Veteran Of Belarusian Resistance Anton Furs Awarded With Medal Dedicated To 100th Anniversary Of BPR

Famous writer Uladzimer Arlou was the one who presented the award.

Today in Pastavy, writer Uladzimer Arlou handed the medal dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the Belarusian People’s Republic to activist of the Belarusian national resistance, member of the war-time Belarusian youth underground organization “Union of Belarusian Patriots” Anton Furs, Radio Svaboda reports.

Anton Furs was born on April 30, 1927. He got primary school education in a Polish school. During the German occupation at the time of the Second World War he went to a Belarusian school in his village, and continued education in the pro-grammar school in Hlybokaye, when it was opened there in 1943.

With the arrival of the Soviet troops, being 16 years old, Anton entered the Hlybokaye Pedagogical Gymnasium, where he, together with friends, founded an illegal organization “Union of Belarusian Patriots”, which set up cultural and enlightenment tasks before it.

Anton Furs was arrested on February 8, 1947 and sentenced to death, but, due to the abolishment of the death penalty on May 20, 1947, he received 25 years of imprisonment instead.

Anton Furs served his time in a camp near the town of Turinsk (Sverdlovsk region, Russia), and then he was moved to the camp in Karaganda, Kazakhstan. In Karaganda, he took part in the camp uprising in 1955.

In 1955, he was released from the camp early, having spent there over 9 years. He lived in Belarus for a while, where he married Alesia Umpirovich, whom he knew from the times of the “Union of Belarusian Patriots”. She also got released by that time. Until 1982, he lived in Karaganda with his wife, and worked at a construction site. After retirement, he left for Belarus.

In November 1992, like many other members of the “Union of Belarusian Patriots”, Anton Furs was rehabilitated due to the “absence of corpus delicti”.

Today, he is a pensioner, living in Pastavy.