Ales Adamovich’s book “Khatyn Tale” was created in 1973. She became widely known not only in the USSR, but also in Europe. Such tales of war will never let the memory of contemporaries fall asleep. This work was created based on documentary stories and eyewitness accounts. The unprecedented atrocities of the Nazis, when thousands of villages were burned along with the inhabitants, all this was described in detail by Adamovich. "Khatyn story" tells about the heroism of the Soviet people in the fight against the German invaders and traitors to the motherland on the territory of Belarus. The feature film "Go and See" was shot based on this book.
"Khatyn story". Summary
There is a Great Patriotic War. The Nazis are fighting with particular cruelty. Cruel battles do not stop. Partisans are hiding in the woods to help regular troops.
The story begins with an elderly man who was blinded by wounds, a former Belarusian partisan, and now a university teacher, Flera Petrovich, together with his wife Glasha, son Seryozha and fellow soldiers go to the opening of the monument to the fallen partisans. On the way, he recalls the events that took place 30 years ago. Among them goes their commander Kosach ...
Fleur
The Khatyn Story tells how the main character, Fleur, a seventeen-year-old boy, lived with his mother and two twin sisters in one of the villages. His father was captured even in Finnish, and he disappeared without a trace. The young man had long wanted to become a partisan and wanted to get to the commander Kosach, since he had heard that he had only personnel officers in his detachment, armed as paratroopers, and who knew how to fight fearlessly. Fleur quickly got himself a weapon, and he dug it with Fedka from a soldier’s grave. Then there were many such burials in the forests of Polesie, since from the 41st year there have been constant battles.
Fedka also asked for the front, but his father did not let him in. But Fleur began with his mother. He came home and admitted that he was leaving for the partisans. The seven-year-old sisters looked at their brother with curiosity and waited for the reaction of their mother, who was very strict and could even go away with a belt. However, at that moment tears appeared in her eyes. Soon they said goodbye.
Partisans
In the partisans, Fleur immediately began to learn serious army discipline, but he could not do without soldier's tales and jokes. At the gramophone in the detachment, only one song was constantly played, “Quit getting angry, Masha,” when everything was fine, when the dead and wounded were brought in, and when the partisans came wet and exhausted.
The partisans respected their commander Kosach, if not to say they were afraid. He was reserved, tough and laconic, but very brave and decisive. It was thanks to him that such a strict discipline was in the detachment. The cowards did not run from the battlefield, because they knew that Kosach would decide their fate. And it was impossible to say whether he was good or bad, but he had his own scores with the war, and he knew how to command.
Kosacha had a relationship with the young partisan Glasha. She once lived with her mother, and her father lived somewhere with another family in the Urals and from there sent alimony. In the summer of the 43rd, when the Germans began to bomb the villages, Glasha, with the permission of her mother, went into the partisans. The girl literally begged Kosach to take her to the squad. She immediately fell in love with this reserved person , as it seemed to her then. But in fact, she did not know how he relates to her and what she thinks about their relationship.
The detachment did not stand still, after periodic "blockades" it was necessary to constantly change the deployment. The Germans were brutal and literally on their heels.
Glasha
The Khatyn Story continues its plot further. Fleur always closely watched Kosach, since he was a great authority for him, and Glasha was next to the commander and therefore also often fell into Fleur's field of vision .
Once Fleur went looking for his horse Goering in a hazel and went quite deep into the thicket, when he suddenly heard someone crying and saw Glasha, who suddenly admitted that she was pregnant. Fleur began to reassure her, they even cheered in their conversations. Then they returned back to the squad. And the next day there was an offensive. Fleur was hurt and shell-shocked, he had to be treated for a long time, he was practically deaf.
Once he fell asleep near an oak tree. Opening his eyes, he saw that Glasha was examining his face. From her eyes, he realized that, most likely, he and Kosach had already parted. But suddenly there were automatic bursts and explosions of mines. They began to run away, wherever they were looking, and after a while they realized that they couldn’t get through to the detachment, since it was in a “blockade”. Now they needed to save themselves. For a long time they had to wander and flee from the Germans.
White Sands
Then Fleur decided to go to his village, although he suspected that the Germans were already there, but perhaps the inhabitants were saved on the “islands” of swamps, as was the case in the 41st and 42nd years. After a while, they came across people who had run away from the village and scared to death. Bombing was heard everywhere, German planes frantically bombed all life on earth. Fleur and Glasha went on and almost fell into an ambush, but managed to escape. And finally they came to the native village of Flera White Sands, but there was practically nothing left of the village, only scorched earth and charred stoves as monuments.
After some time, they met a stranger who led them through the swamps to the island. There they saw women, children and several other partisans. Not finding his relatives among them, Fleur groaned like a beast. A little later he found out that all the inhabitants of his village were burned alive in a stable. From this intense stress, he could not recover for a long time.
Soon he began to hear again. He and three other partisans go for food to make at least some food supplies, because besides potatoes and rabbit sorrel, people had nothing more.
Glasha stands with Stepka-Magician, the “commandant”, a Leningrad man, leaves her to look after the wounded. The women begged: “Though you do not leave us, dear ones, here are your wounded!” “We are not alimony!”, The Belarusian partisan Rubezh protested and joked.
Ambush
They began to approach the German lair itself in order to capture at least some kind of convoy with provisions. Something formidable and irreparable was felt in the air. Partisans Skorohod and the “Leningraders” were soon captured. Fleur and Rubezh remained, who did not forget for a moment that they were waiting for them on the "island". Having looked at one, seemingly calm village, they slipped there. And they incredibly managed to get the cow out of there. And now they were in a hurry to the "island". But after some time, German stray bullets killed first the partisan Rubezh, and then their cow.
Fleur again had to go to the village. But, not having had time to free himself, he again ran into the Germans, who were walking in chains along the field and approaching the village. Seeing them, scattered people ran away, who where. What Fleur saw later is simply impossible to describe in words. He, like many villagers, was first captured, then imprisoned in a barn and first set fire to his thatched roof, and then everything else, so that human death was painful and slow. People screamed with fear and pain in an inhuman voice. Some ran out of the barn, but a bullet immediately overtook them. Others tried to throw their children into the small windows, but they fell on the burning straw. Still others tried to get out through other passages.
Exemption
So Fleur himself did not understand how he was free, the Germans seized him and threw him from the barn, leaving him alive, as well as several others. The Germans forced them to drive cows behind a column of infantry. Fleur, on the other hand, did not give up hope of revenge; he seemed to foresee that ours were about to appear. And they appeared and took revenge on these soulless creatures.
When Fleur saw Kosach, riding a horse, with a detachment of "his", he almost lost his speechlessness. Then he told the commander that Glasha, all the remaining wounded and residents on the “island” should be saved. But this was not destined to happen. The Germans reached the “island” earlier, and everyone was destined to have their own terrible torment there, one was a painful death, the other a concentration camp, and the third a hard labor in Germany.
After the war
In 1946, after passing the Ozarich concentration camp in Belarus and having had typhus, Glasha returned from Germany and decided to find Kosach, who worked in the district executive committee, in the same region where he partized. She so dreamed of meeting, but her expectations did not materialize. After all, then in the meadow she and her love, and the baby just fantasized, and she suffered from her far-fetched love. And after a while she just ran away from him.
The Khatyn Story goes on to say that after the war half the country was devastated, burned and killed, in addition, a drought began. From the villages there were only maples and birch, in some places a dugout and benches near grass-covered conflagrations.
She went into the house to Kosach, where both windows and doors were torn out, and she could not get used to it. It seemed to her that during the war years it was still possible to endure this somehow, but Glasha felt uneasy, and she simply fled. She realized that her memories of Fleur and the forest glade where they chatted had a calming effect on her. She was sure that Fleur died in the hospital, and therefore did not begin to search for him.
And in 1953, she went to enter the institute in the correspondence department, and suddenly she met Fleur in the corridor, by then he was already a young teacher. And their joy knew no bounds. Glasha screamed and threw herself on his neck. And then she told him everything that happened to them then on the “island”, and what these were inhuman trials.
Adamovich "Khatyn story". Analysis
A truly great work was written by Ales Adamovich. "Khatyn story" and now is able to awaken all of humanity to remember fascism.
When documentaries of Nazi atrocities in Europe and throughout the Soviet Union were shown to journalists, judges, the public and soldiers of the guards at the Nuremberg Court, Auschwitz and Khatyn were shown, after watching the light in the hall, and people turning to the defendants' punitive, for 15 minutes silently simply looked at them with wild horror.
The tales of war make us look fascism once again.