In this lecture, Prof. Anika Walke discusses how Soviet Jews experienced the Holocaust and how they made sense of their lives many years later. 

81 years ago, on 21 Octoer 1943, the Minsk ghetto was "liquidated"—German forces rounded up the last remaining Jewish prisoners and either killed them in the surrounding forest or deported them to concentration camps futher west. A group of 13 Jews, however, survived in the basement of a home in the city and saw the end of World War II. This group's survival testifies to the brutal force of the murder campaigns in and around the ghetto. 

It also demonstrates the agnecy Jewish children, youngsters, women, and men developed in the face of marginalization, abuse, and horrific violence which enabled them to survive, in hiding or as part of so-called partisan units that gathered int he forests an dswamps around Minsk and many other Belarusian cities and towns.