This book contains a rare personal and detailed memoir of a survivor of the Minsk Ghetto, written in December 1943, almost immediately after the liquidation of the ghetto. This is a testimony to the Holocaust in the territory of Belarus. Anna Machiz was a remarkable woman who played a leading role in the establishment of the Minsk Ghetto resistance movement. To avoid certain death she escaped the ghetto, successfully reaching the partisans where she recorded her experiences on a typewriter in the forest. After the war, Anna faded into anonymity, along with her memoir that was locked away in the KGB archives.

Now, for the first time it can be read by all. Between 1941 and 1943, almost 100,000 Jews in the Minsk Ghetto were brutally murdered. Anna Machiz survived the horror of the ghetto, then again when she wrote about it, and then again when she talked about it. She remembered it all her life... When you read her lines, imbued with pain, horror and fear, you also feel a great desire to live. Many innocent Jews did all they could to resist. They carried out sabotage missions, organized the underground in the ghetto and fought in the partisan detachments. Each person's individual contribution to their common salvation was invaluable. A doctor, a musician, a professor, a writer - everyone was equally powerless against the madness of the Nazis. There was no family in which there were no victims.

The story of the extermination of almost 100,000 Jews in the Minsk Ghetto is one of the most tragic in Europe. Anna Machiz is one of a few hundred survivors. She left us with her legacy, her witness account, which decades on, we can now finally read. Very few documents about the Minsk Ghetto have been preserved. There are almost no photos, and hardly anyone outside of Belarus has ever heard of it. From what we know through the testimonies of prisoners who had been incarcerated in other ghettos, the cruelty of the Nazis and the police in Minsk was incomparable to the conditions in other ghettos in Europe.

The publication of the book of Anna Machiz's memories and her family archive will fill the information gap and tell the world about the Holocaust in Belarus.

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