Bronnaya Gora
About 100 kilometres northeast of Brest and along the railway between Brest and Minsk lies Bronnaya Gora. About 400 meters from the station, the Nazis set up an execution site. The choice of Bronnaya Gora was due to its closeness to a railway line, which made it easy to transport the Jews to the execution site. Then nature (sand) of the ground was also easy to dig in and therefore easy to dig graves. About 50,000 Jews were murdered in Bronnaya Gora, primarily from the ghettos of Brest and Pinsk. Bronnaya Gora was used on several occassions to murder Jews. In the summer of 1943, the mass graves were opened and the Nazis forced Jewish prisoners to cremate the corpses of murdered.
Current status: Monument (2010).
Location: 52°36'05.32"N 25°04'46.30"E
Get there: Car.
Follow up in books: Arad, Yitzhak: Holocaust in the Soviet union (2009).
After the war, a monument was erected on the site, but nothing was mentioned about Jews being murdered and the victims were simply called soviet citizens. This was not unique because the Soviet Union had no plans whatsoever to share the martyrdom with other groups. Therefore, all the victims were named Soviet citizens and not based on any specific group affiliation. Some time after the war, an industry was established near the mass graves and a railroad track was built from the nearby station to the industry right through the mass graves. Later, power lines were also built on the site alongside the railway tracks. The reason why the site was so desecrated by the Soviet authorities was that it was simply considered necessary for the construction of socialism. A mass grave was simply nothing one had to consider wether it was sutiable or not to desecrate.