The controversial president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, has taken part in unprecedented commemorations for the hundreds of thousands of Jews killed in Belarus under Nazi occupation in World War II. "Ideas of xenophobia and ethnic injustice should never be celebrated.... The principles of humanism and goodwill carry great importance for Belarusians," Lukashenko told a gathering in the capital Minski, near a former pit where more than 5,000 Jews were shot dead by Nazi forces.
Leonid Levin, head of the Belarusian Jewish community, who attended the ceremony in Minsk, said: "This is an extremely important event, the likes of which we have not seen in a decade. The way the Holocaust is viewed by the head of state in principle is the way it will be viewed by the people, who were brought up under decades of Soviet anti-Semitism."
Altogether more than 800,000 Jews were exterminated in Belarus during World War II, including 50,000 Jews forcibly displaced from central and western European countries. More than 200,000 people were massacred or cremated alive in 'Maly Trastsyanets', the biggest Nazi death camp on the territory of the then Soviet Union, with some experts putting the figure at 500,000. A series of Holocaust monuments were to be unveiled this week marking events that were wiped from public consciousness under the Soviet system that ignored the fate of Jews both in Belarus - one of Europe's most vibrant pre-war Jewish centers - and elsewhere.
Among monuments to be inaugurated is a tombstone shaped memorial engraved with a Belarusian, English and Hebrew text placed outside a Minsk cinema marking the center of the former Jewish ghetto.
