Trostenets Memorial opens in Minsk on Remembrance Day of Victims of the Great Patriotic War

70 years after the bloodiest war of the 20th century the Belarusian capital got its new memorial-symbol created in the place of the Soviet Union’s largest and Europe’s fourth biggest Nazi death camp. Today on the area of more than 120 hectares where brutal murdering of innocent people took place an impressive monument is rising to tell the story of a great tragedy and call for eternal memory…

According to the design, the memorial complex Trostenets will occupy the area of 124 hectares uniting all the monuments on the territory of the death camp. Its visitors will be able to walk the road where thousands of people made the last steps of their lives and to feel at least for a moment all the terror of the atrocities that took place there…

The first ensemble of monuments was built on the site of the former concentration camp by 22 June 2015. The sorrowful Road of Death paved with grey and black tiles symbolizing the footprints of the prisoners begins from the entrance of the memorial. In the center of the main square there is an impressive 10-meter high bronze monument the Gates of Memory. Behind the gates one can see the Burying Ground where the ashes of the victims were scattered. The memorial on the site of the shed where some 6,500 prisoners were burnt was renovated. The remains of the facilities including the grain barn, the timber mill, the buildings where the suitcases of the prisoners were stored, and others were put under control. The road leading to the pit oven in Shashkovka was transformed into the Road of Memory with granite monuments symbolizing different parts of Belarus where the Nazi atrocities took place.