Sviatlana Kurs Has Passed Away
It may seem hard to believe, but people of boundless kindness truly do exist.
They are the kind of people who never complain, never speak ill of others, never dwell on their own hardships, are always ready to help, never boast about their achievements, and instead take genuine joy in the success of others.
Sometimes such a person enters our lives and makes the world seem a better place.
For the past several years, our small team had the privilege of working alongside one such person. Sviatlana Kurs, an outstanding Belarusian writer (publishing under the pen name Eva Viežnaviec), journalist, social activist and, to us, a cherished colleague whose desk stood just beside ours.
For more than a year, Sviatlana had been seriously ill. Yet even during Her illness, She never complained. She believed — and we believed with Her — that She would return to the work She had begun before it was so abruptly interrupted by Her illness. She would once again walk through the museum exhibition and tell visitors about the victims of the Katyn Massacre buried at Kuropaty.
Few possessed Sviatlana’s remarkable ability to interpret archival documents. This was due not only to Her native command of Polish, Belarusian and Russian, and Her profound understanding of the historical context, but also to Her exceptional empathy, which enabled Her to perceive the emotions of both the authors and recipients of the correspondence She studied. She spoke about the victims of the Katyn Massacre — people She had come to know through those documents — in beautiful Polish, with the distinctive Eastern Borderlands accent shared by many of the victims and their families.
We extend our deepest sympathy to Sviatlana’s family and friends, especially to Her son, Feliks.
She has left us, leaving behind an immense sense of loss. Yet we believe that Her spirit will continue to accompany us.
We would like to inform you that the funeral ceremonies for the late Sviatlana Kurs will take place on Sunday, 26 July 2026.
A Requiem Mass will be celebrated at 2:00 p.m. at St Alexander’s Church in Warsaw (Plac Trzech Krzyży).
This will be followed by a non-religious farewell ceremony at 3:30 p.m. at the Museum of Free Belarus, located at 11 Foksal Street, Warsaw.
