A resident of the Rossony district creates paintings about the past war based on personal memories

Dmitry Kuzyakov, a resident of the village of Albrechtovo in the Rossony district, could well open his own art gallery. He has accumulated a considerable number of paintings and graphic works, all created by the owner of this house, a graduate of the first cohort of the art and graphics department of the Vitebsk Pedagogical Institute. The artworks can be conditionally divided into thematic series: "From the History of Rossony Region", "Nature of Rossony Region" and "Unforgotten". Some of the collection was exhibited to Dmitry Fyodorovich's fellow countrymen at an exhibition held in the Rossony Museum of Military Comradeship. Particularly striking are the landscapes, portraits of the commander Yakov Kulnev and the writer Yan Barshevsky, but the third of the aforementioned series is the most impressive. It is closely linked to the events experienced by the author during the Great Patriotic War. The black-and-white graphic drawings are not figments of imagination but illustrations of the tragic childhood of the village boy Dima Kuzyakov. "Execution of Partisan Families in Albrechtovo", "Execution of Rossony Jews", tragic scenes from the life of concentration camps, which Dmitry Fyodorovich was forced to endure as a minor inmate. This theme is exceedingly sorrowful. The author accompanies his works with poetic explanations, reading which one feels the soul grow cold with pain.

…In 1943, when units of the Red Army joined forces with the Stalin Brigade of partisans near the village of Nivye, the local population moved behind the front lines. Several families, including the Kuzyakovs – a mother with three young children – did not make it because the Germans blocked the path again. They had to hide in the forest.

– They caught us before the New Year and took us: Grechushino – Klyastitsy – Idritza, and from there – to Lithuania. The first concentration camp we ended up in was located in the Kaunas military barracks. All ragged, dirty, scab-ridden, we would pick lice out of sores. Mother brought some black gruel in a three-liter tin can with a few rare yellow peas floating in it. Typhus broke out, they constantly dragged away the dead with metal hooks, covered them with firewood, and then, probably, burned them, – Dmitry Kuzyakov comments on the plots of his graphic works.

In early May, the prisoners were sent to Germany in coal wagons, i.e., without roofs or windows. In the sanitary block at the border, everyone was given a haircut and forced to rub themselves with some foul-smelling ointment. The already dilapidated clothes literally fell apart in their hands after disinfection.

…The camp was called "Gruenenhaus", which in German means "green house". In reality, it was a pen for cattle fenced with barbed wire – without barracks, only sheds, feeders, and waterers. Women were driven to weed under escort, while children remained in the camp. Once, the young prisoners were lined up, and a German woman, for reasons known only to her, began to select some of them from the line. The young Kuzyakovs did not fall into this group. Many years later, Dmitry Fyodorovich would read about the "Lebensborn" system, according to which the Nazis Germanized Slavic children of Aryan appearance (blond, light-eyed, with regular facial features) in special orphanages created for this purpose. It is quite possible that those unfortunate little ones could have been taken there as well.

Two months later, the prisoners were transported under Berlin in closed wagons, where they were photographed and had numbers written on their hands without puncturing the skin. The next camp, where the Kuzyakovs ended up, was in Hanover and was attached to a light metal smelting plant. Piles of downed aircraft lay in its yard. Initially, the Germans intended to separate the adult and child prisoners, but for unknown reasons, this did not happen. Women, as well as children over 10 years old, were ordered to carry metal debris to the press. The mother, fearing that all three of her children would be taken away from her, assured the overseers that Dima was already 10 years old.

Adults worked from seven in the morning until six in the evening, children from seven until three. Dima and his fellow unfortunate friend Gosha carried metal remnants from stamping on carts. In winter, the steep incline before the workshop became slippery, and the cart became too heavy for the skinny boys.

“You sit on the ground, then pull the cart towards you, stand up, move your body forward a little – sit down again, and so on for the entire shift. These torments were noticed by the adult workers – there were Frenchmen, Italians, and others. They covered us with some shields against the wall, and our shoes (they were clogs – wooden soles with canvas uppers) were fitted with sharp metal plates. And these men helped us more than once,” shares Dmitry Fyodorovich.

The Kuzyakovs stayed at the plant from August 7, 1944, to April 17, 1945, until their liberation by the Americans. The male prisoners' first act was to catch the camp commandant, Kook, to punish him. This monster used to love to harness exhausted women to a cart while drunk and drive around the territory. So, through his earlobe, a camp number was threaded onto a rusty wire, and he was made to clean the latrines first, and then harnessed to the same cart and driven around. The Americans barely managed to retrieve the fascist from the enraged prisoners.

The arriving British set the concentration camp on fire with flamethrowers, and after ferrying the prisoners across the Elbe, handed them over to the Red Army units. The summer was spent in a filtration camp, and after verification, the Kuzyakovs made their way to Polotsk, and then to Rossony, home.

The head of this family had his share of hardships too. A participant in the civil war, collective farm chairman Fyodor Kuzyakov was drafted to the front in 1941. He was taken prisoner and suffered there until the defeat of the fascists. After liberation, he was mobilized to the Japanese front, but by the time their unit reached it, the Far Eastern conflict had been resolved. He had to work in the Kuzbass mines. In 1948, he returned to his homeland for good. Dmitry Fyodorovich's elder brother, Gennady, died as a partisan.

Dmitry Kuzyakov served in the navy and received a higher education. He worked in the party, in the district education department, as deputy chairman of the district executive committee, and as director of the Rossony secondary school. Even in retirement, he taught children drawing, drafting, and labor for ten years. The torch was passed to his daughter Olga, who also graduated from the famous Vitebsk art and graphics faculty and teaches drawing and composition at Polotsk State University. Dmitry Fyodorovich took up art for his soul after completely retiring from work.

Galina Shpakovskaya, "Vitebskiye Vesti"