On his way to conquer Moscow, Hitler first had to occupy Belorussia and Ukraine, which is why it's no wonder that a large and important segment of Soviet partisan cinema stems from these two Soviet republics as a result. In Belorussia, the foremost poet laureate assigned to commemorate the horrors and celebrate the glories of the Great Patriotic War was People's Artist of the USSR Viktor Turov. His dedication to the genre was deeply personal. Turov, born in 1936, spent his childhood in a German concentration camp along with his mother and sister, while his father, a partisan, died in battle. Turov's righteous anger, passionate call-to-arms, and simultaneous embrace of humanism as parallel forces of salvation are therefore not a result of any ideology, but rather deeply felt moral imperatives, already forming the driving force for his first feature Cherez kladbishche.
