‘Rich history’ may sound like a euphemism here, especially in the context of the last century, which left its devastating mark on this part of the world probably more than anywhere else.
Over the past century, these territories, which were mostly inhabited by Poles, Belarusians and Jews, successively belonged to six different states. The once diverse population living here was severely tried during the two world wars, and the Jewish population perished almost completely in the Holocaust.
But this tragic history is told differently depending on who is doing the telling. One may even get the impression that the history in these lands ran along parallel tracks...
In Polish towns, WWII erupted in 1939; in the areas populated by Belarusians, this same period, full of dramatic tensions in their shared relationships, is referred to as ‘the first Soviets’, and the ‘great patriotic war’ [Velíkaya Otéchestvennaya voyná] only started in 1941. One of the most traumatic experiences for the Orthodox population (especially from around Kleshchele and Kamieniets) was bezhenstvo (Беженство) during WWI when many families fled their homes. For Catholics, the darkest era started with the Soviet transports to Siberia. For Belarusians, who are traditionally very attached to their farmlands, the biggest tragedy turned out to be the Soviet system of collective farming (kolkhoz). This tragedy continues even today.
Some of this turbulent 20th-century history is documented in pictures found by the ethnographers, and even the roots of those tragic events can be outlined in the preceding century, since the earliest photographs date back to the 1880s.
The very last moment