Maly Trascjanec between 1944 and today

Satellite image from 1963: the red circle shows the Blahaŭščyna forest clearing and the green circle shows the military base

Satellite image from 2009: The military base has been dismantled (green circle), the landfill is no longer in use (blue rectangle) and the Blahaǔščyna forest clearing (red circle) is almost overgrown

Between 1944 and today, the site of Maly Trascjanec changed in many ways. It was a long way from the transformation of the site by the Extraordinary Commission of the Soviet Union (ČGK) to its agricultural use as a collective farm to the establishment of a memorial.

After the investigation of the former camp and extermination site by the ČGK in July 1944, the area was returned to agricultural use as part of a collective farm. Although there were efforts by local residents in the 1950s to demand that the authorities care for the memory of the victims of Maly Trascjanec, the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR) made no attempt to establish a culture of remembrance. Moves to commemorate the victims of the extermination site were ignored for a long time and the area was used for agricultural and military purposes.¹

As a result of the so-called Saukitens process, the former camp site came increasingly into the focus of Soviet authorities investigating war crimes at Maly Trascjanec in 1962.² In 1961, 1963 and 1966, the first memorials in the form of memorial stones and an obelisk were created at the site of the burnt barn, in the neighbouring village of Vjaliki Trascjanec and near Šaškoŭka. In the early 1990s, after the publication of "Ich wundere mich, dass ich noch lebe" ("I'm surprised that I'm still alive") by Paul Kohl, public awareness of Maly Trascjanec as a scene of the Holocaust grew in Central Europe as well. It was not until 2002 that a memorial stone was laid in Blahaǔščyna; the forest clearing was almost completely overgrown.³ In the 2010s, the expansion of the commemoration of Maly Trascjanec also received increasing government support. Since 2015, the former extermination site has been converted into an international large-scale memorial.