Unlikely holiday resort 'blind and deaf to history'

Letter from Yantarny: Pyotr Fedoruk seems unconcerned by the blizzard and the fierce gale that crash the gun-metal Baltic ashore in great rollers.

Nor does the proximity of the world's biggest amber mine and its hulking dredgers convince him that this once closely guarded corner of Russia would make an eminently resistible tourist destination.

"It is beautiful in summer," he insists. "The sun shines and the beaches around here are clean and quiet. You could have a resort anywhere along this coastline, but not here. This place is soaked with blood and tears."

The place is a stretch of sand in the village of Yantarny, site of one of the last massacres of Nazi genocide and remote resting place for thousands of Jews.

It was also, until the intervention of Mr Fedoruk and outraged Jewish groups, a potential resort for Russians who will need a visa to visit the familiar Baltic coastlines of Lithuania, Latvia and Poland once the ex-Communist states join the EU in May. But what could have been boon for Yantarny - and the wider Kaliningrad region, soon to be a Russian island in a spreading EU sea - would have been a crime against history, Mr Fedoruk says.

It was here that SS officers and Hitler Youth members executed more than 6,000 Jews, mostly women, on January 31st 1945, after forcing them to march north for 10 days from the prison camp of Stutthof, near Gdansk in Poland. Hundreds were shot or froze to death on this, one of the infamous "death marches" undertaken during the last days of the Third Reich, as the Soviet Red Army closed in around Hitler's troops in north-eastern Europe.

Those who survived the march to Palmnicken (as Yantarny was then known) were herded on to a narrow strip of sand between the Baltic and the sheer stone walls of an old amber mine. According to the testimonies of one of only 13 known survivors and a Hitler Youth member present, German soldiers stood on the ridge above them and opened fire. Bullet-riddled bodies washed ashore for weeks. They were buried where a small stone monument now stands, lashed by the fierce winter elements.

"It happened after the liberation of Auschwitz, which is usually thought to mark the end of the massacres, but they continued," said Mr Viktor Shapiro, a leading member of Kaliningrad's Jewish community.

"And there was a prison camp under Stalin here for a while, and the area was closed for decades as a sensitive border region," he says. "So not much was known about Palmnicken, especially as the Soviets didn't want the Jews to be seen as the main victims of the war."

Mr Fedoruk, a burly businessman says he was spurred by a palpable horror at Yantarny's past to strike a deal with the local administration over the massacre and burial site. He pledged in 2001 to maintain it in the hope of building a memorial complex, and the mayor of Yantarny agreed not to sell it to anyone else. Hence, Mr Fedoruk's recent horror when he heard of a local developer's plans to buy the land and build a holiday resort.

"We wrote straight to the governor of Kaliningrad region and he sent a deputy out to Yantarny to investigate," Mr Fedoruk says.

The mayor of Yantarny - a tired village of crumbling or unfinished buildings, dominated by the massive amber mine - says the deputy governor paid a visit, but insists the scandal was a misunderstanding upon which his political enemies capitalised.

"Mr Oleg Shlyk and a delegation from the administration came to see us. We showed him our documents, and he told us that people had come to him from the Jewish community with a request for the land," said Mr Igor Kazakov, in his Yantarny office.

"They sent us a written request for the land and we are working on it. This is pure politics, stirred up by my opponents."

Mr Kazakov's critics accuse him of doing little during two terms in office to improve Yantarny's lot, citing decrepit infrastructure and dismally low pay. The mayor contends that he has spent years forcing the amber mine to pay its taxes, and that it was impossible to attract investment to the village while it was closed to outsiders.

He says Mr Fedoruk will be allowed to build a small memorial park and a monument, but that plans for a holiday resort live on.

"Visitors to the memorial will need somewhere to stay, and we have a beautiful coastline to attract tourists," says Mr Kazakov. "The memorial and the resort needn't disturb each other."

Mr Fedoruk and Mr Shapiro are happy to have won one battle, but know others may lie ahead.

"People want to make money out of that land, but they don't realise the significance of it," says Mr Shapiro.

"They are chasing cash, but are blind and deaf to history."