Thursday morning, First Lady of Ukraine Olena Zelenska addressed a small group of invited guests at the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum.
“Thank you so much,” Zelenska said to applause. “I will speak in Ukrainian.”
Through a translator, Zelenska spoke about the war in Ukraine and the importance of knowing history.
“For a very long time, the world believed that after the tragedy of the Holocaust, humanity learned its lesson. That nothing like this will ever be possible again, but today Ukraine is forced to prove once again, evil does not go away, it only shifts shape,” Zelenska said. “It will always come back under a different banner, but with the same essence. This is why it’s so important that here you preserve memory of Ukrainian tragedies too.”
Tragedies like the Holodomor, the forced famine of Ukrainians in 1932. Zelenska toured an exhibit at the museum, one of the stops on the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum’s audio tour app that recently added the Ukrainian language to explain exhibits.
“Expanding the language offered within the app allows us to bring important history like this to more visitors, broadening access and helping people connect more deeply with these lessons in their own language,” Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum President and CEO Mary Pat Higgins said.
Among the invited guests for Zelenska’s speech was Ukrainian refugee and University of Houston law student Vlad Saratov, who reiterated the importance of knowing history, so that history is not repeated.
“I could never have imagined this could happen in my country,” Saratov said. “I didn’t believe this until the very last second, so yeah, sometimes life seems totally normal, but things can change very fast.”