Remembrance culture and remembrance politics

In Maly Trascjanec, a clear difference can be observed between official state commemoration and unofficial commemoration by the civil society. While the "Forest of Remembrance" was created on the private initiative of Waltraud Barton and the IM-MER memorial association and aims to particularly commemorate the life stories of the deported people, the "Massif of Names" is a clear symbol of national remembrance by the state, which rather commemorates a collective of victims, especially the Jewish ones.

Places of Remembrance in Maly Trascjanec

For a long time, the grounds of Maly Trascjanec were used for other purposes. The commemoration took place mainly in Bolšoi Trascjanec, a few kilometres away. It was not until the mid-1990s and early 2000s that the first ideas were developed for transforming the site into a memorial. For a long time, only the partisans who were murdered in Maly Trascjanec were commemorated in the Soviet Union.

The efforts to turn the Blahauščyna forest, where the execution graves and mass graves of the victims of Maly Trascjanec are located, into a memorial site are primarily based on the initiative of the Belarusian Jewish community and German partner NGOs. In addition to the mass graves, the "Path of Death" and the "Forest of Remembrance" are located here.

Instead of trying to impress visitors with a monumental memorial, as in the official part, the newest memorial, Leonid Levin's "Path of Death", is minimalist and invites visitors to retrace the last path of the victims. This begins with suitcases cast in concrete to symbolise the victims' luggage, then leads through a series of stylised railway carriages and a section of the forest, and finally ends at the mass graves or execution pits. [1]

To find out more about the different places of remembrance in Maly Trascjanec, please swipe over the fields marked in the graphic.

In Austria, Maly Tracjanec was largely unknown - despite the 9,735 Austrians who were murdered there. The first changes in Austria's culture of remembrance only occurred after the "Waldheim Affair" in 1986, after which interest in the fate of the victims of National Socialist politics and the Holocaust also increased significantly in Austria. It was not until 2018 that the "Massif of Names" was inaugurated as an official place of remembrance in the presence of Austrian state representatives.