Maly Trascjanec in the Soviet culture of remembrance

The Maly Trascjanec extermination camp was one of the largest extermination sites in the Nazi-occupied territory of the Soviet Union during the Second World War.¹ Local Jews from the Minsk ghetto, as well as deported Jews from Germany and Austria, formed the main group of victims, along with inmates of the Minsk prisons and people suspected of being partisans.²

Trauerkundgebung in Malyj Trostenez 3 September 1944 Archiv der Geschichtswerkstatt (1).jpg

Mourning rally at the burnt down barn in the former Minsk SD camp. Staff members of the local collective farms and representatives of the authorities take part.

Immediately after the liberation of Minsk in July 1944, the surrounding Nazi execution sites were investigated by the Extraordinary State Commission of the Soviet Union (ČGK).⁴ The ČGK estimated that 6,500 people were murdered during the burning of the barn on the camp grounds alone. The Extraordinary Commission estimated 150,000 victims for the Blahaǔščyna shooting site.⁵ These numbers are still disputed and remain the subject of academic debate.⁶ The fact that thousands of Jews were murdered near Maly Trascjanec was hardly noticed by the ČGK officials. In their final files, the case officers therefore only write about peaceful civilians and prisoners of war from Minsk who were murdered by the German occupiers.⁷

The results of the commission left a lasting mark on the memory of Maly Tracjanec in the Soviet Union and later in Belarus. Scholars and journalists used the ČGK report, in which the genocide of Jews was omitted, as the basis for their own publications.⁸ The first object commemorating the Holocaust in Minsk was an obelisk. It was erected at the "Yama" (Belarusian for "pit") in 1947 and commemorated in Russian and Jewish the 5,000 Jews who were murdered here in 1942. The whole thing happened without the permission of the competent authorities; the architect and author of the inscription was arrested.⁹

Obelisk in Vjaliki Trascjanec village from 1963

The problem with remembering Maly Trascjanec during the Soviet era was that it didn't fit into the common narrative of heroic resistance to the Nazi occupiers. Other memorials in Minsk related to the "Great Patriotic War" commemorated the heroism of the fallen soldiers.¹⁰ In Maly Trascjanec, however, there was no evidence of any resistance by the victims. The memory of Maly Trascjanec therefore faded into the background and was forgotten. Memorials from the 1960s in Maly Trascjanec, Vjaliki Trascjanec and Šaškoŭka offered only meager information about the crimes that had taken place there and left out Jews as a group of victims.¹¹

^{1 Cf. IBB Dortmund/IBB Minsk, Vernichtunsgsort Malyj Trostenez, p. 31.}

^{2 Cf. Rentrop-Koch, Landgut als Vernichtungsstätte, p. 155.}

^{3 Cf. Dalhouski, Zur Transformation des sowjetischen Gedenkortes, p. 118.}

^{4 Cf. ibid.}

^{5 Kohl, Vernichtungslager Trostenez,}^p.^{20; Rentrop, Tatorte der Endlösung, p. 226f.}

^{6 Cf. Marples/Laputska, Maly Traścianiec in the Context of Current Narratives, p. 17.}

^{7 Cf. Dalhouski, Zur Transformation des sowjetischen Gedenkortes, p. 119f.}

^{8 Cf. ibid., p. 120.}

^{9 Cf. Marples/Laputska, Maly Traścianiec in the Context of Current Narratives, p. 4f.}

^{10 Cf. Dalhouski, Zur Transformation des sowjetischen Gedenkortes, p. 121f.}

^{11 Cf. ibid.}