A new project of the National Library of Belarus – "Reading newspaper lines with the heart" – is dedicated to the 80th anniversary of the complete liberation of the territory of our country from Nazi invaders during the Great Patriotic War. To the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Belarus from the Nazi invaders."
"A voice from the Motherland sounds
like a tocsin calling..."
From a letter from G.E. Emelianenko
to his father, E.V. Emelianenko, 1944
From January 4 to August 27, 2024, materials reflecting the chronicle of news and events from publications of the corresponding period in newspapers of Soviet Belarus in 1944 will be presented weekly on the portal of the National Library.
By January 1944, in the course of several operations, part of the Gomel and Mogilev regions of the BSSR had already been liberated. This difficult path began in the late summer of 1943 with the successful completion of the Smolensk, Bryansk, Chernihiv-Pripyat, Lepel, Gomel-Rechitsa operations, which resulted in the liberation of many Belarusian and Ukrainian cities.
Today, the Belarusian people are painfully complementing the chronicle of martyrdom, revealing more and more pages of genocide by the invaders, who could not break the spirit of resistance and freedom. A large-scale guerrilla and underground movement unfolded in the republic, which made a huge contribution to the future Victory, and after liberation joined the active army.
The ashes of burned villages, mass graves, and death camps opened up to the eyes of our soldiers, who were advancing with battles on the already liberated land, which poured into their hearts both justified hatred of the enemy and determination to knock him out of his native land as soon as possible.
In the liberated towns and villages, restoration work immediately began – everything had to be recreated: collective farm agriculture, the work of enterprises, Soviet institutions, and infrastructure. But this heavy burden was facilitated by the realization that the enemy had been driven from his native land.
The same mood can be read in the lines of a letter from a soldier of the Red Army: "I am sending you my Red Army front greetings. Your letter arrived to me at a tense moment, [I felt] in this fierce battle the boundless border of joy and happiness. The voice from the Motherland sounds like a tocsin calling for fierce revenge on the damned German for his bullying of relatives and friends who ruined their young lives so early, and at the same time raises the spirits in difficult conditions. There are currently heated battles on both sides here" (G.E. Emelianenko to his father, E.V. Emelianenko, 1944, the database "Memory of the War" of the libraries of the Khotimsky district of the Mogilev region).
The project of the National Library "Reading newspaper lines with your heart. To the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Belarus from the Nazi invaders", will acquaint readers with the facts and events of those days, reports of the Soviet Information Bureau, some relatively recently declassified and widely known information about military operations, reports from the front, articles about life becoming peaceful, as well as all interested - with periodicals of that time time stored in the collection of the National Library ("Soviet Belarus", "Zvyazda" and others).
The material was provided by the Information and Analytical Department.
