Memorial plaque marking the building where the impressive Upper Town synagogue used to be
Site Tag: Holocaust
Humanity’ Monument Holocaust Memorial
The sculpture was created by famous British sculptor Oscar Nemon. It was errected in one of the city centre squares as his gift to his hometown.
Fosse Ardeatine Memorial
The place is associated with the years under Nazi occupation, and commemorates the massacre by the SS as retaliation for the Partisan attack in Via Rasella when thirty-two German soldiers were killed. On the evening of March the 24th, 1944, three hundred and thirty-five people were rounded up from the city’s prisons – among them, seventy-five Jews – and taken to Via Ardeatina, where they were slaughtered. The underground passages were then blown up to conceal traces of the massacre and the bodies were retrieved only after the war.
In the large area at the centre of the quarry stands the sculpture I Martiri (“The Martyrs”) by Francesco Coccia, made to commemorate the victims, represented by the figures of an artisan, an intellectual and a teenager, bound by the wrists (1950). An opening in the quarry wall leads to the route around the tunnels, and then to the Memorial built in 1949: it is a large tombstone, a vast cement slab held up by six pillars which covers the graves, all identical and in rows.
Image attribution: antmoose, CC BY 2.0
Yama Memorial Complex
The Yama Memorial Complex is a memorial to all Jews who died in the Minsk ghetto. This is a tribute to the memory of the Jews who were shot during the worst punitive operation of the Nazis: on March 2, 1942, five thousand Jews were killed. It was the first memorial to the victims of the Holocaust in the USSR, on which it was allowed to make an inscription in Yiddish.
Photo credit: Adam Jones, Ph.D. / Global Photo Archive / Flickr.
Maly Trostenets Holocaust Memorial and Massacre Site
The Trostenets extermination camp, created in the autumn of 1941, became the largest on the territory of the Soviet Union. In terms of the number of victims of fascism, Trostenets became the fourth after Auschwitz, Majdanek and Treblinka. Civilians and prisoners of war from all countries of the Soviet Union, as well as citizens of Austria, Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland were murdered there.
Image credit: The Together Plan – subject to copyright ©
Minsk Ghetto
250 ghettos were created on the territory of Belarus. In the largest – the Minsk ghetto – more than 100 thousand people died. It was created in August 1941 and became one of the largest in Europe, ranking second in terms of the number of prisoners after the Lvov ghetto. On several streets wrapped with barbed wire, there were at first 80 thousand, and then more than 100 thousand prisoners.
Image credit: Adam Jones, Ph.D. / Global Photo Archive / Flickr
Minsk Holocaust Workshop
Minsk History Workshop is an educational and research center that deals with the themes of the Holocaust and World War II. By studying history for the future, the workshop contributes to reconciliation between Germany and Belarus, as well as preserves the memory, engages in education and research on the themes of the Minsk ghetto and the Trostenets memorial complex.
Image credit: The Together Plan – subject to copyright ©; Adam Jones, Ph.D. / Global Photo Archive / Flickr.
Khatyn Memorial Village
The Belarusian village Khatyn is known all over the world, although its life ended tragically on March 22, 1943. The village was not abandoned, but died with its inhabitants. It is a symbol of the terrible tragedy that people experienced during the Great Patriotic War. The memorial complex is dedicated to the death of this and other Belarusian villages and the death of every fourth Belarusian.
Photo credit: Adam Jones, Ph.D. / Global Photo Archive / Flickr;
Anne Frank Museum
The Anne Frank House is a writer’s house and biographical museum dedicated to Jewish wartime diarist Anne Frank. The building is located on a canal called the Prinsengracht, close to the Westerkerk, in central Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
During World War II, Anne Frank hid from Nazi persecution with her family and four other people in hidden rooms at the rear of the 17th-century canal house, known as the Secret Annex. She did not survive the war but her wartime diary was published in 1947. Ten years later the Anne Frank Foundation was established to protect the property from developers who wanted to demolish the block.
The museum opened on 3 May 1960. It preserves the hiding place, has a permanent exhibition on the life and times of Anne Frank, and has an exhibition space about all forms of persecution and discrimination. In 2013 and 2014, the museum had 1.2 million visitors and was the 3rd most visited museum in the Netherlands, after the Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh Museum.
Soap Grave
A special memorial is located on the east side of the graveyard, to the right of the Randegg memorial. Damaged Torah scrolls that became unusable during the Shoah, along with soaps made from human remains and human ashes from Auschwitz are buried here. Such memorials were erected in numerous Jewish cemeteries across Hungary. They symbolize the religious and personal
losses of the community and the damages in general.
