There is a cemetery in Abiezh where the dead and murdered Soviet captives held in the local NKVD POW camp during and after the Second World War were buried. In the cemetery rest the prisoners who died in the central camp lazarette. In total, about 2,000 people of various nationalities were buried here, in individual and mass graves: Poles, Czechs, Estonians, Lithuanians, Latvians and Belarusians and Ukrainians from the pre-war Polish territories. In 1959, the POW camp in Abież was disbanded and the cemetery closed.

One of the Polish prisoners of war, Mikołaj Korzeniewski, kept notes documenting the martyrdom in the gulags, writing down the locations of the cemeteries and, if possible, the number of buried victims (some of these notes have survived to the present day). His notes show that in 1951, the NKVD began liquidating prisoners due to a lack of facilities to hold them. Officially, it was said that the prisoners were taken from the lazaretto to the Abież camp for feeding. In reality, however, they were murdered.

In 1989, with the efforts of the local community, work began to commemorate the site. The area of the cemetery was neglected, a lot of posts overturned, and some of the plaques with signatures were missing. In 1999, the cemetery was given the status of a memorial and was included in the register of historical and cultural monuments of republican significance. Numerous memorial signs have been erected here - joint national-religious and individual.

A cross commemorating the prisoners of Polish origin who died in the Minlag sub-camp in Abież was set up on 11 November 1999. A cross was also erected in memory of the deceased Belarusians. Both memorials are situated in front of the monument in the form of a split boulder; the crosses were erected on the initiative of Jerzy Korzeniecki. One cross bears a plaque in Polish, the other in Belarusian. The inscription reads: "To the memory of compatriots who found their eternal rest in Abiezi".