The village of Rozhdestvo on a 1940 military map. This is the Sychevsky district of the Smolensk region. Neither Christmas nor the other villages on the map are no longer there.
The villages of Rozhdestvo and Aksenino at the source of the Dnieper on a military map of 1940.
Some died out on their own, while others – like Aksenino, next door to Christmas – were burned by the Nazis along with the inhabitants. 46 people are data from the Book of Memory of the Smolensk Region, which contains all the documented facts about the atrocities of the German occupiers during the Great Patriotic War.
The Germans destroyed Aksenino and its inhabitants on New Year’s Eve 1943 – in retaliation for the actions of the partisans. They threw grenades into every house and every dugout, and shot at those who managed to jump out.
– Here, in this place, there was a bathhouse. My cousin Nastya and her daughter Nadya and Galya and Vanyusha burned alive in it. They were five years old. My sister’s husband’s nephews Vitya, Vanyusha and Valyusha also died. And Manya’s niece died… Before that night, I brought a bundle of rye to my relatives in Korolevo. She returned – no Aksenino. I stand like a stone. Only the heart is beating, about to break out of the chest and fall to the ground – these memories of Ustinya Tevelekova from the neighboring village of Dudkino were recorded by the journalist of the Smolensk newspaper “Rabochy Put” N. Khrienko in 1979.
And for the rest of my life I remembered Ustinya’s tears at the source.
It is no coincidence that he calls the events at the source of the Dnieper “his Khatyn.” Because the fascists carried out their bloody massacre here with the same zeal as in Belarus. Where the memory of murdered civilians and villages is immortalized in a world-famous memorial.
And here, in the Smolensk region, only on this five-kilometer strip, declared by the Germans to be “no man’s land” (so they wanted to protect themselves from the partisans), they destroyed 25 villages, and the inhabitants were shot, burned or driven into concentration camps.
Around Christmas the Dnieper is born. Here, at its source, a monastery was built 10 years ago. And here, near the source, a slab was once placed long ago in honor of the soldiers of the 119th Krasnoyarsk Rifle Division. In the winter of 1941, they were frozen here in the snow “and at their line did not allow the enemy to reach Moscow.”
The first monuments appeared in these places thanks to a simple rural teacher E.V. Vlasova from the village of Bocharovo. In the 1970s, she and her students were looking for information about the relatives of warriors who died in this land. It was she who arranged for the installation of an obelisk on a mass grave near Dudkino.
There is almost no one left in those villages that were rebuilt after the war, where life began to warm up again.
N. Khrienko, having seen these places almost 40 years ago, dreamed that a memorial would one day appear here:
– I see this: near the krynichka, from which the small Dnieper flows like a blue ribbon, there is a large open book made of stone, and on its pages are carved words telling about the history of this land… From the krynichka two paths lead to the graves of fallen Soviet soldiers and residents of the village of Aksenino . And a visitor from a neighboring village or from a distant land sees on these graves majestic obelisk monuments commensurate with their feat. Such as near the Ukrainian farm Buda in Kholodny Yar in the Cherkassy region, as in the Belarusian Khatyn…
Instead of majestic monuments, this place is now a wooden monastery. Now they continue to create a memorial complex “The Source of the Dnieper – a Place of Power” dedicated to the feat of our soldiers.
The soldiers who remained lying here in mass graves or who themselves became dirt and grass. All so that we can live, remember, grieve, rejoice, celebrate.
Be it October Revolution Day or Christmas.
Source: rodina-history.ru
