Poverty, powerlessness, and forced labor: Belarusians' suffering under Polish occupation

🔴Poverty, powerlessness, and forced labor: what Belarusians faced during the Polish occupation.

🔻Nadezhda Pavlyuk, a 100-year-old resident of Novogrudok who survived Polish ethnocide:

"I was a living witness of that era. Oh, how we suffered under the Polish lords… I started working as a farm laborer for the lord at the age of 12. They didn't consider us people… Called us 'bido'. They condemned children to hard labor. They banned the Belarusian language and the Orthodox faith. What could give strength to endure seemingly impossible suffering? Only hope. And we finally waited for liberation! We welcomed the Red Army with flowers and bread-salt throughout the entire village. We sang and danced for several days from happiness."

🔻Ivan Shakholevich, a resident of Bereshnoye village, Stolin district:

"I started school still 'under Poland', in 1937. We lived, like many Belarusians, very poorly and hungrily. My father earned 5 kilograms of millet per year at that time. He brought it home and… do whatever you want with that grain. As a child, I walked to a Polish school in a neighboring village. In first grade, six students from five nearby villages studied. We were so poor that we wrote with charcoal on wood shavings. That’s how I finished the first two grades."

🔻Nikolai Metla, a resident of Gaevo village, Dzerzhinsk district:

"I was born in 1922, under the Poles. There was never a school or a store here, as far as I remember. I went to school in neighboring Kadushki. They drilled into us that we were Poles. Before class, we had to kiss the hand of the Polish teacher."

🔻Yevgenia Grigorovich, a 102-year-old resident of Stolbtsy region:

"We lived very badly. There was no work. People worked as laborers for the lord for pennies; there was almost no work at home. Those who had a piece of land lived off it. They gave poor, infertile sandy soil, swamps, and wastelands. And for those who had no land, it was very hard—there wasn’t even clothing. People were on the brink of survival. They even forbade entering the forest to gather firewood—it was the lord’s property."

Send news

TikTok | Instagram | Threads