Once Khatyn was a remote and unknown village of 26 houses in the Logoisk district of the Minsk region. Today this is the monument to a bloody tragedy.
On March 22, 1943 a Nazi punishment battalion encircled the village. The Nazis gathered all villagers in a barn and set it on fire. Those who tried to escape were shot.
All in all, 149 people including 75 children were killed.
Only two children and a smith escaped by a miracle.
In January 1966 the Central Committee of the Belarussian Communist Party decided to erect a memorial in Khatyn to commemorate hundreds of Belarussian villages destroyed by the Nazi invaders. The memorial was open in 1968-1969.
The memorial has an eternal fire, sculptures and symbolic chimneys with bells.
On June 30, 1969 urns with soil of 185 Belarussian burnt-alive villages, which were never restored after the war, were brought to Khatyn. So, a graveyard of villages was founded.
The memory wall has 66 plates with names of the largest death camps in Belarus and other sites of mass murders and number of the victims.
