In 1942, the partisan Mikalai Kiselyov managed to take more than 200 Belarusian Jews from occupied Belarus to the front line.

This was made possible by a 40-kilometer gap in the front, known as the "Sura Gate".

Together with the Belarusian partisans, Kiselyov accompanied a group of Jews on a road of hundreds of kilometers.

Thanks to this, several hundred Belarusian Jews were saved from the Holocaust.

Until the 2000s, this historical fact was unknown, despite the fact that there were living witnesses of the Kisialev march.

Ina Gerasimova, the former director of the Museum of History and Culture of the Jews of Belarus, was the first to write about it.

In 2016, after 10 years of work, she published the book "March of Life.

How they saved the Jews of Dovginiv".

It was Gerasimova who initiated the process of awarding Kiselev the title "Righteous One of the World", which honors people who saved Jews during World War II.

Gerasimova discovered the story of Kiselev by accident while working in the National Archives.

"Mainly partisans passed through these "gates".

Few people knew about their existence.

Children, partisan families were taken out through them.

But the story about the fact that the partisans took the Jews there is the only one in the history of World War II.

While working in the archive, I found a letter from Kisyalev himself about this.

It was among hundreds of thousands of partisan documents.

That's how it all started," says Gerasimova.

Ina decided to write a book.

When she was working on this issue in the archive in Moscow, she met Kiselyov's daughter.

The story of the historian from Minsk came as a surprise to the daughter, she herself had not heard about her father's act.

The daughter became interested in this topic of her acquaintance, a documentary filmmaker, who soon came to Minsk.

"The film crew was at my museum, at home, and they filmed me and all my documents that I found.

I introduced them to the people of Dougina, whom Kiselyov brought out.

Six months later, the film was released.

My friends called me and said: you are not in the film, there are documents, but not you.

It turned out that allegedly the producer and director himself found all the documents and the witness," says Gerasimova.

If that documentary film received many awards and resonance, the producer, as Ina Gerasimova says, decided to make a feature film as well.

But he fell ill and soon died.

His case was continued by others who were involved in the filming of that documentary.

"I am sure that it was they who proposed the idea to the director of "The Righteous" Ursuliak.

I knew that this film was being shot, but no one contacted me.

I know the screenwriter read my book and used it.

At first I was a little upset that it turned out that way.

And then I watched the episodes and was happy that I wasn't there," says Gerasimova.

The authors of the film emphasize the reality of Kisialev's story, but the historian says that "The Righteous" does not have a "historical basis" of the story, the context in which the events take place.

"The film begins with the fact that the Germans enter the village and start shooting at the houses.

The Jews gather and flee.

It is unclear whether there is a ghetto there or not.

It's just that people were afraid of the shots, ran away and immediately met Kisialev in the forest.

And when the partisans saw that many people had come, they decided to take them somewhere," says the historian.

Gerasimova emphasizes not to save, but to take out.

By the way, Kiselyov himself writes about this several times in the report.

The goal was to take people further.

No one, except Kisialev, wanted to deal with this group of Jews, because everyone understood that they would not be able to get anywhere.

"However, Kiselyov also refused at first.

It was just a move to get them out of the woods.

Because being close to the partisans, they hindered them a lot.

After all, who will feed these Jews?

Partisans used the villages themselves, took everything there.

They did not want to take them into the squad.

There were cases when Jews came to partisan units and were shot.

Because there was no idyll: no one was going to save them," says Gerasimova.

However, as a convinced historian, Kiselyov himself in 1942 was not inspired by humanity towards Jews and internationalism.

After the war, says Gerasimova, few people in the partisan movement were interested in the topic of rescuing Jews, so no one mentioned it.

It is for this reason that historians have not previously described Kisyalev's act.

Neither he nor other partisans, who took Jews beyond the front line, were rewarded for this during their lifetime.

In 1948, he received the order from the secretary of the party's underground district committee in the area of ​​Ilya, the then Moladocha region, where Kiseliov was active during the war.

But this award was not for the operation to save the Jews, but for his general underground activities as a Bolshevik.

  • Dmitry Gurnevich

    Radio Svaboda journalist

    hurnievicd@rferl.org

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