It is a quiet place, with lush green grass covering the location of the former Belarusian village. A village that was burned to the ground with its inhabitants in 1943. Anyone familiar with this small corner of Eastern Europe is chilled to the bone by the events that transpired there, and the village's name Khatyn has now come to embody a horrific national tragedy. But tragedy is not all this name embodies, for it also reminds people of the tremendous courage of those who fought for the life and freedom of their country.

It is the story of this village and the events that surround its annihilation that are the focus of Ales Adamovich's novel Khatyn, which was written on the basis of historical documents. The author, himself a World War II veteran and partisan,  depicts the reality of the partisan resistance to fascism in Belarus.

The main character is a man named Florian, who in his memories returns to events that transpired some thirty years ago, when as a teenager he joined a partisan unit and met his future wife, Glasha. He witnesses how the villagers of Khatyn are burned alive as reprisal for supporting the partisan movement. The monstrous cruelty of the death squad and its commanders manifested itself in the act of punishing the entire community for the deeds of those who had helped the partisans. The village, composed mostly of the elderly and mothers with children, was locked inside a barn. After being covered with dry hay, the barn was set ablaze with the families inside.

Over half a century later, Adamovich's story about the courage of ordinary people has not lost its immediacy. Today, the world is still marred by war crimes committed against communities of noncombatant. Khatyn is a testament to an event that must not be forgotten, and to a reality that must not be repeated.

Known for his straightforward character, Ales Adamovich (1927-1994), an award winning Belarusian author, screenwriter and literary critic, was an active public figure and teacher in the former Soviet Union where he wrote his most influential war novel Khatyn. During WWII he fought as a partisan; this experience became the basis for Khatyn.
After WWII he went on to receive his PhD in philology from Belarusian State University and also took graduate courses in directing and screenwriting at the prestigious Moscow film school VKSR. Adamovich was a professor and a member of the Belorussian Academy of Sciences. As a result of refusing to testify against his colleagues and to sign letters condemning political dissidents he was barred from teaching at Moscow State University. However, he was a member of many public and professional unions. In 1989 he was one of the first writers to join the Belorussian PEN Center, and in 1994 the Center instituted the Ales Adamovich Literary Prize.
Ales Adamovich's works are still read widely and his legacy continues to be an important milestone in Belorussian history. His fiction and non-fiction titles make a profound case against the necessity of war, and are a testament to the kind of knowledge and wisdom being vastly sought after today.

Awards:

Award for Honor and Dignity of Talent, 1997 (posthumous)
Order of the Red Banner, 1987
Order of the Patriotic War, 1985
Gold Medal of Alexander Fadeyev, 1983
Order of the Badge of Honor, 1977
Yakub Kolas Belorussian State Prize, 1976 (For Khatyn)
Ministry of Defense Prize, 1974 (For Khatyn)
Friendship Literary Prize, 1972
Partisan Medal, 1946

The first edition of Khatyn was censored and the reader outside USSR never saw the original. Forty years later Glagoslav Publications releases the unaltered version of the novel as was the author's intent.

Based on previously sealed war archives and rare witness records of the survivors, Khatyn is a heart wrenching story of the people who fought for their lives under the Nazi occupation during World War II. Through the prism of the retrospect perception as narrated by the novel's main character Flyora - a boy who matures during the war - author Ales Adamovich beholds genocide and horrific crimes against humanity. The former teen partisan goes back in time and remembers atrocities of 1943. The novel's pages become the stage where perished people come to life for one last time, get to say their last word, all at the backdrop of blood chilling cries of women and children being burned alive by a Nazi death squad that, accompanied by the Vlasov's unit, surges a Belorussian village.

Today the book is part of Belorussian cultural heritage and its actuality is even more so apparent - having marked the zones of fire on the world map, the on-going blood baths have scarred the surface of our planet, begging mankind to "never again''.