By Natalia Bordilovskaya: International Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorates the genocide that claimed the lives of 6 million Jewish people during the Great Patriotic War. Over 320 ghettos were located in Belarus’ territory, killing about 800,000 people.
The Pit memorial in Minsk is the first monument in the USSR and the most well-known memorial dedicated to Holocaust victims. It is on this site that the Nazi forces shot about 5,000 prisoners of the Minsk Ghetto on 2 March, 1942. Several times a year – on 2 March, 21 October (the date of the Minsk Ghetto elimination) and 9 May (Victory Day) – the memorial hosts remembrance events in memory of the victims.
The whole of Minsk is permeated with the tragic history of the war, German occupation and mass extermination of Jews. For instance, the obelisk in the Shashkovka area on the outskirts of Minsk commemorates the victims of the Trostinets death camp; Romanovskaya Sloboda, 19 is the place of the deportation and murder of 450 Bremen Jews in the 1940s; the monument in Sukhaya Street located on the site of an old Jewish cemetery commemorates the Holocaust victims deported from Europe.
This year’s events dedicated to the Holocaust – a public dialogue in the historic workshop named after Leonid Levin, film screenings, honouring ceremonies for ghetto and Nazi concentration camp survivors and the exhibition Reading and Writing with Anne Frank – are being held under the motto Educating for a Better Future.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day was established by the UN General Assembly to mark the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp on 27 January 1945.
