“The Pit” is a memorial complex in Minsk dedicated to commemorating the victims of fascism in the Minsk ghetto. Before the war, near the intersection of Ratomskaya Street (now Melnikayte) and Zaslavlskaya Street, there was a pit (quarry) where residents collected sand for construction work. During the occupation of Minsk, German fascists used the pit to bury numerous victims of the Minsk ghetto. During the shootings in the ghetto on March 2, 1942, at Jubilee Square and its surroundings, many Jews were killed, whom the Judenrat forced the ghetto residents to throw into this pit.

When in 1942 an official from the Reich Security Main Office, Eichmann, came to Minsk for an inspection, the local fascist authorities organized a show action. According to their order, the director of the orphanage, Fleisher, and the doctor Chernik brought more than 40 children to the Judenrat. All of them and the orphanage workers were shot in the presence and under the supervision of Kube, Eichmann, and the police chief Strauch. Some children were buried alive in the pit. Approximately 500-600 people are buried in the grave.

The first rally at The Pit took place in 1971. Since then — annually.

This was a place feared by adults — with slopes descending into the earth and a bottom lost in darkness. Adults were frightened not only by the blood spilled here but also by the monument standing below with an incomprehensible inscription in a forbidden Jewish language. No one really knew whether it was Hebrew or Yiddish, but everyone knew that this place was connected with departures to Israel.

My relatives did not go to The Pit. Nor did their educated friends — doctors, musicians, teachers. None of them planned to go to Israel, and a career could easily be ruined. Those who went to The Pit were those who had nothing to lose: “emigrants,” “refuseniks,” and non-party Jewish proletariat: carpenters-mechanics, shoemakers-tailors, barbers-plumbers. The Soviet authorities could do nothing with them.

Thus, the Black Obelisk placed in the heart of The Pit became an anti-Soviet monument. It was not shown on television, not written about in newspapers, and not mentioned in guidebooks… Not mentioned anywhere at all! There were repeated attempts to demolish it — under various pretexts, but always to “improve” it. They wanted to improve the inscription — to remove that very Yiddish or Hebrew.

This was probably the only case where the Soviet authorities failed to realize their desire: both the monument and the inscription were defended. By whom? By those very carpenters-mechanics and their like.

The authorities unofficially recommended not to express grief while standing at the pit. But three Minsk combat officers — colonels Yefim Davidovich, Lev Ovsisher, and lieutenant colonel Naum Alshansky — ignored these recommendations.

Year after year, on May 9, wearing combat orders and medals, they came to The Pit, the site of the mass death of Jews. In the early 1970s, all three began to be persecuted. Searches, surveillance, wiretapping of telephone conversations, threats, defamatory publications in the press... A criminal case was opened. The charge was “activities aimed at undermining Soviet power by spreading slanderous fabrications that defame the Soviet social and state system.” In October 1972, at a meeting of the bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belarus, Yefim Davidovich was expelled from the party. Moreover, the authorities tried to accuse Davidovich of creating an underground Zionist organization in Minsk, involving Lev Ovsisher and Naum Alshansky.

Thanks to all these people, the Black Obelisk still bears the same words that were originally inscribed there. They can still be read today.

Bright memory for all time to the five thousand Jews who died at the hands of the cruel enemies of humanity — the fascist-German villains on March 2, 1942.

The Soviet authorities had nothing against the fascist-German villains, but Jews were not to their liking. All that was needed was to replace them with abstract Soviet citizens. But Jews did not want to be Soviet citizens; they wanted to be Jews and therefore left for Israel.

The idea to erect a monument to the prisoners of the Minsk ghetto was born in 1945 when soldiers returning from the war learned that their relatives had been killed and their bodies thrown into the old sand quarry. The quarry began to be called The Pit — with a capital letter.

By 1947, money for the monument was collected by the whole community, and the famous city stonemason Mordukh Sprishen carved a marble obelisk from a tombstone from the old Jewish cemetery on Sukhaya Street. The inscription for it in Yiddish was written by the poet Chaim Maltinsky.

Maltinsky went through the war to Berlin, was awarded orders and medals, and lost a leg in battle. And so, wearing his combat awards, he went to get the inscription approved at Glavlit — the censorship office in the USSR. The censors were located on the sixth floor of the Government House. The elevator was not working. When the one-legged front-line soldier reached the required office, he was almost in tears from pain and fatigue. The censor read the text and, as expected, did not give permission. Arguing was useless. Before leaving, Maltinsky said just one phrase: “My mother, wife, and seven-year-old son lie there.” And a miracle happened: the censor, also a front-line soldier, signed the permission.

Such hard-earned permission would prove a poor protection: a few years later Maltinsky would be found in Birobidzhan, where he went to work in a publishing house. He was sentenced to ten years in camps “for attempting to sell the Far East and part of Siberia to the Americans.” Maltinsky was one of the first arrested in 1949 when the campaign against “cosmopolitanism” began. Cosmopolitans, ironically, turned out to be almost exclusively Jews. Maltinsky’s cosmopolitanism, as it later turned out, consisted only in the fact that, having composed the text for the Minsk monument, he somehow wrote about the death of five thousand Jews destroyed by the Hitlerites on Purim 1942, whereas he should have written about five thousand “Soviet citizens.” How was this not a “manifestation of Jewish bourgeois nationalism”? How was this not “emphasizing the national exclusivity of the Jewish people”?

Mordukh Sprishen also suffered for his participation in creating the Black Obelisk. He was arrested much later, in 1952. They found another compromising piece of evidence against him. During a search, 20 gramophone records with Jewish music were seized from him.

In fact, all of them were produced at the Aprelevka factory and were not some kind of American “jazz,” which could have been interpreted as worshiping the West. But, unfortunately, he did not have any records with Lenin’s and Stalin’s speeches. For the investigator, this was direct evidence of “Jewish bourgeois nationalism” with a complete lack of “proletarian consciousness.”

This would be the price the creators paid for the monument. The first monument in the USSR to the murdered Jews.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the “anti-Soviet” Pit stood in the middle of the city like a fortress surrounded by enemies. The Soviet authorities fought it to the death. And they lost. The Soviet Union ceased to exist, but The Pit remained. However, the victory turned out to be Pyrrhic — with the collapse of the USSR, almost everyone who needed it left.

Sources:

https://news.jeps.ru/lichnaya-istoriya/evrei-na-vojne-evrei-sssr-davidovich-ovsishher-alshanskij-istoriya-presledovaniya.html

Semyon Sprishen: Black Obelisk. On the history of the creation of the Memorial at the Minsk Pit

https://evreimir.com/88123/131117_volodin_obelisk/