Cold but Cultured

It’s still snowy and cold outside and, for all I know, might be until the end of time. And COVID is rampant with no sign of the vaccine. But you know what? I live in Minsk and I want to see it before I move on next September. I’m tired of waiting for ideal conditions, so I made a pact that I’d start going to see some things that are right around here.

Yama Memorial stairs

Since moving to this side of the world, I’ve come to learn a lot more about this area’s place in history, mostly with what we know as WWII but here is called The Great Patriotic War. Americans were focused on the Pacific front, but it was this area that was being torn apart.

Following an event that my boss went to, I finally decided to find the Yama Memorial, which, as it turns out, I’ve passed several times but from the other side of the road. It’s a pit with stairs leading down to it. In 1942, it’s where the Nazis marched about 5,000 Jewish Minsk residents and shot them. There’s now a memorial and stairs leading down to the pit, with a line of sculptures going down that represent the chain of Jews who were marched to their deaths.

In a way, it reminded me of the Korean War memorial in DC, but I guess that’s just because it was a group of sculptures representing people. This one was haunting, as you would imagine. It depicted individuals and families who were slaughtered. 

This area is full of things like that, and I don’t mean just Minsk. I’m less than 10 hours away from Auschwitz, and the whole area is full of places that were Jewish ghettos and work camps.

Today, I decided to mask up and go to one of Minsk’s museums. There are three or four I’d like to visit,  and honestly, I’m just tired of waiting for ideal conditions. I’ve got a mask and wipey things and I’m not afraid to use them. What I am afraid of is not only depression from being locked up but leaving town without discovering the history of the area.

So today I hit the Great Patriotic War Museum, which I’d be wanting to see but for a variety of reasons, most notably that it’s been a protest site on Sundays, I hadn’t gotten to. So screw it, I’m going to do stuff now.

After a couple of false starts – I got there at 11:20 but say a sign that I thought meant it opened at 12, so I did my post-museum run before the museum, went back and still discovered the door locked, but then I watched a family go in a door that I thought said “no entry” – I paid about $6 for entry and little headphones and set out.

Initially, there were barely any people in there (one reason I went early) but eventually more started trickling in. I was there almost four hours, listening to every single segment on the audio until I got to about No. 70 and realized I was famished, so I started speeding through at that point.

Great Patriotic War Museum

But the whole history was just so depressing – 260 Jewish work camps and 2.3 million Belarusians killed. The country lost about a quarter of the population and quite a few of the cities were scorched and burned. I couldn’t absorb everything on the audio but man, it was rough. Minsk is one of the Hero Cities of WWII – I mean, The Great Patriotic War. No one calls it WWII here, and it’s the Soviets who were the heroes, not the Americans.

Tomorrow is a holiday and, true to COVID life, there’s no out-of-town getaway but I did schedule another massage. There’s just nothing else to do, but now that I’ve done the one museum with no known repercussions, there are a couple more I’d like to see.

I will probably never have housing more centrally located; there are two national museums within two blocks of me. One is a historical museum, but not war-related, and the other is an art museum. Hopefully I can get to those in the next few weeks.