MINSK, 9 January (BelTA) - Young people should know the truth about the Great Patriotic War and remember those events, said Lyudmila Burdyko, the artistic director of the creative team of former young prisoners of Nazi concentration camps Sudby [Fates] that has received a special award of the Belarusian president in culture and art.
The group does a lot of work to promote patriotic education and preserve the memory of the Great Patriotic War: they attend “Courage” lessons in schools, universities, lyceums, military units, give concerts at enterprises, hospitals, homes for the disabled, organize presentations of books about the Great Patriotic War.
“Our group has 28 members, and all of them are former young prisoners of fascist concentration camps, residents of the besieged Leningrad. Those people survived the horrors of the war, saw their mothers die and their beloved people suffer. They do not want those events to happen again. We do everything possible to convey the undistorted truth about that time to the youth,” Lyudmila Burdyko said.
According to Lyudmila Burdyko, recently the world has seen the attempts to rewrite the history, to “whitewash” the essence of fascism. “For almost 15 years we have been telling the truth of those events, about the losses suffered by the Soviet Union. We visit Minsk schools and different Belarusian regions, go abroad to Poland, Sweden, Finland, the Czech Republic, Austria, Slovakia, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, former Soviet republics,” Lyudmila Burdyko added.
The Sudby [Fates] team plays an active part in the international campaign "No to Fascism! Childhood Without War!" which kicked off in the run-up to the 70th anniversary of the Victory of the Soviet people in the Great Patriotic War. The former young prisoners of concentration camps traveled along the Golden Ring of Memory route in all regions of Belarus, border cities, visited war memorials in other countries and laid wreaths and flowers to the monuments to those who died during the war. In addition, they brought a capsule with the soil from Buchenwald, one of the largest concentration camps in Germany, to bury it in the crypt of the the Memorial Church of All Saints in Minsk.
Lyudmila Burdyko expressed gratitude to the administration of the Pervomaisky district of Minsk, the Belarusian Women's Union district organization, Minsk City Hall and the Belarusian association of former young prisoners of concentration camps. “Our team members are aged between 80 to 93. We are happy that we have been noticed and honored with such a high award," Lyudmila Burdyko concluded.
