Memorial Stone in Blahaǔščyna (2002)

It was only in 2002, almost 60 years after the liberation of Minsk, that Blahaǔščyna was included in the culture of remembrance of Maly Trascjanec as one of the central murder sites of the National Socialists.

The Minsk historian Dr. Aliaksandr Dalhouski describes the erection of the memorial stone as a "milestone"¹ in the work of the Organizing Committee for the Blahaǔščyna Memorial.

Memorial stone in Blahaŭščyna forest

The memorial stone commemorates the murdered Soviet victims of the National Socialists. Jews are also named in the inscription as an explicit group of victims of the Maly Trascjanec extermination site. The memorial stone was thus the first cultural remembrance object that recognized Jews as a victim group in the context of the extermination site.² The number of victims mentioned refers to the investigations by the ČGK in 1944.

Inscription on the memorial stone: "In this place the national-fascist conquerors murdered over 150,000 people in 1941-1943: Soviet prisoners of war, underground fighters from Minsk and partisans and citizens from different parts of the republic, Jews from the Minsk ghetto and many European countries."³

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^{1 Cf. Dalhouski, Zur Transformation des sowjetischen Gedenkortes, p. 122.}

^{2 Cf. ibid., p. 124.}

^{3 Transl.: Evgeny Yuriev.}