Today marks the 75th anniversary of the Khatyn massacre. On March 22, 1943, the village of Khatyn in Belarus with its 156 inhabitants and 26 houses was completely destroyed by a Nazi Police battalion made up of primarily Ukrainian collaborators. I visited the site on my March 1991 trip to Russia and Belarus (see my 1 March post).
Over 5,000 settlements and villages in Belarus were burned and destroyed by the Nazis in a three year period from 1941 to 1944 for collaborating with partisan forces. Many were burned numerous times.
Khatyn was destroyed on this date because earlier in the day a convoy of the German Schultzmannschaft Battalion 118 was attacked by Soviet partisans near Khatyn. Four police officers were killed, including the commander who was a famous 1936 Olympian.
The police battalion gathered the villagers together and locked them into a barn, put straw around it, and set fire to it. Those villagers that tried to escape by jumping out windows or breaking the doors down were machine-gunned. There were only six persons, one adult, and five children, who survived the burning of the village. Two other adult women were away from the village for the day. 75 children under the age of 16 perished that day.
The sculpture above was made to represent the sole adult survivor of the burning, Yuzif Kaminsky, who searched and found his son’s body in the charred remains of the barn. When I visited the site, the guide told us that he was actually away tending his field at the time and came back only afterward. I don’t know which story is true. Most of the information and all of the photos on today’s blog are from a Wikipedia site which I will post at the end of this blog today.
Another part of the memorial I saw was the remains of the 26 homes. Only the brick chimneys remain. Bells were put in the top of each chimney and they are rung in unison every 30 seconds representing the rate at which the Belarusians were killed during the war. Over 2 million people were killed during that three-year period, about 25 % of the population.
Another moving part of the memorial was what was called a Cemetery of villages, which consisted of 185 cubed onyx-like boxes in rows representing a village in Belarus that was destroyed. Each box contained ashes from that particular village.
According to some sources, Russia used this memorial to confuse the foreign community with the covering up of the Katyn massacre.
A final note: among the group of our peace conference high schoolers that day was a small group from Germany. They said very little. I can only imagine what they were thinking.
Please go to this site for more information:
(Calibri 12)
No comments:
Post a Comment