In Warsaw, during the book fair, a presentation of a children’s book by journalist, former political prisoner Aleh Gruzdzilovich “The Adventures of Uncle Vitsia on Valadarka” was held.
Aleh Gruzdzilovich wrote poems from prison for his grandchildren. And the grandchildren liked these short poems with drawings by the author very much, he says.
“The book was written in prison, and its peculiarity is that all the poems, there are 26 of them, 25 of them were naturally written in prison. And they miraculously, in principle, escaped, they might not have reached, because I, as it were, sent poems to my children. But then the connection was interrupted, and I was just accumulating them, thinking that I would take them out upon release. But, as it turned out later, when I was released from the Mahilow colony, everything I had — all my manuscripts, all my letters, even drawings — was destroyed,” the journalist said.
According to Aleh Gruzdzilovich, kind people helped him to smuggle the poems to freedom.
The Lukashenka regime punished journalist Gruzdzilovich with 1.5 years in prison. He served his sentence in the Minsk pre-trial detention center on Valadarskaha Street and in a colony near Mahilow.
