Students of Vitebsk Secondary School No. 8 helped find the remains of 132 soldiers near the village of Navarotye, Liozno district
It all started when the students, members of the patriotic detachment "Prometheus" of Secondary School No. 8 named after A. Ispenkov, asked me to teach them how to read topographic maps correlated with the modern terrain, – shared the detachment leader Dmitry Gantman. – At the next lesson, we had a copy of an aerial photograph from 1944 of a section of land near Vitebsk. When they started comparing the data from both maps using a special smartphone application, they…
– Dmitry Sergeevich, look, right by the road there are mounds in a row, like in a cemetery, but there is no cemetery on the modern map, only a forest, – they said, stunned.
– Indeed, the sharp eyes of the children spotted burials on the poor-quality 1944 map copy. We started to investigate. With the help of archival documents, it turned out that in this place, in late 1943 – early 1944, the 13th Separate Medical Battalion of the 17th Guards Rifle Division was located. On December 19, 1943, with the support of the 28th Tank Brigade, it launched an offensive against the enemy, – Dmitry Gantman continued. – I passed the information to the international search association "Zapadny Rubezh" (Western Frontier). Just the other day, the head of this association, Valery Kuzmin, together with the soldiers of the 52nd Search Battalion of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Belarus, completed search operations near the village of Navarotye (this is on the border of Vitebsk and Liozno districts), in the place indicated by the students of Secondary School No. 8. Here, the searchers found the remains of 132 Red Army soldiers who heroically died during the liberation of Vitebsk and our native Belarus. After detailed examination, the remains of the heroes will be reburied with honors.