Press releases

MINSK, 4 October (BelTA) – The Pyatrus Brouka Belarusian Encyclopedia publishing house has released a book about Trostenets, the biggest Nazi concentration camp on the territory of Belarus and all former Soviet Union, in Belarusian, Russian and English, BelTA learned from director of the publishing house Vladimir Andriyevich.

The edition is fact-based and shows the awful reality of those times. It makes readers feel the pain and tragedy of several thousands of people who fell victims to the Nazis during the occupation. The book narrates the events that happened in 1941-1944 near the village of Maly Trostenets, Minsk District where the biggest Nazi extermination camp in the USSR territory occupied by the German invaders was situated.

The book compiles historic information about the villages of Maly Trostenets and Bolshoi Trostenets and their outskirts beginning from the late 16th century. The book gives a detailed account of the tragedy of mass destruction of innocent people, the history of their commemoration. The book is intended for broad Belarusian and international readership, first of all for young people.

“Trostenets: Tragedy of Europe's Peoples” is continuation of our work on books that show the horrors of the Great Patriotic War and the memory that live in the hearts of the Belarusian people. The book “Khatyn, the Tragedy of the Belarusian People” was the first in the series of books dedicated to this theme,” the director of the publishing house said.

Trostenets was one of Europe’s eight largest places of mass destruction of people. The death toll was 206,500 residents of Belarus, Russia, Germany, Austria, Czechia, Poland and other countries and also war prisoners. The Trostenets Memorial Complex has been set up to commemorate their memory. The first part was unveiled in 2015 and the second in 2018.