Kochanova tours Victory Train mobile museum

"This is a great project. It reminds us of the huge price that we paid for Victory. We must remember it to prevent this from happening again. I sincerely thank the author of the exhibition Dmitry Poshtarenko, our Russian colleagues for letting us this train-museum. Of course, I would like this project to continue. There are many pages in the history of the Great Patriotic War that we could show and perpetuate for our descendants. This train needs to visit Belarus again, because a lot of our people would like to visit it," Natalya Kochanova said.

The speaker was shown around the exhibition of the mobile museum. "I experienced a whirlwind of emotions: from peaceful and calm in the first car, the terrible traumatic ones in the next cars and absolutely joyful, victorious feelings in the end," she shared. 

On 30 June, Belarusian Railways celebrated the 25,000th visitor to the exhibition - Yevgeny Serov, a urologist at Minsk City Hospital No.4. He came to the exhibition with his six-year old son Andrei. “Such projects merit attention. This is a great way to promote patriotism. I have three kids and I believe that they should know the history of their country. There is no future without history. This sounds pompous, but it is true. My two grandfathers fought in the war, one of them reached Berlin and the other found himself in Koenigsberg at the end of the war. We are alive thanks to our fathers and grandfathers. I hope that our children will never have to face what people went through during the war,” Yevgeny Serov said.

The Victory Train arrived in Belarus on 11 June. “When the project was still in the works, we tried to estimate how many visitors it might draw. According to our initial estimates, it was around 16,000 people. However, the project has sparked more interest than expected. On the fourth day in Belarus the train welcomed 5,000th visitor in Orsha, 10,000th - in Grodno, 15,000th - in Brest, and 20,000th - in Gomel,” Press Secretary of Belarusian Railways Dmitry Kazutin said.

The Victory Train project was supposed to wrap up in Mogilev on 28 June – on the day when the city was liberated from Nazi invaders. However, in view of the huge popularity of the project in Belarus and multiple requests from Belarusians, Belarusian Railways and the organizers of the project from Russia extended the stay in Minsk by two more days.