MINSK, 18 June (BelTA) - In Belarus, there are more than 8,700 military burial locations and burial places of war victims, Sergei Kornev, the head of the department for immortalizing the memory of the defenders of the Fatherland and war victims of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Belarus, said at a press conference dedicated to the Day of National Remembrance of the Victims of the Great Patriotic War, BelTA learned.
The Book of Memory of the Republic of Belarus database went online on 1 March of last year. It contains the information about the burial places which are on the state register and about the people buried in these places, Sergei Kornev said.
According to him, the database contains the information about those whose names were established during field or archival search operations. “When we establish the name we enter it into the burial passport and make this information available on the website. If we cannot identify a person we indicate him/her as ‘unknown”’ or we indicate the number of unknown people,” he explained.
The Book of Memory also includes the information about people who lived in a certain area and died during the war, even if the exact place of their burial is unknown. In this case, the information does not have reference to a specific cemetery or a memorial site.
Sergei Kornev said that many citizens apply with requests to find the records about fallen relatives. “But ours is not an archival organization and we do not have such information. Nevertheless when we establish the identity of a soldier we try to find out where he served, in what position, the awards he was honored with and we enter this information in the ‘additional information’ box,” he added.
The main mission of the database, according to Sergei Kornev, is to bring the information about the burial place of a fallen soldier to the families. “On the website people can see how a burial place looks like, find out its coordinates and come and pay tribute to their hero,” he said.
