Expert: denial of genocide of Belarusian people is actual falsification of history
In his talk with Alfa Radio, Director General of Belarus’ National Library Vadim Gigin recalled why it is so important to talk about the events of the Great Patriotic War and explained why the case of Khatyn executioner V.K. Katryuk (found guilty of committing genocide of the Belarusian people) caused such a resonance
The expert explained why this case had attracted so much attention, “Firstly, this is the memory of our ancestors and compatriots who were tortured by the Nazi occupiers. I think this alone is enough. Secondly, one of the areas of attack on our statehood is our historical unconsciousness – the revision of history, actually, its falsification. We saw how this happens among our neighbours in Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltic States. Denial of the genocide of the Nazi occupiers against our peoples is one of the key points.”
He also noted that in these countries they tried and are still trying to present the fact that the partisans are to blame for the Khatyn tragedy,
“Why are the partisans to blame? They say because ‘the partisans were fighting there in Khatyn, and because of this the Nazis shot people’. However, this is all complete nonsense. We know Hitler’s documents, his speeches and his plans to destroy us. Should we not have fought against Hitler’s army? They are also trying to forget about the genocide as if it never happened at all. How can it be so? And then Aleksievich [a Belarusian writer] appears in an interview and says that Belarus is not a partisan republic, but a republic of policemen. You see, they are trying to throw their abomination on the entire people. We reply to them that they are bastards and scoundrels, and that nothing will work out. We are the descendants of the partisans and will remember those who gave their lives in the fight against Nazism, who were innocently killed. We’ll remember everyone: Jews, Belarusians, Russians, Ukrainians, Tatars, Lithuanians, Latvians. After all, we can’t say that all Lithuanians and Latvians were on the other side. No, there were their troops here and heroes of the Soviet Union. They were also in our underground, like the Germans, Slovaks, Italians, and French. It was truly a universal struggle in which our people were the leaders.”
The Director General of the National Library also added, “Trials of deceased traitors, betrayers and criminals who did not suffer deserved punishment are needed for a legal assessment of their actions. So that later no one will dare say that ‘not everything is so simple and clear there’. Definitely, this is the verdict. Whether he died or not, this stamp will always be on him. It’s also about going back and studying what happened. We’re learning about our history through all this pain and tragedy,” summed up Vadim Gigin.
