Khatyn

Twenty-six houses. A hundred and fifty-seven people. This is a memorial and nothing else.

Khatyn was a village in the Lahoysk district of the Minsk region of Belarus, 50 km from Minsk. Nobody knows exactly when it was founded, but the first written mention dates to the mid-16th century, when the territory belonged to the service Tatars of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, who had settled there in the time of Prince Vitovt and served in the military. In July 1551 Sigismund Augustus, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, granted privileges over these lands.

On 22 March 1943 almost the entire population was massacred by Schutzmannschaft Battalion 118, made up mostly of Ukrainian and other Soviet collaborators, assisted by the SS-Sonderbataillon Dirlewanger, in retaliation for a partisan attack on German troops.

Khatyn became a national memorial rather than a local one because it was not unusual. At least 5,295 Belarusian settlements were burned and destroyed during the war, and their inhabitants were frequently killed as punishment for supporting partisans, some places losing as many as 1,500 people. In the Vitebsk region 243 villages were burned twice, 83 three times, and 22 four or more times. In the Minsk region 92 were burned twice, 40 three times, nine four times and six five or more times. Over 2,000,000 people were killed in Belarus across three years of Nazi occupation, close to a quarter of the population.

The state memorial complex now standing on the site keeps the history of the village itself alongside the history of its destruction, and runs a museum, guided excursions and a guestbook. The associated memorials at Dalva and the Mound of Glory are part of the same complex.

Go, and read the village history first. Khatyn existed for four hundred years before the day it is remembered for.