One of the most fascinating persons featured in our exhibition is a poetess and public figure Łarysa Hienijuš (1910-1983). She devoted her life to the Belarusian national movement. Hienijuš’s ardent patriotism greatly influenced her work and determined her dramatic fate.
Hienijuš and her family moved to Prague from western Belarus (then part of the Second Polish Republic) in the second half of the 1930s. There, she became the secretary of the Council of the Belarusian Democratic Republic and a member of a Belarusian Relief Committee that provided support to Belarusian émigrés, political refugees and prisoners of war. In Prague, her first collection of poems, From the Native Fields, was published in 1942.
In March 1948, Hienijuš and her husband Janka were arrested by Czechoslovak communists who had seized power during the February coup. The family was handed over to the Soviet security services who secretly transported them to Minsk. Hienijuš managed to send her twelve-year-old son, Jurka, to live with her relatives in Poland in relative safety.
During the interrogation, the poetess was pressured to hand over the archives of the Belarusian Democratic Republic to the Soviet authorities. She did not succumb to coercion. In February 1949, the Supreme Court of Soviet Belarus sentenced Hienijuš and her husband to 25 years in the Gulag camps in the far north of the USSR. They were released during the 1956 Khrushchev amnesty and returned to Zeĺva in the Hrodna region of Belarus.
While In the Gulag, Hienijuš continued to write poems in secret and produced some of her most sombre and powerful verses. Separated from her son and husband, and sentenced to forced labour in unimaginably harsh conditions, Hienijuš remained unswerving in her humanity and devotion to her homeland. In the book of memoirs, The Confession, she writes:
“I got up from my knees a different person, somewhat strong and completely calm in a new way. Only my Motherland existed for me then… I had not appreciated that choosing to die for the Motherland is not scary, but easy, joyful, almost celebratory.”
After the release, the poetess refused to accept Soviet citizenship and continued writing poetry. Her hospitable house in Zeĺva became a place of clandestine pilgrimage for the Belarusian cultural elite of the 1970-80s.
