The exhibition "I'm Going on a Mission", dedicated to women who participated in the partisan movement of the Surazh partisan zone, has opened at the Vitebsk Regional Museum of the Hero of the Soviet Union M.F. Shmyrev, reports BELTA correspondent.
The exhibition features documents about 10 women who held various positions and maintained contact with partisans and underground fighters during the Great Patriotic War. Some of them were responsible for creating underground Komsomol organizations, not only in the Vitebsk region but also in the Polotsk region. Together with the partisans, they participated in combat operations, distributed patriotic leaflets among the population, and helped treat soldiers.
The exhibition's title comes from the memoir book of one of the heroines of the partisan movement, Maria Kozlova (Zhuravleva), published in 1975. It tells how Maria first went underground in the Nevelsky district of the Pskov region, and then was sent to a partisan detachment in Belarus.
The exhibition organisers also noted the merits of a simple villager, Emilia Chonenko, who, living in a village occupied by the Germans, helped the partisans by baking bread, sewing clothes from parachute material, and sheltering soldiers. Once, she saved the life of a young scout from a partisan detachment who stopped at her place to spend the night. When Germans arrived in the village and discovered the young man, they began to ask who he was. Emilia Ivanovna "christened" the partisan as a neighbour's son. She had managed to hide his weapons in advance, so nothing betrayed the young man, who was subsequently released. This way, the peasant woman saved herself, as she faced execution for collaborating with the partisans. After the war, she was awarded a medal for military merit, and Emilia Chonenko could not understand why, as she had not fought the enemy but simply fulfilled her civic duty.
The exhibition will be useful and interesting for the younger generation, especially young people. At the beginning of the war, all the female partisans featured here were 18-21 years old, and they were not intimidated by the enemy, acting and helping as they could. Their feats can serve as an example of patriotism and love for the Motherland.