BREST, 22 June (BelTA) – A requiem meeting, The Candle of Memory, took place at the Brest Hero Fortress in the early hours of 22 June to mark the 75th anniversary of the start of the Great Patriotic War, BelTA has learned.
Participants of the event walked along the road of memory through thousands of red lamps to the venue of the annual commemorative ceremony, Ceremonials Square. The road of memory was walked by thousands of Belarusian residents, numerous delegations from the CIS and non-CIS states. The music and theatrical show, accompanied by pre-war songs and the screening of documentary fragments, started with a symbolic conversation between a war veteran and his grandson. “What brings you here every year?” asks the grandson. “I want my memory to become yours,” answers the war veteran.
The guests of the Brest Fortress were invited to go 75 years back in time. Big screens were showing the faces of the fortress defenders, still alive at that time, several minutes before the war. The hosts were telling their heroic stories. Students of the Border Service Institute carried the portraits of the killed soldiers to their burial places. Brest frontier guards lit lampads from the Eternal Light and set wreaths with them afloat on the Bug. The candle lights symbolize the eternal memory of the heroic deed of the fortress defenders, the hosts said.
Thousands of flowers and wreaths were laid by delegations at the memorial stones and the Eternal Light. Flowers were brought by frontier guards, war veterans, mayors of Pskov and Volgograd, representatives of Kazakhstan's Atyrau Oblast, war veterans from Saint Petersburg and other honorary guests. Once white balloons were released into the skies, the people that gathered in the fortress froze for a minute of silence.
“The words “Brest” and “Fortress” have become the symbols of endurance forever. The deed of the frontier guards will always bear a special meaning in almost 1,000-year-long history of Brest. We bow our heads to pay tribute to the memory of the heroes. The fact that so many people have gathered here today proves the moral strength of that generation's deed,” Brest Mayor Alexander Rogachuk said at the meeting.
“Unfortunately, that war has not become the last one. People are still killed in military conflicts,” he noted. Alexander Rogachuk called upon everyone to keep the memory of the lessons of the Great Patriotic War and never allow it again on the native land.
