“My grandfather was in a concentration camp in Berez-Kartuzskaya for 6 years”: the director of the children’s art school

For many Belarusians, National Unity Day is not only a state holiday, but also a personal history. So it happened and the Director of the Berestovitsk children’s school of art Tatiana Alexeyuk, whose grandfather from the end of 1934 until the moment of liberation was a prisoner of the concentration camp in Berez-Kartuzskaya, writes sb.by.

Tatiana Alexeyuk said:

My grandfather Nikolai Ignatievich Polekhovich is a native of Pinsk. After the Treaty of Riga, the city remained in the western part of our lands that had passed away from Poland. His grandfather was a literate man, he graduated from seven classes of a Polish school, and he was drafted into the army.

In the army, Nikolai Ignatievich joined a group of communists from the Communist Party of Western Belarus. He did not have time to join the party, but participated in the gatherings of patriots.

- At one of these meetings there was a traitor, and soon my grandfather and his comrades were in a concentration camp. He never shared memories of this difficult period of his life, and that he was in Berez-Kartuzskaya for almost six years, the family learned recently. Until one of my cousins began to open the archives, we believed that Nikolai Ignatievich was sitting in an ordinary Polish prison.

After the liberation of Western Belarus, the former prisoner of the Polish concentration camp returned to Pinsk, where he joined the police. When the Great Patriotic War began, he was sent to accompany the train going to Stalingrad, from where he got to the Urals, where he mined coal in mines.

- My grandfather had a medal “For valiant work in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945”. He died in 1978 and I remember him well. As soon as I learned that it was possible to visit the memorial at the place where my own man was a prisoner, I did not doubt for a second: we need to go, Tatiana Alekseyuk emphasized.

The history of Nikolai Ignatievich Polekhovich, as in a mirror, reflected the tragic and heroic history of our people in the middle of the twentieth century. It is Belarusians like him, courageous, not used to complaining about life, ready to work and defend the Motherland, who ensured our peaceful and happy present. “We are a single country – sovereign and independent”: National Unity Day celebrated in the Soviet district of Minsk