Vacla Ivanovsky
Belarus- Biography of Vatslav Ivanovsky
- Collaboration with the Germans during World War II
- Assassination and Family
Biography of Vatslav Ivanovsky
Vatslav Ivanovsky was a Belarusian public figure and professor. He was one of the founders of the Belarusian Revolutionary Community and the Belarusian Socialist Community. From 1907, he published a newspaper in the Belarusian language in St. Petersburg. In 1918, he served as the Minister of Education in the government of the Belarusian People's Republic. From the autumn of 1919, he was a member of the Temporary Belarusian Executive Committee and the publisher of the journal "Run". In March 1920, he became the rector of the Minsk Pedagogical Institute. From 1922 to 1939, he lived in Poland and worked as a professor at the Warsaw Polytechnic Institute. After the annexation of Western Belarus to the USSR in 1939, he became a teacher at Vilnius University.
Collaboration with the Germans during World War II
After the start of the Great Patriotic War, Ivanovsky began collaborating with the German occupiers and on November 17, 1941, he became the mayor of Minsk. According to historian Yuri Turonok, before leaving Vilnius, Ivanovsky entrusted his daughter Anna to evacuate two Jewish women - Emma Altberg and her sister Maria Arnold - from Vilnius. From the end of June to December 1943, he was also a member of the "Belarusian Trust Council" under the General Commissioner of the General Commissariat of Belarus. He was one of the leaders of the underground organization of Belarusian nationalists. He maintained secret contacts with the Home Army and attempted to establish contact with the British government through the Polish underground.
Assassination and Family
Ivanovsky was shot in December 1943 by an agent of the NKGB of the USSR who had infiltrated his car. He was buried in the Kalvariyskoye Cemetery in Minsk. His brothers, Vatslav Ivanovsky, were also well-known figures. Yuri (Józef) Ivanovsky was a minister in Poland (1918-1919), then a senator in Poland (1930-1935), and later an officer in the Polish foreign forces. His younger brother, Tadeusz Ivanovsky (Tadas Ivanauskas), was an academic and the director of the Institute of Biology at the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences. Another brother, Stanislaw, was a lawyer.
