Stories of native people and places. What else did the participants of the children's partisan readings talk about
The National Archives is hosting children's partisan readings as part of the "Archives to Schools" campaign, a BELTA correspondent reports.
Sviataslau Kulianok, Deputy Director of the National Archives and Candidate of Historical Sciences, said that the idea of holding children's partisan readings emerged last year. "In the year of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Belarus, we wanted to create an event that would stimulate interest in the heroic history among the younger generation. We thought that the archive is a platform where children can implement their research projects. Within the framework of this conference, many came here and worked with primary sources, original documents, to write their papers. Our main task is to foster a sense of patriotism in schoolchildren and students. It is gratifying to note that the conference is growing both in terms of the number of participants and geographically. If last year students from Minsk schools participated, this year children from regions and provinces have come. The project has entered an international format: schoolchildren from Perm, Yekaterinburg, and Petrozavodsk have joined us," he said.
Oleg Voinov, Director of the Department for Archives and Records Management of the Ministry of Justice, added that the number of participants in the readings has increased by almost 50% this year.
When the applications were collected, the organizers were surprised that a third of the reports were dedicated to family histories. "This is great, because any history begins with one's family, one's small homeland. The children had the opportunity to further study the fates of their loved ones and tell their peers about it," noted Sviataslau Kulianok.
Yasmin Nasr, a student of the A.I. Gurin Gymnasium in Fanipol, will present a report on her great-grandfather. "The idea for the research came after we flew to visit my grandmother in the Urals. There we saw a photograph, and began to search for information about my grandfather in the archives and on the internet. We managed to gather information about his combat path. He was wounded and fought until the end of the war. It was important for me to preserve his memory," shared the participant.
Anastasia Maksimenko, a tenth-grader from the same gymnasium, is participating in the conference. Her work "Genocide of the Belarusian People" is about the atrocities of the fascists on the lands of her native Dzerzhinsk district. "In the Dzerzhinsk district, 84 villages were completely or partially burned, three of which shared the fate of Khatyn. People fought, went through a very difficult path so that we could have the life we have now. Future generations need to remember this," she is confident.
A student from Minsk State
Vladimir Dyadichenko, Director of the College of Digital Technologies, will speak about his relatives at the conference. "My three great-grandfathers were a writer, a partisan, and a Red Army soldier. I believe that without the past, there is no present; one must know it to move forward," he emphasized.
The conference became a logical continuation of a series of events held in the archival sector during the 80th anniversary of Victory year. In 2025, two books of the eponymous series "Partisan Archive" were published: "Partisan Life" and "Women in the Partisan Movement of Belarus." This series will be continued in 2026. In September, the second international conference "Partisan Archive" was held.