The Heavy Burden of Captivity

Eighty years separate us from the end of the Second World War. They say the years erase a lot. Forgetting is not the worst property of human memory. Still, the years are powerless to erase the memories of the incalculable sufferings and hardships of people and of the millions of victims of bloody fascism. There are crimes that cannot be forgotten or forgiven. Humanity will never forget the cremation furnaces of Majdanek and Auschwitz, the horrors of Babyn Yar, the ashes of Lidice, and thousands of towns and villages that were burnt down to the ground. The barbaric extermination of millions of innocent people will never be forgotten.

On April 11, the world celebrates the International Day of Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps, established in memory of the international uprising in Buchenwald. In 1945 prisoners of Buchenwald, who learned about the approach to the camp of the Allied forces, organized a successful uprising, disarming and capturing about 200 camp guards and taking over the concentration camp in their hands. In 1958, a complex of buildings dedicated to the heroes and victims of Buchenwald was opened there.

Nazi Germany created a gigantic network of concentration camps on the territory of the occupied European countries, which were turned into places of organized systematic extermination of millions of people and laboratories for conducting medical and other experiments. Out of the 18 million prisoners, 11 million died, with more than 15 percent being children under the age of 14. Among the world-famous death camps today are Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbruck, Majdanek, Treblinka, and Stuttgart.…

There were more than 260 concentration camps and their branches in Belarus. 1.4 million people were killed in them. The Trostenets camp near Minsk, with more than 200,000 victims, is the largest after the Polish Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Treblinka.

Dear Readers! The Fiction Department invites you to attend the book exhibition “The Heavy Burden of Captivity”, dedicated to the International Day of Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps. The exhibition presents memoirs of Nazi prisoners, documentaries and fiction books, which tell the terrible truth about what concentration camp prisoners experienced and saw with their own eyes.

The exhibition is located in room 105 in the University’s main building.