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Abstract
This article examines the current memorialisation of the Holocaust in Belarus through the example of the Maly Traścianiec camp, established by the Nazi occupation regime just outside Minsk. It traces the changing interpretations of the site’s history, from neglect of its Holocaust dimension to a partial recognition of this in the past few years and the establishment of two significant memorials, opened in Maly Traścianiec (2015) and Blahaŭščyna Forest (2018). Building on previous studies, it asks whether Belarus may finally recognise the transnational nature of the Holocaust and Maly Traścianiec as a key component of the Holocaust in Belarus. Such recognition may eventually change the government’s longstanding focus on victory in World War II as the founding stone of modern Belarus.
Notes
1 The figure of 820,000 includes Jews in Western Belarus, annexed by the Soviet Union from Poland in September 1939.
2 The territories of the BSSR were divided during the occupation: then northwestern regions of Brest and Bielastok (now in Poland—Białystok) including the cities of Hrodna and Vaŭkavysk were added to East Prussia; the southern regions of Brest, Pinsk, Paliessie and Homiel oblasti along a line 20 km north of the Brest–Homiel railroad were added to the ‘Reichskommissariat Ukraine’; the northwestern parts of Viciebsk were included in the District of Lithuania; the remaining parts of Viciebsk, as well as Mahilioŭ, most of Homiel Oblast’ and the eastern regions of Minsk Oblast’ constituted the operating rear zone of the Army Group Centre; and the General District of Belorussia (Weissrussland) comprised Baranavičy, parts of Vilejka, Minsk, Brest, Pinsk and Paliessie oblasti, about one-third of the prewar territory of the BSSR in its September 1939 composition. It was included in the makeup of Reichskommisariat Ostland, made up of ten districts. See Kokhanovsky and Ianovsky (Citation1997, p. 344).
3 ‘Population Census 2009’, National Statistical Committee of the Republic of Belarus, 2009, available at: http://www.belstat.gov.by/en/perepis-naseleniya/perepis-naseleniya-2009-goda/main-demographic-and-social-characteristics-of-population-of-the-republic-of-belarus/changes-in-the-populations-of-the-majority-ethnic-groups/, accessed 8 November 2019.
4 The IBB is a Dortmund-based German charitable agency that has been operating in Minsk for the past two decades. It holds lectures and seminars and promotes German–Belarusian partnership. The German side was led by Astrid Sahm in 2006–2011, Olga Rensch in 2012–2015, and Patrick Doepfner since 2015.
5 Timothy Snyder notes that Solomon Mikhoels, leader of the Soviet Anti-Fascist Committee during the war, tried in vain to persuade Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s propaganda leader, to permit publication of the Black Book of Soviet Jewry, with focus on the Holocaust and edited by Vasily Grossman, Ilya Ehrenberg and others. However, ‘the Zhdanov era in Soviet culture could not endorse a Jewish history of the war’. Mikhoels was murdered in Minsk, on Stalin’s orders, in January 1948 (Snyder Citation2010, p. 340). See also the chapter, ‘1948 god: ubiystvo v Minske’, in Taras (Citation2017, pp. 560–69).
6 Another, recent, source states that the camp functioned only from October 1942 to 30 June 1944 (Bahdanava Citation2019, p. 4).
7 ‘Memorial’nyi kompleks “Trostenets”’, Belarusian Telegraph Agency (BELTA), 27 June 2018, available at: https://www.belta.by/infographica/view/memorialnyj-kompleks-trostenets-12765/, accessed 5 June 2020.
8 This is the official opening date, though it seems certain that the idea of a museum was conceived at this time and began to operate after the liberation of Minsk by the Red Army in early July 1944.
9 ‘Belorusskii kulturnyi tsentr dukhovnogo vozrozhdeniya, “O Trostentse”’, Belarusian Centre of Spiritual Rebirth, available at: http://www.zdv.by/o-trostence, accessed 14 November 2019.
10 According to Kuzniacoŭ, the question of a memorial of victims in the area of the villages Vialiki and Maly Traścianiec arose as early as 1994, when the Belarusian Council of Ministers issued a decree about its creation. A deputy of the Belarusian Parliament (Supreme Soviet), Yauhen Tsumarau, suggested that the memorial commemorate the victims of both Stalinism and Nazism, especially at the start of the German–Soviet war on 24 and 25 June 1941, when the inmates of Minsk prison were executed by the NKVD, and subsequently prisoners from Kaunas, who shared the same fate. A year later, the authorities hired sculptor Leonid Levin, best known for his work at the Chatyń memorial site, to begin work on the Gates of Death, but the idea of commemorating Stalin’s victims was dropped. See, for example, Borel’ (Citation2014).
11 Interview with Hanna Bahdanava, Minsk, 27 October 2019.
12 According to Kozak, about 20 Jews from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia survived the camp. Some ended up in Soviet camps, suspected by the Red Army of espionage (Kozak Citation2013, p. 19).
13 In an interview with Larisa Mikhalchuk, German historian Paul Kohl comments that the Maly Traścianiec camp administration consisted of about 1,000 people, only one-tenth of which were Germans or Austrians. The remaining 900 were made up of collaborators: Belarusians, Latvians and Ukrainians. He also describes Maly Traścianiec as a defensive village, meaning that it was armed in anticipation of partisan attacks. Only trusted collaborators could live there. See Mikhalchuk (Citation2009).
14 Rudling (Citation2017, p. 84) attributes some of what he terms nationalist ‘myth making’ about the war to the fact that most sources remain unavailable in the KGB archives, closed to the public since 1994, but notes that there are alternative voices that provide articles on complex issues, including both Stalinist atrocities and the Holocaust, specifically the journal ARCHE.
15 ‘Mass Grave Unearthed at Belarusian Ghetto Site’, Transitions, 1 March 2019, available at: https://www.tol.org/client/article/28263-mass-grave-unearthed-at-belarusian-ghetto-site.html, accessed 13 November 2019.
16 ‘Na meste byvshego evreiskogo kladbishcha v Minske kopayut’, “Vykalyut kosti, matsevy”’, Nasha Niva, 11 November 2019, available at: https://nn.by/?c=ar&i=2390 66&lang=ru, accessed 5 June 2020.
17 Walke’s depiction of the memorial site at Biešankovičy provides the most poignant illustration of this neglect. The memorial obelisk is located some distance from the town and difficult to access, and does not mention the national identity of the victims (Jews), and thus ‘reflects the divisions of communal memory in Belarus’ (Walke Citation2018, pp. 174–75).
18 For more details, see also ‘Maly Trostenets: The Death Camp near Minsk’, Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team, available at: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/nazioccupation/malytrost.html, accessed 4 June 2020.
19 ‘O Trostentse’, Belorusskiy kulturnyi tsentr dukhovnogo vozrozhdeniya, available at: http://www.zdv.by/o-trostence, accessed 25 June 2021.
20 This is corroborated by Kuzma Kazak. See Kozak (Citation2013, p. 18).
21 See also, ‘Maly Trostenets: The Death Camp near Minsk’, Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team, available at: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/nazioccupation/malytrost.html, accessed 4 June 2020.
22 ‘Memorialnyi kompleks “TROSTENETS”’, Belorusskii Soyuz Arkhitektorov, available at: http://bsa.by/news/BUA/memorialnyiy-kompleks-trostenets, accessed 25 June 2021.
23 ‘O Trostentse’, Belorusskii kulturnyi tsentr dukhovnogo vozrozhdeniya, available at: http://www.zdv.by/o-trostence, accessed 25 June 2021.
24 Kozak (Citation2013, pp. 16–7) also provides an account of recognition of the site from the early postwar period to 2013.
25 ‘Belarusian Holocaust Memorial Sheds Light on Neglected History’, Transitions, 2 July 2018, available at: https://www.tol.org/client/article/27819-belarus-holocaust-society-culture-trostenets.html, accessed 12 November 2019; see also Arkhivy Belarusi (Archives of Belarus), which contains a number of articles focused on the war. The most recent one with reference to events at Maly Traścianiec is available at: https://archives.gov.by/be/news/1016710, accessed 25 June 2021.
26 A statement by the Shoah Research Center states that 200,000 were killed in the Traścianiec area and 65,000 in the camp itself. See ‘Maly Trostynets’, Shoah Research Center, available at: https://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%206636.pdf, accessed 12 November 2019. Kotljarchuk (Citation2013, p. 13) also cites 65,000 Jewish deaths at the site.
27 ‘Kak seichas vyglyadit memorial na meste kontslagerya “Trostenets”’, Khartiya 97, 4 July 2019, available at: https://charter97.org/ru/news/2019/7/4/340145/, accessed 5 June 2020.
28 ‘Austrian Researchers to Continue Studying Nazi Crimes in Belarusian Trostenets’, Belarusian Telegraph Agency, 29 March 2019, available at: https://www.belarus.by/en/press-center/speeches-and-interviews/austrian-researchers-to-continue-studying-nazi-crimes-in-belarusian-trostenets_i_0000095438.html, accessed 12 November 2019.
29 ‘Lukashenko, Kurz visit Trostenets Memorial Complex’, Belarusian Telegraph Agency (BELTA), 28 March 2019, available at: https://eng.belta.by/president/view/lukashenko-kurz-visit-trostenets-memorial-complex-119841-2019/, accessed 5 June 2020.
30 Compare photos from Spasiuk and Semashko (Citation2015) with the recent video from the opening of Array of Names at Maly Traścianiec, shown on ONT, ont.by, 31 March 2019, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p256Txmh-wE; and ‘Alexander Lukashenko, Sebastian Kurz Unveil Array of Names Monument’, Belarusian Telegraph Agency (BELTA), 29 March 2019, available at: https://eng.belta.by/video/getRecord/599/, both accessed 11 November 2019.
31 ‘Memorialnyi kompleks “TROSTENETS”’, Belorusskiy Soyuz Arkhitektorov, available at: http://bsa.by/news/BUA/memorialnyiy-kompleks-trostenets, accessed 25 June 2021.
32 The authors visited the park in September 2019. The monument to Stalin’s victims is poorly maintained, whereas the elaborate monument commemorating partisans had recently been adorned with flowers.
33 Stalin’s crimes are not ignored but their commemoration is a result of non-government efforts. Mass graves have been discovered since 2015 at Kabyliaki, near Orša, and at Chajsy, near Viciebsk, the latter clearly on a major scale and often compared to those at Kurapaty on the northern outskirts of Minsk. Both have public Facebook groups that provide further information: for Chajsy, see Chajsy-Viciebskiya Kurapaty, available at: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1738507716405123/, accessed 25 June 2020; and for Kabyliaki see, ‘Kabyliaki: Rasstrelyani v Orshe’, available at: https://www.facebook.com/groups/133839023975578/, accessed 25 June 2021.
34 Concerning the exhibition in Hrodna, see, for example, ‘U Grodne—vystava pra Trastianets’, 16 May 2017, available at: https://belisrael.info/?tag=aleksandr-dolgovskiy, accessed 25 June 2021.
35 The only corpses to have been positively identified at the Kurapaty site are both Jews: Moshe Kramer and Mordechai Shuleskes, based on receipts they were given in prison for the confiscation of valuables on 10 June 1940. The Office of the Prosecutor reportedly refused to respond to inquiries about three other Jews from Hrodna, shot at Kurapaty in the summer and autumn of 1940. See Melnichuk (Citation2017).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
David R. Marples
David R. Marples, Professor, Department of History and Classics, University of Alberta, Canada. Email: [email protected]
Veranika Laputska
Veranika Laputska, PhD Candidate, Graduate School for Social Research, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, The Polish Academy of Sciences, Nowy Swiat 72, Warsaw 00-30, Poland. Email: [email protected]