By Olga Karach, Our House Centre for Human Rights and Relief, June 10, 2026

When we speak about war, we tend to think first of shattered cities, of lives lost beneath bombardment, of shifting borders, or of armies colliding on the battlefield. Yet every war produces more than the destruction of the material world and the familiar fabric of everyday life. At the same time, it begins to create a particular order of memory—subtle and often barely perceptible, yet no less consequential than the military events themselves. Long before peace agreements are signed and the first assessments of the conflict are made, society has already begun to determine which lives are worthy of remaining in collective remembrance and which will gradually dissolve into silence.

Memory is rarely neutral. It is never a simple reflection of the past. Rather, it is a complex process of selection through which certain human lives acquire symbolic significance, while others are pushed to the margins of public consciousness. This is why wars end long after the guns fall silent. They continue to live on in monuments and school textbooks, in family stories and state ceremonies, in the distinction between those who are remembered as heroes and those whose names are quietly omitted from the narrative altogether.

Every era develops its own culture of memory, but in times of war this process acquires a particular intensity. Societies instinctively seek figures around whom stories of suffering, courage, sacrifice, and loyalty can be constructed. Thus emerge the familiar images: the soldier who fell at the front; the mother waiting in tears for her son to return; the family mourning a loved one; the citizen who gave everything for the state. Such stories become part of a broader national narrative through which communities attempt to make sense of what has happened and to come to terms with collective trauma.

Yet every culture of memory creates not only a space of visibility but also a space of absence. Alongside those whose names are carved into stone stand others whose presence remains inconvenient to the dominant story of war. Their lives seldom become subjects of public reflection, their photographs do not appear on memorial walls, and their choices often remain incomprehensible even to those closest to them.

Among them are deserters, conscientious objectors, draft evaders, and all those who, at a moment when the world around them demanded a willingness to participate in violence, chose a different path. What unites them is not a shared political ideology or worldview, but rather the experience of refusal itself: a refusal to take part in killing, a refusal to submit to the logic of war, a refusal to accept the notion that human life can be reduced to a resource of military necessity.

For this reason, their place within public memory remains deeply uncertain. The fallen soldier fits comfortably within the established coordinates through which war is understood. His fate can be interpreted through the familiar language of duty, sacrifice, service, or tragedy. The person who refuses to fight, however, unsettles the structure of the narrative itself. His very existence serves as a reminder that war is never the only possible choice; that even in an atmosphere of mass mobilisation there remains a space for moral agency; and that society’s consent to violence is never as unanimous as it may appear.

Perhaps this is why conscientious objectors so often become not only politically vulnerable but symbolically invisible as well. They disappear not through physical death, but through the absence of a language capable of describing their experience. They are excluded from the national pantheon, yet neither are they recognised as a legitimate part of the history of war. Instead, they find themselves in a peculiar grey zone of memory, where a person formally exists, yet their life is stripped of public significance.

This phenomenon is particularly visible in Belarus. More than eighty years after the end of the Second World War, Belarusian society has yet to begin a serious conversation about those who refused to participate in war. Family archives preserve stories of soldiers, partisans, underground fighters, the fallen and the survivors. Yet it is remarkably difficult to find memories of deserters, draft evaders, or those who sought to avoid participation in violence. One is left with the impression that such people never existed at all.

And yet their absence from memory does not mean their absence from history. On the contrary, it is precisely this silence that deserves our attention. For the question is not only whom we choose to remember, but also whom we choose to forget.

Perhaps one day our understanding of war will become broader and deeper than it is today. Alongside the history of armies, battles, victories, and defeats, there may emerge another history: the history of those who refused to accept war as inevitable and declined to become part of it. Alongside accounts of mass mobilisation, there may be space for the stories of those who found the strength to resist its logic, remaining faithful to their moral convictions even when doing so required courage no less profound than that demanded by combat itself.

History would then become not only a history of states and their armed forces, but also a history of human conscience; not only a history of organised violence, but also a history of those forms of civil, moral, and nonviolent resistance through which the possibility of a different future was preserved in the darkest of times.

And perhaps, alongside the names of generals, political leaders, and military heroes, there will also be room for those whom their contemporaries scarcely noticed—or preferred not to notice at all: conscientious objectors, deserters, draft evaders, the women who helped them hide, the families who shared their risks and their loneliness, and all those who remained beyond the boundaries of the official narrative of war.

These will be the names of people for whom no monuments were erected and in whose honour no state ceremonies were held; people who found no place in national myths or solemn speeches; people whose very existence war sought to erase not only from public space but from memory itself.

And yet it is precisely because of such people that the memory of peace continues to endure, even in times when everything around us has become subordinated to the language of war.

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