I hadn’t realised, but I’d passed the site many times before. It’s hidden on the side of a slope at a road junction. The memorial is in a pit where 5,000 Jewish prisoners were shot on 2nd March 1942. This week was the 70th anniversary of the liquidation of the Minsk Ghetto, and the pit is the centre of the commemoration. On 21st October 1943, the occupying forces cleared the Ghetto of the last Jewish residents.
Or so they thought. Some residents of the Ghetto had built safe places, called “malina”, where they hid during the many searches. Most survivors from the Ghetto were those who had escaped. A very few managed to survive the Ghetto’s liquidation, and the subsequent winter, until Soviet forces freed the city in July 1944.
These details come from a film “Chronicle of the Minsk Ghetto” that was shown as part of the commemoration of the anniversary. Some of the remaining survivors of the Ghetto spoke about their experiences, including the “ghetto within the ghetto” for Jews transported to Minsk from Germany.
It is very hard from a British perspective to understand the full horror of the Holocaust. All the forced movement of large populations happened beyond our shores. It was only at the end of the war that the truth came to light – though there were many clues that pointed to the murder of so many people.
We could, and should, have done more to accept Jewish refugees. Some eminent Jews, such as Sigmund Freud the founder of psychoanalysis, were able to escape to Britain. 10,000 Jewish, and other, children were accepted under the “kindertransport” mission from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland.
This is easy to say with hindsight. At the time, most people in Britain were hoping that there wouldn’t be a war, as they wanted to avoid the horror of the First World War. No one could imagine the evil that was about to be unleashed.
The film was a good reminder that Belarus had once been a multi-communal, or as we might say today, a multicultural country. The Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR) as existed from 1922-36 had four official languages of Belarusian, Polish, Russian and Yiddish. The Jewish and other communities existed side by side in relative harmony.
The war changed all that. The largest movements of populations happened at the end of the war, in response to the moving of borders as confirmed by the Allies at Potsdam, following the initial agreement at Yalta. The net result was the homogenisation of most nation states in Central and Eastern Europe.
It took a long time for the world to come to terms psychologically with the Holocaust and all the other shocking events of the Second World War. It was as if the trauma was so terrible, that it was too difficult for the immediate post war generation to deal with. And the shadow cast by the threat of nuclear war may also have impeded the process of coming to terms with the events of 1939-45.
As Chronicle of the Minsk Ghetto made clear, for the whole Cold War period, Soviet authorities did not remember the terrible crimes, including those of the Holocaust. It has only been since the break-up of the Soviet Union that the past has been explored.
This period of trauma even occurred in Britain. The shock of war, especially the aerial bombings had been considerable, but the loss of human life was nothing like as overwhelming as in the “bloodlands” of Eastern and Central Europe. It was not until 1988 that such an organisation as the Holocaust Educational Trust was set up, to teach the next generation about the Holocaust, and its relevance today.
When I was at school in the 1970s, the Holocaust was something terrible that we knew about, but didn’t really analyse. It was another awful episode from the first part of the 20th century that we were glad hadn’t happened to us.
That’s changed. My sons learnt about the Holocaust at school, and have explored the issues in far more detail than I ever did. Through the work of such organisations as the Holocaust Educational Trust, Holocaust survivors visit many schools in Britain to tell the next generation of the horror.
As the Ghetto survivors repeated again this week, we must not forget. We should honour the dead of this terrible catastrophe, and keep watch to ensure that it never happens again. That’s the same for people in Britain, Belarus and anywhere else.