Day of concentration camp prisoners observed in Belarus

14 апреля 2013

By Ruslan Turkov: On April 11 68 years ago the prisoners of Buchenwald, one of the most terrible concentration camps, were liberated. People were killed, tortured and made victims of experiments there. Millions of people in Europe were prisoners of such camps. There's a plate in Buchenwald, which always has human temperature of 36.6 C. The names of the countries of victims of the camps are inscribed on it. Belarus was one of them. 8,000 Soviet soldiers were killed in a local stable alone. In one of the rooms the floor was colored red, so that next prisoners didn't see the traces of blood. On April 11 1945, having learnt about the approach of the Red Army, the prisoners made a rebellion and took control over the camp and captured 80 guardians. 250,000 prisoners passed through the gate of Buchenwald. 18,000 of them were under 15. The Nazi even had special concentration camps for the children. One of them, Salaspils, was located in Latvia. Nobody knows how many kids were killed and tortured in this cam, as the Germans burnt the archive before the Soviet Army liberated Latvia in 1944. The first children were taken here after of the cruelest and bloodiest operations of Hitler's Germany called Winter Magic. In 1943 the Nazi burned almost 500 villages in Belarus alone. A memorial complex in their memory was built in Salaspils in late 1960s. Every day the Latvians and foreign tourists bring flowers and torches to Salaspils. There were 14,000 concentration camps on the territory of Germany and Eastern Europe during the WWII. 18 million people passed through the death factory and 11 million of them never returned home.