We really enjoyed our trip around Belarus in 2019, so we had the idea of coming back a year later, to relax with family away from our Middle Eastern heat and to see the beauty of our native Belarus.
Back then, nobody even knew there would be an election in August.
As soon as the school year ended, my wife and son flew to Minsk for a vacation. I had to keep working and was going to join them in August. So I bought tickets for August 7.
Early in the morning of August 7, I arrived in Belarus on a Tel Aviv–Minsk flight. On August 7–8, I met up with my childhood friends, and we went to the Minsk Sea.
During the day the internet started cutting out. At lunchtime we moved to a rented apartment right in the center of Minsk. In the evening we went out to eat around Zybitskaya Street. There were a lot of police in the city center. After 8 p.m. they started closing off sidewalks and streets. Looking for a way home, we ended up near the "Belarus" hotel. From there you can see the Stela, where the protests were taking place. We saw stun grenades being used and ambulances pulling up to the crowd again and again. Somehow we made it home through the police cordons.
In the morning, to our surprise, TV announced some figure like 80% for Lukashenko. Somewhere, somehow, we got internet access in the city center. Judging by the videos on Telegram, the violence by the security forces was off the charts.
We saw a yellow bus parked on Independence Avenue, with a pile of shields marked “Police” lying next to it. I thought it would make an interesting shot, and I took a photo. Right away seven “OMON officers” burst out of the bus, pinned me down and started beating me right in front of my wife, then threw me into the bus. They started shouting: “Why were you taking pictures?” I tried to explain that it was an art photo, but they shouted back: “You photographed the bus to plan an attack!”
The only other people in the bus were two guys from the Brest region. They had just come to Minsk to walk around and even had return tickets. Later I watched them detain others brutally: they tied their hands with plastic zip ties and even fastened one of them to a handrail. They tormented a guy who had braked on his bike at the wrong moment. They beat him hard, stepped on him, tied his hands and legs. They started accusing him of being a courier who hides drug stashes. His backpack was closed with a small lock, and they hit him a couple of times for that.
I sat in the bus until 8 p.m. Then they beat the people they had arrested and moved them into a police van (avtozak). They pulled the van up against the bus so that nobody in the windows of the nearby buildings could see what was being done to us. On August 9, I had watched detentions like this from a window myself. Now I know what they do to people in there. You lock your hands behind your back and bend over so your head is as low as possible. They shout at you when to get out. On the way to the van you run the gauntlet: they beat you with batons, on the legs, on the stomach, and knee you in the gut.
They brought us to the Sovetsky district police department (RUVD). There they unloaded us, again through a "baton corridor." They lined up 62 people along a fence: you press your head against the fence at stomach height, hands either on your head or above it with palms facing out, feet shoulder-width apart. I had only seen this in TV crime reports, when serious criminals are arrested. And between you and the fence, barbed wire is stretched along the ground. If you lose your balance, you fall onto the Bruno razor wire.
Two of the top-ranking officers at the RUVD were the only ones without masks. One of them was even wearing a smart white shirt. He walked up to a guy with a broken arm, grabbed the arm right at the fracture, slammed it against the fence as hard as he could and shouted: "Hands above your head!"
Around 11 a.m. police vans started arriving. First they loaded the protesters detained on Surganova Street. We could hear blows and threats from inside the van. The OMON officers singled out people with tattoos, long hair, or symbols on their T-shirts. We heard things like: "This lot won't make it there." Then they started loading us.
I spent two nights and two days in Zhodino prison, where I met some wonderful guys in my cell. We are still friends. Of course it wasn't comfortable, 18 people in a cell with four bunk beds, but complete solidarity helped us cope.
In the evening, still not knowing what to do with me, the jailers "lost" my unsigned arrest report, and my Israeli passport along with it. So when the 72 hours were up, they had no choice but to let me go. Over the next two days, under public pressure, the regime released all the detainees, regardless of the time left on their court sentences.
