Khatyn massacre

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The neutrality of this article is disputed. Please see the discussion on the talk page. Please do not remove this message until the dispute is resolved. (July 2009)

'Invincible Man' - the statue of Yuzif Kaminsky carrying his dying son

The eternal flame

Part of the wall with niches to represent the victims of concentration camps

Memorial of destroyed villages

Khatyn, Chatyń (Belarusian and Russian: Хаты́нь, pronounced [xʌˈtɨnʲ]) is a village in Belarus, in Lahojsk district, Minsk Voblast, all of whose inhabitants (149 people) except one, Yuzif (Josef) Kaminsky, were burnt alive by the Nazis, with participation of Ukrainian and Belarusian collaborators^[1] from the 118th Schutzmannschaft battalion, on 22 March 1943.

The massacre occurred on March 22, 1943. German forces rushed into the village and encircled it. The inhabitants of the village did not know anything about the fact that in the morning a German motor convoy was attacked by fire on a motorway just 6 km away from Khatyn. As a result a German officer was killed. The inhabitants of Khatyn were innocent, however their death sentence had already been pronounced. All of them - young and old, women and kids — were driven from their houses out into the shed. The Germans roused the sick from their beds with rifle butts. They had mercy neither for the old nor for women with infants in their arms. The family of Joseph and Anna Baranovsky with their 9 children was among them. So were Alex and Alexandra Novitsky with their 7 children. Similarly, there were 7 kids in the family of Kazimir and Elena Iotko, the youngest boy was only 1 year old. Vera Yaskevich was also driven into the shed with her 7-week-old son Tolik. Little Lena Yaskevich first tried to hide in the farmstead, but then decided to take safe shelter in the wood. Germans' bullets were not able to catch up with the running girl, therefore one of the Germans rushed to her and having overtaken killed the girl before the very eyes of her father who was distraught with grief. Among the perished there were also two people from other villages who by chance found themselves in Khatyn at the time. These were Anton Kunkevich from the village of Yurkovichi and Kristina Slonskaja from the village of Kameno.

None of the adults managed to escape. Only three kids - Volodia Yaskevich, his sister Sonia and another boy Sasha Zhelobkovich by name - were able to hide from the Germans. When all people were finally in the shed, the door was locked and the Nazis covered the shed with straw, poured gasoline over it and set it on fire. In a moment the wooden shed was ablaze. The children were crying and suffocating in the smoke. The adults were trying to rescue them. The doors of the shed could not bear the force and the pressure of the dozens of people and so they crashed down. Horror-stricken people in their burning clothes took to their heels. But the Germans with their machine guns dispassionately killed those who tried to escape from the flames. 149 people, including 75 children under age were burned alive. The youngest baby was only 7 weeks old. The village was then looted and burned to the ground.

The girls from two different families — Maria Fedorovich and Yulia Klimovich — were saved by miracle. They managed to leave the shed and crawl to the nearby wood. Half dead or half alive, all burned they were found by the inhabitants of the village of Khvorosteny of the Kameno village council. Unfortunately, this village was later also burned to the ground and the two girls were killed.

In the village of Khatyn only two children survived. They are a 7-year-old Viktor Zhelobkovich and a 12-year-old Anton Baranovsky. A young woman Anna Zhelobkovich by name was also in the shed. Together with some other horror-stricken people in their burning clothes she tried to leave the shed, which was ablaze. She was firmly holding her son Vitia's hand. A moment later she was fatally wounded and as she was falling down on the ground she covered the son with her body. The child was wounded in his arm. He lay on the ground under his mother's corpse till the Nazis finally left the village. Anton Baranovsky was also wounded in his leg by an explosive bullet. And so the Germans mistook him for a dead boy.

Inhabitants of neighbouring villages picked up all those injured and severely burnt children and brought them to an orphanage in a small town of Pleshinitsy where they were raised after the war.

The only adult witness to the Khatyn massacre, a 56-year-old village smith Joseph Kaminsky, also wounded and burnt, recovered consciousness late at night when the Germans were already gone. He had to suffer a hard blow, though. He found his injured son among the corpses of the fellow - villagers. The boy was fatally wounded in the abdomen and totally burnt. He died later in the arms of his father.

In the Soviet Union, Khatyn became a symbol of mass killings of the civilian population during the fights between partisans, German troops, and collaborators. Hundreds of similar settlements shared the fate of Khatyn in Belarus during World War II. In 1969 it was named the national war memorial of the Byelorussian SSR. Among the best-recognized symbols of the complex is a monument with three birch trees, with an eternal flame instead of a fourth tree, a tribute to the one in every four Belarusians who died in the war. ^[2] There is also a statue of Yuzif Kaminsky carrying his dying son. The site also contains a wall with niches to represent the victims of all concentration camps with large niches representing concentration camps with victims of greater than 20,000 people and bells ring out every 30 seconds to commemorate the rate at which lives were lost of Belarusian people throughout the duration of the Second World War.

Among the foreign leaders who visited Khatyn Memorial during their time in office were Richard Nixon of the USA, Fidel Castro of Cuba, Rajiv Gandhi of India, Yasser Arafat of the PLO, and Jiang Zemin of China.^[3]

At least 5,295 Belarusian settlements were destroyed by the Nazis and some or all their inhabitants killed (out of 9200 settlements that were burned or otherwise destroyed in Belarus during World War II). In the Vitebsk region: 243 Belarusian villages were burned down twice, 83 villages three times, and 22 villages were burned down four or more times. In the Minsk region: 92 villages were burned down twice, 40 villages three times, nine villages four times, and six villages five or more times.^[4] Altogether, 2,230,000 people were killed in Belarus within the three years of German occupation. All told, a quarter of the republic's population died in WWII.^[2][5]

Commander of one of the platoons of 118th Schutzmannschaft Battalion, Ukrainian Vasyl Meleshko, was tried in Soviet court and executed in 1975.

In the Brezhnev era USSR, much attention was paid to this Nazi crime, presumably with the intention of driving away the attention from the Katyn massacre of Polish officers^[6] . According to Norman Davies, of Wolfson College, Oxford, the village was chosen and the memorial created by the Soviet authorities in a calculated policy of disinformation,^[7] designed to create confusion with the Katyn massacre.

[edit] See also

• 36th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS
• Katyn massacre
• Occupation of Belarus by Nazi Germany
• Ležáky
• Lidice
• Oradour-sur-Glane

[edit] Notes and references

[edit] External links

• Official website of the Khatyn Museum

Coordinates: 54°20′04″N 27°56′37″E / 54.33444°N 27.94361°E / 54.33444; 27.94361