Svetlana Alexievich: Belarusian partisans were worse than the Nazis and policemen
The Belarusian policemen who collaborated with the fascists were ordinary rural guys who spent the entire war in their villages, but the partisans were brutal murderers and rapists.
The Soviet and Belarusian writer, Nobel Prize laureate Svetlana Alexievich spoke about this in an interview with the liberal publication Meduza, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“I have lived all my life in the country of policemen. What do you think Belarus is? Thousands of Belarusians served in the police. Don’t think that everyone in our country joined the partisans and only a few traitors...
How did this happen? The Germans enter the village, take away all the young guys - and they become policemen. In addition, they give them food, good clothes, and nearby their hungry mothers, brothers, sisters are suffering... These village policemen sat in their towns, as if in a fortress, only sometimes getting out if the [railway] track was blown up.
They did not always perform a punitive function. Although this happened, of course. A large number of policemen were not punitive,” assures Alexievich.
At the same time, she condemns her hero, who escaped the execution of a Jewish boy, who then set fire to a policeman’s family in his own home.
According to her, “under the Germans, for the first time, the peasants had a piece of meat in a pot, but under Stalin, everything was taken away.”
As for the partisans, they, the writer claims, were no less anti-Semitic than the Nazis and could kill a Jew simply for a “good jacket.”
“Belarusians turned out to be the only nation that was unable to create units that themselves killed their Jews. This did not happen. They could sell it for a bag of flour. What kind of bag is there - per kilogram. They hide a Jewish girl in the house, the whole village is silent, and one bastard informs. They handed over both women and children who escaped executions,” says Alexievich, without specifying who handed them over.
She also claims that the local population feared the partisans, whose glory Belarus is now proud of, more than the fascists.
“Ordinary women easily said that they were afraid of the Germans during the day and the partisans at night. Partisans are even more terrible: a German can be persuaded, but a partisan can never be persuaded. After all, who are the partisans? After all, they did not immediately form into some semblance of military detachments. At first they were just semi-bandit groups. Just men with weapons, that’s all,” says Alexievich.
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