Minsk. The Yama Memorial Complex.

The camp, formerly located on the territory of the Belarusian capital, was one of the largest in Europe. According to the records and testimonies that have survived to this day, it appeared in July 1941. This event was preceded by the German occupation of Minsk. A special governing body, the Judenrat, was founded on the site of the ghetto, which was engaged in executing the orders of the German command regarding Jews.

At first, all residents of Jewish blood were forced to hand over valuables, and then they began to take them en masse to the camp. Initially, it was planned to complete the arrests within five days, but the size of the community turned out to be so large that the process was delayed for twice as long. By August 1, more than 80 thousand Jews lived in the occupied territory.

The living conditions in the Minsk ghetto were incredibly difficult. The prisoners had to survive in extremely cramped conditions, when more than a hundred people were settled in one small house with several apartments. The situation was aggravated by unsanitary conditions, spreading infections and the lack of any medicines. Once in the camp, the prisoners found themselves in complete isolation and could no longer count on any outside help. But people died not only from pestilence, but also from sweeps and shootings. The first of them occurred almost immediately after the foundation of the ghetto – in August 41, and mass executions have become regular since November. According to the surviving data, at that time the number of victims was more than 15 thousand people. One of the most brutal was the massacre of Jews, which the German command carried out in March. It became the third in a row, and unlike previous executions, the bodies of the dead were not taken out of the city, but simply thrown into the nearest ravine.

For the first time, a monument erected in honor of those who died in the Minsk ghetto appeared back in Soviet times. Its authors were the poet Chaim Maltinsky and the stone master Mordukh Sprishen. The memory of the dead was forever preserved by a black granite stele, on the basis of which memorable lines in Yiddish and Russian were immortalized in honor of all those who died in the Minsk ghetto. The creation of the memorial was completed in 1947.

However, the history of the monument also turned out to be very tragic. For the lines in Yiddish, its creators were accused of cosmopolitanism and "a manifestation of Jewish bourgeois nationalism." Both authors, who had a hand in the creation of the memorial, were convicted and exiled to the Gulag.

In the 2000s, the Yama complex was renovated, which lasted for eight years. Such a long period of reconstruction was caused by the fact that the craftsmen had to carry out all the work manually so that heavy machinery would not damage the burial and not disturb the remains of the buried.

Nowadays, the monument has acquired an updated look. Now there is a small pedestal in front of its frontal part, to which steps lead. The bottom of the ravine is covered with black paving stones, and two stairs descend to the formed circular platform: one with ordinary railings, and the other with bronze sculptures, which represent a composition called "The Last Way". Its author was Leonid Levin, a native of the Belarusian Jewish community. He was assisted in the creation of a new part of the memorial by the Israeli sculptor Elsa Pollak.

The original plan of the creators of the renovated monument was to depict among the sculptures the most expressive images of the victims of the Holocaust: the figure of a pregnant woman, a male violinist and other sculptures that would symbolize the terrible tragedy and irreparable loss of Jewish society. However, later they decided to depersonalize the silhouettes of the victims of the tragic events so that they would become a generalized image of all those who passed away within the walls of the Minsk ghetto. The authors considered that such an image of exhausted prisoners would be the most appropriate symbol of the difficult time and hopeless suffering of victims going to an unjust execution. It is in this form that the monument can be seen now.