While the authorities of the Viciebsk region refuse to recognize the Hai area as the place of mass executions of the 1930s, public activists honor the memory of the Stalinist regime killed by the henchmen. Currently, 33 crosses of memory are installed in the forest.
On October 29, on the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repressions, activists of the civil initiative "Chajsy" buried the human remains they collected after the current careless work of the 52nd search battalion, and designated the places of destruction of citizens in the firing forest as a memorial of "Chajsy".
The resident of Viciebsk Alexei Nikitin, whose relatives originate from the village of Drykolle, recalls:
– I was brought to grandfather and grandmother in Drykolle at the beginning of the war. They lived from this place with a kilometer. I myself since 1936. So, as my father told me, people were shot here from 1937 until the war itself. Residents of the surrounding villages of Drykolle, Baravoje, Zahorje were afraid even to come here, although the forest was mushroom. After the shootings, the earth, they say, moved, as if alive. Before the war, however, no one talked about repression. And only after Stalin's death they began to remember. Here on this field there was a forest, all in the graves. In the war the forest was cut down, and afterwards the collective farm uprooted the stumps and smelled it.
The chairman of the civil initiative Jan Derzhavtsev says:
– On this day in 1937 132 representatives of the Belarusian intelligentsia were killed in Minsk. We in Viciebsk, according to the "Memorial", 80 years ago on October 29, 6 people were killed. But on November 4, according to the historian Alexander Lisov, 112 people who were repressed were killed near Viciebsk on a fabricated case. Among them are representatives of the Viciebsk intelligentsia: teachers of the Viciebsk Art College, brothers Peter and Christopher Darkevich, Yefim Minin, artist Yanka Gavris... I'm not saying exactly that they all lie in the Chajsy. It can be the Warm forest, and a forest near the village of Palai, where they also shot.
The fact that the destruction of citizens, the remains of which we buried today, the work of the NKVD, is said by the present finds of the search battalion, but the authorities do not want to recognize this fact until today. The bullets found by the search engines from the Colt and the revolver and the skull with holes in the back of the head testify only to one thing: Stalin's executioners were shot.
We are doing a people's memorial here, but the authorities are not attached to this matter. I do not know by whose orders the manure and the decaying bales of straw were thrown out of the "Mazalavagaz" production facility almost to the very crosses that we had set dead, but this attitude is outraged. I think this was done on purpose! If, however, unconsciously, then one must be without brains and brakes, so as not to understand such a perversion.
The offensive attitude of the management of the "Mazalavagaz" CJSC to the people's memory outraged the rest of the participants of Sunday's meeting.
The remains were found buried in the excavation sites of the search engines: a small skull and about a hundred small human bones. Among the bones are three jaws, which suggests that the collected belong to different people. A small skull with an inlet from a bullet in the back of the head and a weekend from the temple, most likely belonged to a woman.
While the activists lowered the coffin and buried the grave, the melancholy sounds of the requiem were heard through the forest. They spread themselves to remember that crimes committed by people uncontrollable by the people could never be repeated.
