I can almost hear birds

“I can almost hear birds” is a visual investigation of the former Nazi death camp Maly Trostenec located near Minsk, Belarus. This was the largest camp on the USSR territory. In 1941-1942, Jews from Austria, Germany and the Czech Republic were murdered there (from 60,000-65,000 to 200,000 victims).

The project investigates the state of invisibility and secrecy of operation “Sonderaktion 1005,” a Nazi massacre after which they hid the evidence. Geopolitical invisibility grows and the memory of Trostenets appears to have lost any relevance in the USSR (and Belarus now), because most of the victims were European Jews, and in Europe today, because of the physical, political isolation and geographical remoteness of Belarus.

Maxim Sarychau symbolically violates the attempt of the Nazis to hide the crimes and with the use of photograms, he literally illuminates, via sunlight, the personal belongings of the dead and fragments of human remains extracted from the mass graves. Sarychau investigates what happened — revealing the invisible in the landscape — while mirroring the investigators of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission who arrived in 1944, a few days after the Germans left. The results of their work, archival photographs and original signatures, are in collections at the Museum of WWII (Belarus) and the Latvian National Museum (Latvia).