This book by the Byelorussian author Ales Adamovich (born 1927) contains two works of documentary fiction, Khatyn and The Punitive Squads. The fate of the Byelorussian village of Khatyn during World War II closely resembled the massacres of the Czech village of Lidice, the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane, and the My Lai massacre in 1968 during the American aggression in Vietnam. All these villages, brutally wiped out along with their peaceful inhabitants, will forever symbolize, on one hand, the crimes of fascism and militarism, and on the other, the resilience of the human spirit.

In Khatyn, Adamovich portrays the horrors of fascism through the eyes of its victims, while in The Punitive Squads, he delves into the fascist psyche and illustrates the reality of Hitler’s terrifying plans, conceived as early as the 1930s: “Let the world think… that the threat to destroy the lower races was just an allegory, an exaggeration made for effect…”

Translated from the Russian by Glenys Kozlov, Frances Longman, Sharon McKee

Designed by Vladimir Gordon

You can get the book here and here.

KHATYN 5
THE PUNITIVE SQUADS. The Joy of the Knife, Or the Hyperboreans and How They Live 231