Witness Of Executions In Kurapaty: People Screamed, Not Understanding Why

Then, in 1938,Volha Barouskaya was an 11-year-old girl.

In 2018, it was 30 years since the discovery of Kurapaty for Belarus and the whole world. This is the forest behind the Minsk district Zialiony Luh, right on the current ring road. There, in 1937-41, Soviet executioners shot dozns of thousands of innocent people, hunting for the “enemies of the people,” reports Belsat.

Many heard the sounds and cries; few people saw the executions with their own eyes, as the Stalinist murderers surrounded the sites of mass crimes with a high fence. One of the most terrible is the testimony of Volha Barouskaya, a resident of the village of Tsna-Iodkava. In 1938, she was an 11-year-old girl. A boy she knew suggested that she and her friends go to a place where there are a lot of berries. Under the Kurapaty fence, there was a kind of a manhole, through which the children climbed. Suddenly, on the other side, the gates opened, and cars began to drive in. The boy shouted: “Alarm! Girls, run away! ”

Little Volha did not have time to escape.

“I hid, pressed my head against the tree, and the tree with my head and only scuffed the ground, shaking with fear,” says Mrs. Volha. “I would not be so scared, if these people had not pleaded for themselves. I did not understand at that moment that they would be shot dead, I did not understand,” recalls the random witness of the executions.

As an 11-year-old girl, she saw something she would remember for the rest of her life - people in uniform put other people on their knees, faces to the pit. The executioners started from behind, people shouted “For what? Why are you doing this to us, dear people? Little children, goodbye!”

“And then came the bang-bang-bang, like peas on a frying pan ... They fell, they fell, they fell ...", describes Mrs. Volha.

She admits that she was silent until archeologists found the remains of those killed in Kurapaty.

The number of victims shot and buried in Kurapaty is estimated differently. The initial investigation in 1988 concluded that at least 30,000 people had been shot in Kurapaty.

Zianon Pazniak then estimated this number at 102,000, a later analysis of the number of graves and the average number of victims in the grave allowed us to talk about 220-250 thousand killed.

In any case, even if you stop at the smallest named figure of 30,000, it’s a whole town, like Navahradak or Asipovichy. If we take the largest figure, then in Kurapaty there lies a whole Babruisk. Only in Minsk there were at least 8 such places of mass executions of the NKVD. No one will tell how many there are all over Belarus, as the crime archives remain classified.

Yesterday, the authorities demolished crosses around the Kurapaty perimeter.

Activists report 100 crosses were brought down and taken away.

During a press-conference on March 1, Lukashenka expressed dissatisfaction with the crosses around Kurapaty, which are visible from the road.

In an interview with Charter97, one of the leaders of the Belarusian National Congress Mikalai Statkevich urged the people to gather at 12.00 on Sunday, April 7 in the Freedom Square near the Minsk Holy Spirit Cathedral (Orthodox).