REP Activist From Baranavichy: Officials Must Come And Repent Before Cross

Activists in Baranavichy honoured the victims of Communist repressions at the place where the NKVD prison was once located.

A dozen of Baranavichy residents cleaned the area around the memorial cross to the victims of the Communist terror, lit candles, recited the poems by the poets who had been shot dead, and prayed for all those who had been killed at the times of hte Communist regime.

One of the participants of the action, REP trade unionist Ryhor Hryk thinks that “the Soviet repression continues to exist today”, — Radio Liberty reports.

“Many relatives of Baranavichy dwellers were killed at this place,” — Ryhor Hryk says. — For many years, in spring and autumn, we come here to clean the territory around the cross and pray for the victims of repression. Each nation has places where the people honour the memory of the innocent deceased.”

Hryk believes that the officials “must come and repent before this cross.” Representative of the Belarusian Helsinki Committee Uladzimir Bolbat regretted that the the authorities and the communal services pay so little attention to this memorial cross.

During the action, the activists placed a symbolic wreath of a barbed wire with the white-red-white ribbon braided into it, on the cross.

No incidents were reported, no policemen were spotted.

The cross-monument with the inscription "To Victims of Violence 1939-1953" is located in Baranavichy at the place where the Krivoye Koleso prison of the NKVD stood in Stalin's times. It was erected in 1992 in the center of the city, but a few years later it was secretly moved to the square, where the prison used to be.

According to the Baranavichy researcher of the archives Aliaksandr Tatarenka, several thousand people were killed in the Krivoye Koleso prison in 1939-1949.