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WE WILL NOT FORGET, NEITHER WILL WE FORGIVE

«In June, 1966 a monument to the victims of fascism was erected in Buharino village, Krasninsky region on the border with the village of Liady. More than 2,000 people were buried here: women, old people and children, tortured to death on April 2nd, 1942.

An article from a newspaper dating from 1943 was read out during a mournful meeting with relatives of those who perished.

One day after Liady was liberated, representatives of the Red Army and civil groups organized excavations of the mass grave in town and faced a tragic picture.

Hundreds of soldiers and officers saw it: they came to the edge of the deep trench and as they looked down their hearts stopped at the view. A baby wrapped in a blanket embraced by a mutilated mother, disfigured corpses of old people, young women, boys with smashed skulls.

The pale-faced soldiers looked back at the trench with pain and anger as if they wanted to remember the picture forever, and squeezed their guns even firmer.

Afanasy Semenov, who used to work in a bakery, told us about what had happened in Liady. The Hitler cannibals started exterminating the local population from the first days. Robbery, raping and murders were a usual thing.

The population of Liady will never forget the April days of 1942. The streets were deserted – people were scared to go outside. The sinister silence was interrupted by yelling that came from a school that had been turned into a prison by the Nazis. The prisoners were local people and people from neighboring villages. There they were starved and tortured.

On that eerie April day the Nazis decided to get rid of the captives at once. Everyone had to be shot including old people, women and children. They were executed in groups of a hundred and two hundred people.

This mass murder of innocent people lasted the whole day. Women with babies, old people, young men and women were taken along the street like cattle. The remaining locals were prohibited to go outside that day.

The bloody massacre took two more days. The Nazis organized raids, caught and killed everyone who they suspected to have connections or sympathy with partisans.

They derived some special pleasure from torturing people: they poked them with bayonets, broke bones, and buried them alive. They did not have compassion for children, either.

We are standing in front of a heap of mutilated bodies of Soviet people. Their blood calls for vengeance to fascist murderers.»

This article was published on June 11th, 1981 in a newspaper called “Smena”. It mentions facts, but words “a Jew” or “ghetto” are not mentioned even once. It does not mention that the memorial, which was opened on June 11th, 1966, was erected on the money collected by those who were lucky to survive. But even to publish this kind of article the newspaper’s editor, M. Velikanov, had to have a lot of courage.

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