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EU ambassadors lay flowers at sites near Minsk to commemorate victims of Stalinism and Nazism

The Minsk-based ambassadors of the European Union's member countries held flower-laying ceremonies at sites near Minsk on November 3 to commemorate the victims of Stalinism and Nazism.

The ambassadors visited the area where the Nazis’ Trastsyanets death camp was located and Kurapaty, a Stalin-era massacre site just outside Minsk.

About 30,000 people were executed by the NKVD and 170,000 by the Nazis at Trastsyanets in the 1930s and 1940s, said historian Ihar Kuznyatsow.

To cover up the Stalinist crimes, authorities made the Trastsyanets area into a city dump in 1957, Mr. Kuznyatsow said.

The current government plans to put up a memorial there only in commemoration of the victims of Nazism, he noted.

As for Kurapaty, it is the largest Stalin-era execution site in the former Soviet Union, containing the remains of more than 30,000 people, Mr. Kuznyatsow said.

The memory of political terror victims is sacred for the Lithuanian government and public, Ambassador Edminas Bagdonas told BelaPAN.

The former KGB building at the center of Vilnius now houses a museum, Mr. Bagdonas said. Its walls feature the names of Stalinist terror victims and its exhibits expose crimes of the Soviet state security agencies, this "most dreadful repressive mechanism," he said.

The tragic pages of the Stalinist terror are not hushed up in Hungary, said Ambassador Ferenc Kontra. Monuments have been put up at all known massacre sites, he noted. "I'm sure that the Belarusians have the need to properly memorialize the victims of Trastsyanets," he said.

EU diplomats visit Kurapaty every November to commemorate the victims of the tragedy that befell Belarus several decades ago, said Swedish Ambassador Stefan Eriksson. The crosses that were put up at Kurapaty by common people make a "strong impression," he said. Although the government does not pay enough attention to the site, it has been preserved because people's memory is "very retentive," Mr. Eriksson said.