"All occupying forces have the same effect on life. I wouldn't say that the German occupiers were worse than others. The problem was that they behaved in a very cruel way when they were attacked. They sorted out ten or twenty people and shot them. A bomb went off - the first car of the tram was for the Germans and the second one for the local population. The first one blew up so they arrested a hundred people and shot ten of them in public."
"My cousin was a partisan. Their house burned down, they left Minsk and went to the village. We lived in the same street – their house burned down, one more house burned down, then the fire stopped. The wind turned in a different direction. They had no house so they went to the village. My older cousin joined the guerrillas and the younger one worked in agriculture."
"Schools weren't closed down. They even tried to send me to school. My mother was a teacher and taught me at home. I had learned to read even before the beginning of the war. My favorite book was the 'Small Soviet Encyclopedia'. After the war, I went straight to the fourth grade."
Mr. Stanislav Stanislavovič Šuškevič was born on 15 December, 1934, in Minsk. He lived here during the Second World War. His father was arrested in 1936, imprisoned and then exiled to Siberia. He only came back in the 1950s. In 1956, Mr. Šuškevič completed his studies at the Belarusian State University (BGU). In 1973, he became a professor and a member of the Academy of Sciences. Since 1990, he was a member of the Supreme Soviet of the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic. Between the years 1991-1994, he was its chairman (head of state). He died on May 3, 2022.
