Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: Survivors Commermorate Minsk Ghetto Anniversary
Followup-To: alt.revisionism
Organization: The Nizkor Project http://www.nizkor.org
Keywords: Minsk,Belarus,genocide

Archive/File: places/poland/minsk minsk.001
Last-Modified: 1993/12/03

Belarus remembers World War Two Jewish ghetto           
By Larisa Sayenko 

MINSK, Belarus, Oct 20 (Reuter) - Leaders of the former Soviet
republic of Belarus on Wednesday marked the 50th anniversary of the
destruction of a Nazi ghetto in Minsk with visits to memorials and
sites where Jews were shot en masse.

Commemorations of the ghetto, in which 100,000 died before the area
was levelled in October 1943, entered the second of four days,
attended by ministers anxious to demonstrate that relations between
Belarussians and Jews were generally good.

"It is time to tell the truth -- that the Minsk ghetto was as big a
symbol of Jewish genocide as Babi Yar and the Warsaw ghetto," Foreign
Minister Pyotr Kravchenko said earlier this week, referring to Nazi
atrocities in Ukraine and Poland.

The ghetto set up by Nazi occupiers had an inner area reserved for
tens of thousands of Jews brought to Minsk by train from Hamburg.
Large numbers of deportees were brought from France, Holland, Poland
and Czechoslovakia.

The war had a devastating effect on Belarus as a whole -- two million
people, or one in three residents, were killed and the country was
left in ruins.

Before the outbreak of the war, there were 400,000 Jews in Belarus,
many having settled there because they were banned from living in much
of tsarist Russia.  Yiddish was declared one of four state languages
in a 1920s Soviet-era constitution

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