Entering Europe's Last Dictatorship

We explored Minsk and Brest, learning about Belarusian history, Jewish heritage, and the Holocaust while tracing our great-grandparents’ roots. We visited the Brest Fortress, preserved Jewish cemetery headstones, a synagogue, historical archives, and met Frida, one of Belarus’s last Holocaust survivors. We then entered the Belarusian Chernobyl exclusion zone to explore abandoned Soviet buildings and villages before sharing a traditional meal with a Belarusian grandmother in the countryside.