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National tourism agency to offer Minsk ghetto excursion

The National Agency of Belarusian Tourism will offer a new excursion that will take visitors to major sites of the Holocaust in Minsk.

The excursion, which will last two hours and a half, will include visits by bus and on foot to streets where the Minsk ghetto was located.

Visitors will see a former synagogue, houses that have survived the Nazis' occupation of Minsk between 1941 and 1944, a stone memorial on Yubileynaya Square and the Yama Holocaust memorial.

More that 100,000 Jews from Minsk and other Belarusian cities were put in the ghetto in the first days of the war.

The agency prepared the excursion as part of events to mark the 65th anniversary of the end to the ghetto.

"Participants will be told about the resistance of ghetto prisoners and about how they fought for their human dignity, life and liberation," Maryna Mastashava, a departmental head at the agency, told BelaPAN. "In addition, tourists will learn about how residents of the Belarusian capital helped save those who managed to escape from the ghetto. There are several dozens people in Belarus recognized as righteous gentiles."

"Since the attention of many tourists visiting Belarus has been drawn to the Holocaust tragedy in the last decades, I think the excursion prove very popular," Ms. Mastashava said. "It will form the right understanding of our history during the occupation of Minsk and Belarus."