The Lowest of the Low

Quote from the memorial inside the forest, "
To our fellow-believers--Jews, Christians
and the Muslims-- the victims of
Stalinism"- from the Belarusian Jews.

The cold rain fell on me as I sat motionless in the Kurapaty Forest, on the outskirts of Minsk, surrounded by hundreds of crosses and pine trees. The thought that each erect cross represented the remains of someone whose body was found in the forest sent shivers down my spine. An estimated 7,000 to 250,000 people were murdered in this forest by the Stalin regime in the 1930's during the Great Purge. The thing that sickened me the most was that the people who were killed in this forest were shot by their own government. They were killed because Stalin feared that these individuals were rebellious, had criticized the government, or were spies. Many of those killed, however, actually supported the Soviet Union and had fought for the their country. Sitting in the forest, listening to the echoing silence of the trees that were once witnesses to the horror's of the forest, all I can think is how can humanity sink this low... My mind wandered back to my morning when I was at the Minsk Yama Holocaust Memorial (Yama means "pit" in English). I had felt so low physically and mentally standing in the pit where 5,000 Jews were killed in one day alone and thousands more were killedon the spot throughout the Holocaust. In a city that was once 50% Jewish, I felt scared and uneasy. I wasn't scared because I am Jewish. I felt scared seeing humanity's ability to destroy everything it has built and the realization that this horror happened less than 75 years ago.

The view from the bottom of the pit. This statue represents those who were forced to descend into this pit and never left it. 

The stone obelisk monument at the site of the Yama is in
Yiddish and Russian because these were once the two main
languages of Belarusian Jews. It was erected in 1947
and is one of the first Holocaust memorials in Europe.