By Elena Bormotova: The Belarusian State Museum of the Great Patriotic War History has presented a new exhibition. A partisan hospital opened in a hall dedicated to the underground and anti-fascist movement in Belarus.
The new exhibition was prepared following the Aviation for Partisans project. Aviation was the main source of all the necessary materials, tools and information in the forest zones in the occupied territories.
The exhibition features about 150 original items, which makes it the biggest exposition of the health system at the times of WWII in Belarus. These are real things and medicines that were used in the 1940s - medical tools made in the Soviet Union, captured items and things that were supplied through the Lend-Lease Programme.
Each of the exhibits has its own story. Each scalpel or suitcase with a red cross is the identity of a partisan doctor. In the conditions of guerrilla resistance, a medical uniform was not easy to find, so quite often doctor’s gowns were made from parachutes.
Parachute silk often acted as a bandaging material, too. Back in those times, there were enormous shortages of both bandages and anesthesia. Operations were often performed even without any anesthesia, even though in 1942, a medical-sanitary department was established in the Belarusian headquarters of the partisan movement and medicines were delivered fairly regularly from the Big Land.
As a rule, such make-shift forest hospitals operated in large partisan units and brigades - in the territories that were fully controlled by partisans.
This isn’t the only exhibition dedicated to partisan life. The Museum’s staff is preparing a project that will show electrification in partisan detachments. As it happens, all the modern alternative sources of energy were used as early as during the Great Patriotic War.
