Executed childhood
Pupils of the Mogilev sanatorium boarding school know about the genocide of the Belarusian people during the war from eyewitnesses of heinous crimes. They meet them in person, find their memories and documentary evidence of the military past in museums and archives. The guys admit: “The detailed description of the atrocities that the occupiers committed on our land gives me goosebumps. Some people think that such information is too heavy for our fragile psyche. But we want to know it, because this is the real truth about the war.”
Insight into the topic
A research paper was written at school about what the Nazis did during the Great Patriotic War in occupied Mogilev and its environs. Ninth-grader Ulyana Leshchina reasons:
– Khatyn, Ozarichi, Trostenets, Borki, Ola are well-known, but few even of our fellow countrymen, especially young ones, know that the Nazis turned the area near the boarding school into a place of torture and a cemetery.
In the Kazimirovsky forest they shot civilians, including children. The monsters buried some alive in the ground, and broke the spines of others, pressing the backs of their heads to their heels. It’s hard to imagine what kind of suffering the unfortunate people experienced, because it’s painful to even read about. But we must read. Because history textbooks do not give a complete picture of the war. There is a lot of heroism in them, and it is needed, but those who are truly interested in the topic want a deeper penetration into it.
