The elderly man in a black suit and wide-brimmed hat painstakingly opens his bulging stack of files that threaten to slip off his knees. Vladimir Raksha fervently recites the names on his documents like prayers learned over years of study at synagogue.
- Bunya Barkina, 40 years old
- Esfir Barkina, 9 years old
- Larisa Belitskaya, 12 years old
- Raisa Alperovich, 57 years old
The Nazis executed an estimated 27,000 Jews, prisoners of war and others in Rostov on Don, Russia, during their occupation, mowing down most of them in unmarked graves in an area in the western outskirts of town called the Snake Ravine. Since 1975 a hulking monument has stood on the lonely grassy hillside to commemorate what is considered the worst Holocaust-era crime in Russia. To activists, the statue is cold and inhuman, as it provides visitors no insight into the individuals murdered nearby. Indeed, no signs mark the mass graves where they died and many of the names of those exterminated have been lost to history.
Rashka is the self-described archivist of Rostov’s Jewish community. His congregation from the Rostov Soldiers’ Synagogue along with the Russian Jewish Congress have been working for years to compile a full list of the Rostov Holocaust victims so they could add them to the Soviet-era memorial already in place. So far they have confirmed only around 6,000 names, mostly of Jewish victims, and they have raised money to pay for a new plaque to display them.
But the quest to commemorate the dead has run into a wall of unsympathetic authorities.
