The sand of Sinai

*solidarity of Belarusians with the Jewish people

Soviet monuments were silent about Jews. It’s been 32 years since the USSR has been gone – and the monuments are still silent. Here and there we mention pre-war Jewish pogroms, but the Holocaust in Belarus seems to have never happened.

That chimera of the 20th century — hatred of Jews — seemed to have vanished. But no: it still exists – and it is still parasitized by those whom such things help to hide their own evil. And that’s why calls to exterminate Jews are allowed absolutely openly and shamelessly, and somewhere even on live broadcasts people are ready to stone someone to death. Undisguised barbarism is becoming fashionable again today, and humanity has less and less strength to resist it.

Wars are fought for territory, access to resources, the ambition and stupidity of rulers, but no one in the world, except the Jews, has had to fight for his existence for centuries just because he or she has that blood — blood of the same color as that which flows in our veins, but for some reason special, for some reason “incorrect”. It shouldn’t be like that. There are no better or worse nations, all deserve equal respect and immunity. Everyone has the right to exist.

Yulij Taŭbin was a Jew. This is a fact that cannot be disputed or removed from history. A Belarusian poet of Jewish origin, he wrote the poem “Taǔryda”, wonderful in its horror, where he showed how pogroms are carried out, and actually predicted the Holocaust, which wiped out almost the entire Jewish population of Belarus.

I think he would not be silent in these dark days. Yudal Abramovich himself became a victim of terror 86 years ago – for a different reason, but no less unjust. And now only the pines in the Kurapaty forest can whisper lines for him… We, modern poets and poetesses, must speak for Yulij Taŭbin, and that’s why we do these publications – to say that evil has no place in the civilized world and that no one should fear for his or her life because he or she is of the “wrong” blood, and to give space to the voices of those who cannot be heard or cannot speak because of propaganda of hatred. These concepts must stay in the past. Barbarism will never defeat the next day.