Black obelisk biography

I pulled with the publication: I tried to find photos of those thanks to whom the black obelisk arose; those who stood the wall when they tried to demolish it; Those who were leaving forever came here to say goodbye to the city to go to the station from here. I pulled, trying to find an approach to one of the most bitter Minsk monuments ... After all, the rest are just monuments, and this one is a open grave.

I pulled until I realized what to say from the first person. Because the whole city went through a hole, and every Minsk resident has its own. Even those who do not know or do not want to know. It is difficult for me to call this story a stories - this is a story. It seems that the pit has always been. In X, my mother and I squinted in fright, bypassed her on the way to the Hatter, Aunt Tsile - her tiny house stood in the place of the "Brest fortress", on the tank.

In X, the yam revealed her terrible pharynx when in the evenings I hurried past her into the house on the now -non -existent green lane: there, for the recent students of Parnat, lectures on art, unforgettable Cyril Zeleni. Most likely, before, before x, there was my pit - where could she go! The first rally on the pit passed in the year. Since then - annually.

Children's memory draws a place that adults were afraid of - with the slopes leaving deeper into the Earth, and the bottom lost in the dark. Adults were scared not only by blood spilled here, but also by a monument standing below with an incomprehensible inscription in the prohibited Jewish language. No one really knew whether this or Yiddish, but everyone knew that this place was connected with departures to Israel.

My relatives are Jewish, that the Russians did not go to the pit. And their educated friends - doctors, musicians, teachers - too. None of them was going to Israel, and a career could easily be spoiled. There were those who had nothing to lose to the pit: “departures”, “refuseniks” and a non-partisan Jewish proletariat: priests-centers, portal shoemakers, hairdressers-sanitary equipment.

The Soviet government could not do anything with them. Flowers under the escort. It so happened that a black obelisk placed in the heart of the pit became an anti -Soviet monument. He was not shown on TV, they did not write about him in the newspapers and did not mention the guidebooks ... In general, they did not mention anywhere! They tried to demolish him more than once - under various pretexts, but always to improve.

They wanted to improve the inscription - to remove this same idysh or Hebrew from it. This was perhaps the only case when the Soviet government failed to realize their desire: both the monument and the inscription were defended. These same priests are the Sleseri and others like them. The legendary Minsk Colonels Ovsishcher, Alshansky and Davidovich, who rebelled against state anti -Semitism and unclenched into ordinary ones.

Thanks to all these people, at the beginning of x, when I first got into the pit, I read the same words on the black obelisk that were originally drawn there. They can also be read today. The bright memory in eternal times to five thousand Jews who died at the hands of the fierce enemies of mankind-the Nazi-German villains on March 2 of the year against the Nazi-German villains of the Soviet government had nothing, but the Jews were not to her liking.

All that was necessary, replace them with abstract Soviet citizens. But the Jews did not want to be Soviet citizens, they wanted to be Jews and therefore left for Israel. The history of a black obelisk is the history of the outcome of Jews from Belarus. The idea to erect a monument to the prisoners of the Minsk ghetto was born in the year when the soldiers who returned from the war found out that their relatives were killed and their bodies were thrown into the old sand career.

The quarry began to call a pit - with a capital letter. Jewish column of the Minsk ghetto. They are still alive ... By the year the whole world was collected money for a monument, and the famous city Kamnetes Mordukh was sophisticated from the tombstone from the old Jewish cemetery to Sukhoi cut out the marble obelisk. The inscription for him in Yiddish was written by the poet Chaim Maltinsky.

Through years, recalling him in the book “Tolki B Yareii, it was! Apparently, a good man was an Yiddish poet. Maltinsky went through the war before Berlin, was awarded orders and medals, lost his leg in battle. And so, wearing military awards, he went to coordinate the inscription on the monument to Glavlit - this was the case in the USSR called the censorship department.

Censors sat in the government of the government on the sixth floor. The elevator did not work. When the one -legged front -line soldier got to the desired office, he almost cried from pain and fatigue. The censor read the text and, as expected, did not give permission. It was useless to argue. Before leaving, Maltinsky said only one phrase: "I have a mother, wife and seven -year -old son there." And a miracle happened: a censor, also a front -line soldier, signed permission.

Mordukh is diCiting with permission to make a monument. With such difficulty, the produced paper will be a poor protection: after a few years, Maltinsky will be found in Birobidzhan, where he will leave for the publishing house. He will be sentenced to ten years of camps "for trying to sell the Far East and part of Siberia to the Americans." From Vladivostok to Yakutsk - no more or less!

Kamnetes will be condemned for a collection of records of the Soviet company "Melody" with Jewish songs. Also for ten years.Such will be the price that the creators will pay for the monument. The first monument in the USSR killed Jews. In X and X "Anti -Soviet" pit will stand in the middle of the city, as a fortress surrounded by an enemy. The Soviet government will fight it not for life, but for death.

And he will lose: the Soviet Union will not, but the pit will remain.

However, the victory will be Pirrova - almost everyone who needed it would leave with the collapse of the USSR. What do the former ghetto prisoners think, looking at the lenses of cameras? The bus rolled along the avenue, and I told - about our amazing Babylon, where many cultures have intertwined; about countless wars, fires and destruction; About communists and fascists; About the beginning of the World Revolution and the killer of President Kennedy ...

The musicians had just played a concert and were tired: they looked out the window behind which the winter city glided, and from time to time they politely nodded their heads. Suddenly, one of them asked: do you have monuments to the Jews? There is, ”I answered and told about the pit. Can I go there? The request was unexpected. Even more strange she was made by the fact that my interlocutor was a black man.

After some hesitation, I changed the route. We drove up to the pit and the musician, gathering in an armful flowers donated by the audience, walked along the steps to the monument. In the dark, against the backdrop of snow, a black man seemed a ghost. He laid flowers on a stone and silently froze nearby. Black man at a black obelisk. I asked why he had a Jewish monument.

And he heard an amazing story. The ancestors of a strange guest came to the United States from Ethiopia, and among them there was a legend that they ... Jews. One of the lost Israeli knees. Probably, distrust flashed on my face, my interlocutor hesitated for a moment, and then said: it is difficult to check the legend, it is easier to believe that you are a Jew. With these words, he handed me a camera and asked me to photograph it against the backdrop of a black obelisk.

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