Memorial to the victims of the extermination site Bronnaya Gora

Место массовых убийств Бронная Гора / Месца масавых забойстваў Бронная Гара

In the Belarusian village of Bronnaya Gora, two monuments commemorate the approximately 50,000 people who were murdered here in 1942.

History

The village of Bronnaya Gora (Belarusian: Bronnaya Hara, Polish: Bronna Góra) situated about 120 km northeast of Brest (also known as Brest-Litovsk) on the road to Minsk, belonged to Poland before 1939. In September 1939, the region was annexed by the Soviet Union in consequence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, until it was conquered by the Wehrmacht within a few days after the German attack in June 1941.
After German troops had already murdered thousands of Jews in the region in the summer of 1941, the occupation authorities set up ghettos in many larger cities towards the end of 1941, including Brest. In the spring of 1942, they began to murder the inhabitants of the ghettos by mass shootings. Presumably in May and June 1942 an extermination site was established in Bronnaya Gora near the Brest-Minsk railway line. Hundreds of civilians from the surrounding area were conscripted to dig eight pits, each of them over 60 metres long, up to six metres wide and about four metres deep. Between June and November 1942 trains arrived regularly in Bronnaya Gora, the occupants of which were murdered upon arrival. Exact data on the number of murdered persons and their origin are not recorded. It is considered certain that many trains with several thousands of victims arrived directly from Brest, at least 15,000 Jews from Brest arrived on October 15/16, 1942. Other victims presumably came from cities such as Pinsk or nearby Bereza. The vast majority of the murdered were Jews. The perpetrators were members of the KdS department in Brest, various gendarmerie and police units as well as presumably collaborators of other nationalities.
When the defeat in the war became apparent, the Germans began to cover their tracks. In March 1944, about 100 people were forced to open the mass graves and burn the already strongly decaying bodies. Subsequently, these forced labourers were also murdered and their bodies burned.

Bronnaya Gora, 2012, Memorial stones, Avner

Bronnaya Gora, 2012, Side track to the shooting sites, Avner

Victims

Since virtually no documents on the Bronnaya Gora extermination site have been handed down, historians can only roughly determine the number of victims. Due to the size of the pits and the estimated number of trains, it is likely that more than 50,000 children, women and men were murdered in Bronnaya Gora, most of them Jews. At least 15,000 of them came from the Brest ghetto, they were murdered on October 15 and 16, 1942. Whether Jews from other countries or other victim groups such as prisoners of war, partisans or political prisoners were among the victims has not been clarified.

With the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939 and the Red Army’s invasion of eastern Poland the north-east of the country was annexed to Soviet Belarus. In summer 1941 the whole of Belarus was occupied by German troops. Over the next three years between one in four and one in three residents met a violent death. Almost all of the towns were completely destroyed. The Wehrmacht or SS systematically annihilated around 620 villages together with theor inhabitants, including Chatyn. The largest extermination camp on occupied Soviet territory was located in Maly Trostenets outside the Belarusian capital Minsk. It is now presumed that at least 60,000 German and Belarusian Jews were murdered there. Up to 85,000 Jews are estimated to have died in Minsk and 230,000 in the country as a whole. From 1941, Belarus was at the heart of the Soviet partisan struggle against the German occupation with over a thousand active partisan groups. The Red Army began to recapture the country at the end of 1943 and the German occupation was considered over by summer 1944. The country was largely destroyed, the society shattered and the people traumatised. Belarus was reincorporated into the Soviet Union in 1944. A large part of the Polish territory annexed in 1939 remained part of the country. National memorial and memory culture in post-war Belarus were dominated by the liberation of the country on 3 July 1944 and the day of victory on 9 May 1945 as the end of a »heroic« struggle in the Great Patriotic War. Memory of the partisan war was also of key importance. The genocide of the Jews was not mentioned directly in the Soviet republics. An obelisk put up at the »Yama«, a pit where mass murders took place in the Minsk ghetto, was therefore an exception in the former Soviet Union. It was erected as early as 1946 and for decades was the sole memorial with a Yiddish inscription and a direct reference to the murdered Jews. The memorial site at Khatyn is also unusual. Here,153 people were burnt alive in March 1943. The memorial site, established in 1969, is notable for its simplicity, its concentration on the human dimension of the plight of the victims amidst the horrors of war and the absence of monumental features otherwise common in the former Soviet Union. After Belarus claimed independence in 1991 the search began for an independent national identity. The number of victims plays a decisive role, especially those killed during the Second World War. However, there is consciously no distinction drawn between the territorial situation of the country pre- and post-1939. Both the crimes of the Stalinist regime and the Holocaust have come to the fore but the nature of the state has prevented public discussion of these aspects. State remembrance continues to be dominated by the war in the years 1941 to 1944. Its main symbol is the monumental new building of the Museum of the History of the Great Patriotic War, opened in 2014. In the meantime, however, the association of Jewish communities in Belarus has established a series of memorials to the victims of mass murder. Since the early 1990s, several German towns have also put up stelae in Minsk to remember the Jews deported and murdered there. The Berlin stele, financed by the federal state of Berlin and the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, was inaugurated in an official ceremony on June 25, 2009. There is also movement with regards to a fitting development of the Maly Trostenets area: In 2015, a memorial complex was inaugurated at the site. A second segment which was co-financed by Germany was opened in 2018 by the presidents of Belarus, Austria and Germany. Germany has also pledged to finance the renovation of the Historical Workshop’s historical building on the former territory of the Minsk ghetto, documenting the fates of its victims.

Remembrance

The Red Army liberated the area around Bronnaya Gora in summer of 1944. Soon afterwards, a Soviet special commission investigated the former killing site. It interviewed local residents and carried out excavations to find masses of human remains. After that, the Bronnaya Gora extermination site fell into oblivion. Although it had been a central killing site, neither the mass graves were fenced in nor was a memorial created after the war. Only surviving Jews from Brest were interested in the place and visited it occasionally.
It was not until the end of the 1980s that a number of Jewish and non-Jewish activists joined forces to establish a memorial. They were supported by relatives from Israel, especially after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. A first memorial stone was dedicated in 1992. It is located next to the disused side-track where the mass graves are located. The plaque mentions »50,000 Soviet citizens murdered by Hitlerite fascists«. Around 2007, a plaque was added to this memorial stone, which for the first time made explicit reference to Jewish victims. About 100 metres further on, another larger memorial was dedicated in 1994. At a height of five metres, a bell is placed between metal pillars reminiscent of railroad tracks. The inscription on the memorial plaque in Belarusian, Hebrew, Yiddish and English reads: »In memory of the 50,000 citizens of Jewish nationality from the Soviet Union and Western Europe who were murdered by the Nazis during the time of the Holocaust during the Great Patriotic War in 1941-1945«.

Bronnaya Gora, 2012, Inscription on the central monument in four languages, Avner

Bronnaya Gora, 2012, The memorial stone, erected in 2002, first mentioned Jewish victims, Avner

Contact

Bronnaya Gora, 2012, Belarusian inscription on the memorial stone erected in 1992, Avner

Bronnaya Gora, 2012, The central memorial dedicated in 1994, Avner

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