of a school, then on the basis of a young technicians' station, and was initially housed in one room. In 2011, the museum was moved to the current building (the old German school), where it is located now. This building was built in 1880 as a German mixed-type school. According to information from local residents, during the Nazi occupation, there was a German hospital in the building, and during the evacuation of the hospital, certain documents were hidden in the basement (according to the former director of the museum Kateryna Bibik, there is still a sound of emptiness in the floor, and by 2022 the museum had plans to explore what was under the floor).

Until 2014, the former Bibik interviewed local veterans of World War 2 and made a documentary that was on her computer, which had a broken hard drive with all the information. Perhaps a copy of the movie was left in a museum. She interviewed up to 5 local residents from the surrounding villages: Lukashov, Martynenko Vyacheslav Akimovich (from the village of Arkhangelske), Gorokhov Mykola Yakovlevich, Denisenko Halyna Mykolaivna, and Yasinsky. There are short excerpts from the video on the Bibik Facebook page. There was no inventory log in the museum. A local researcher of World War II, Yuriy Mudryi, provided exhibits for the museum. He is currently listed as missing in action as a result of the Russian-Ukrainian war. A local resident, Hennadii Trush, found and handed over to the museum lists of Soviet combatants buried in the Vysokopil district. Bibik used this list to analyze who was buried in Vysokopillia, but their names are not listed on the memorial stele, and vice versa, who is listed but not buried there. Bibik negotiated with local authorities about the need to officially document this, but the Russian aggression against Ukraine in 2022 interrupted this work. The paper list for the Vysokopillia district remained in the museum, and the list for Vysokopillia is supposed to be in the researcher's private collection.

The lists of Ostarbeiters (15 sheets) were already in the museum when Bibik became director, and she does not know their origin. Bibik estimates the number of photographs from the period of World War II to be 100. The local periodical “Vysoke Pole” (formerly “October Dawns”) had publications about local veterans and their meetings. The local archives have all the issues of the publication, but Bibik believes that they are from the postwar period.

Vysokopillia, Beryslav district, Kherson region

Initially a civic initiative, later a local budgetary institution

Municipal institution of the local territorial community

The building of an old German school. Before 2022, the museum had 6 halls with exhibitions and a room for an improvised storage facility that lacked proper storage conditions. After the de-occupation in 2022, all the materials were moved to one hall, where everything is still stored, and there are still stands in two rooms.