Opinions & Interviews

Lukashenko: Future generations should know the price our people paid for freedom

MINSK, 9 May (BelTA) - Future generations should know the price our people paid for freedom, Belarus President Aleksandr Lukashenko said as he addressed the event on the occasion of the 74th anniversary of the Great Victory in Minsk on 9 May, BelTA learned.

The president stressed that it was on the Belarusian land that Soviet soldiers debunked the myth of the invincibility of the Third Reich war machine. “They fought for their Motherland. They fought to the bitter near Minsk and Mogilev, on the banks of the Dnieper and Berezina. Every line of defense was the Brest Fortress for the enemy. Almost every Belarusian family was stricken with grief. Two-thirds of those killed in the war were civilians. The terrible places of the genocide of the Belarusian people are well known all over the world: Khatyn, Dalva, Ozarichi, Shunevka, Trostenets. This sorrowful list seems endless,”  the president said.

Alexander Lukashenko paid tribute to the fate of the children of war. Today these are elderly people - living evidence and witnesses to the atrocities. “Their loved ones were killed in front of them. They grew up in hunger and cold in the first postwar years. They helped defend the country and rebuild it. The gloomiest pages in the  book of war sorrows were children's donor concentration camps. Thousands passed through them, few survived,” Aleksandr Lukashenko said.

The head of state believes that all those who encourage neo-Nazi rallies and processions of the elderly SS soldiers in Europe today should come to Belarus and visit the village of Krasnyi Bereg that was the place of a children's concentration camp and see the memorial for crushed child dreams, Aleksandr Lukashenko said.

“The Great Victory is the triumph of life over death. Coming generations should know what price our people paid for freedom. In the name of goodness, justice and peace. Nothing similar must never happen again,” Aleksandr Lukashenko said.

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