This was a bit hard to find, on a hilltop in the center of the city, surrounded by trees.
In the 1970s it was easy to find buildings in Belgium and Germany that still had shell holes, and Petra and I saw buildings in the former DDR with war damage in the 1990s. It’s been a while – when I saw buildings like this in Bosnia last month I felt a shock of recognition, but that was from the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. This is WW II.
I walked the perimeter track where guards would have once patrolled. A guy walking his dog came the other way. He was absorbed in his cellphone.
The stakes which once supported barbed wire are easy to pick out.
Floodlamps
Pillbox
While I was taking photos of the punishment cells in front of the prison a woman in her 60s or so came up, walking her dog, and angrily motioned me away. Her condemnation was in Ukrainian, naturally, and included a word which sounded very much like „Spion“ – German for spy – and indeed шпигун is the identical Ukrainian word. I smiled at her, however this was ineffective. She waved me away from the cells and angrily instructed me several times, including sentences with шпигун, and when I didn’t leave she turned around and stalked off. It’s possible she felt I was dishonoring the memory of prisoners by taking photos here, but if this were the case would she use the word „spy“? I don’t know. What secrets might my photos reveal to what foreign enemy?
The woman’s loud anger brought a portly caretaker out of the Citadel. He spoke no English or German. I think by now we’ve established I speak no Ukrainian. He was pretty uninterested in me and my cellphone camera, but he gestured that he would like a cigarette. This was one of the very few times when I truly regretted that I don’t smoke.
These plaques invariably call for victims not to be forgotten, but in 2018 I wonder how much they are known in the first place. I’m not sure how much time my fellow Americans spend thinking about Belarusian PoWs who died in Nazi prison camps.
