Barak of concentration camp
The monument "Road to death"
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In late 1941 the occupying fascist troops began to cleanse the city of Jews,
forcing them into concentration camps hastily set up in the countryside around
Odessa. The last path for many of the city's Jews began that winter in
Prokhorovsky Square.
In 1995, a memorial was erected in the square, funded by Yakov Maniovich, an
Odessa-born Israeli lawyer and camp survivor. Entitled "Road to Death," the
memorial consists of two vertical slabs of black granite, depicting the two
parts of the gate to the fascist inferno from which only 600 returned. One of
the slabs bears the names of the villages near the death camps, Dalnik,
Berezovka, Mostovoye, Domanevka, Bogdanovka. Those who did return from the
camps and those who managed to survive in the occupied city never forgot the
Russians, Ukrainians, Bulgarians and Moldovans, who risked their own lives, and
those of their children, to save their fellow men, the Jews of Odessa.
The title "Righteous Gentile" has been bestowed on these people, and their
names are carved on a third granite slab that stands some ten meters away from
the Holocaust memorial. In 1996, a birch tree was planted for each of them.
From this developed the Alley of the Righteous Gentiles. Today the names of
more than 40 such people have been revealed, and the search for others
continues, so that the number of birch trees continues to grow...
Trees live longer than people, and the fully-grown birch trees will be there
for a long time to come. They will remind new generations of the heroic deeds
of their parents and grandparents.
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