A Bystander's Account ofa Mass Murder
Kazimierz Sakowicz E D J T E D B Y Yitzhak Arad
Yale University Press New Haven and London This diary was published in Polish in 1999 by Towarzystwo Milosnikow Wilna i Ziemi Wilenskiej and Rachel Margolis. The translation was made possible through the assistance of the Organization of Partisans, Underground Fighters and Ghetto Rebels in Israel and of Towarzystwo Milosnikow Wilna i Ziemi Wilensk.iej. Translation copyright© 2005 by Yad Vashem. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illus trations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the pub lic press), without written permission from the publishers. Printed in the United States ofAmerica Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sakowicz, Kazimierz, 1894-1944. [Dziennik pisany w Ponarach od 11 lipca 1941 r. do 6 listopa
Foreword by Rachel Margolis tm
Preface by YitzhakArad xiii
Note on the Text xvii
Ponary Diary l
Index 145 Foreword RACHEL MARGOLIS
This is the first publication in English of the diary kept by Kazimierz Sakowicz from 1941 to 1943 in Ponary, near Wilno (Lithuanian Vilnius,Jewish Vilna). This diary, which describes the murders ofsome 50,000 to 60,000Jewish men, women, and children by the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators, is one of the most shocking documents of its time. Historians were denied access to the diary for many years, possibly because it provides evidence of the atrocities committed by Lithuanians (Sakowicz's "Ponary riflemen") as well as by the German occu piers of the city. When I first learned of the existence of this document I re solved to track it down and publish it so that the widest possible audience could learn the truth about the last years ofWilno, the Eastern European cultural center known as the ''Jerusalem of Lithuania." The only member of my family to survive the Holo caust, I, along with my husband, Haim Zaidelsan, have spent my life collecting documents relating to that period. While I was collaborating with the Jewish Museum established in what is now Vilnius after World War II (the museum was shut down in 1949), with the assistance ofShmerke Kacherginsky and Abra ham Sutskever, I learned about numerous documents relating Vlll Foreword to the Holocaust that had survived the war. Among these newly discovered documents was Sakowicz's diary, which had been written on loose sheets that were then placed in empty lemon ade bottles, sealed, and buried in the ground. After the war, Sakowicz's neighbors dug up some of these bottles and gave them to the Jewish Museum. Many years later I was employed as director of the histori cal division of the Jewish State Museum of Lithuania. While searching through documents in the Central State Archives of Lithuania I discovered a folder containing a number ofyellow ing handwritten sheets. Some were pieces of plain paper rang ing from 5 .5 to 25 centimeters long; others were the margins ofa Russian-Polish calendar for 1941. The entries appeared to have been written in great haste, with a trembling hand; nothing was crossed out. Many sheets had been stamped "illegible" by the archive. This was my first glimpse of Sakowicz's diary, which, along with other documents from the earlier Jewish Museum, had wound up in the Central State Archives ofLithuania . Work ing under special lighting and using a magnifying glass, I was eventually able to sort out and decipher the heartrending en tries, which covered the period fromJuly 11, 1941, through Au gust 1942. Because ofmy familiarity with the Wilno dialect and Russian, I was able to decipher everything-a total of sixteen documents. But these pages, the first section of Sakowicz's di ary, turned out to be only a fraction of the diary. In various articles and books on the Holocaust period I en countered quotations from other entries in the diary, written in a later period. I recognized Sakowicz's style and hasty writing, even in distorted transcriptions. For example, his terms "Lithu anian killers" and "Ponary riflemen" were replaced by "Lithua- Foreword ix nian police," apparently in order to diminish the role played by Lithuanian nationalists in the extermination of the Jews. I continued my search for documents. In the 1970s an em ployee of the Museum of the Revolution in Vilnius had told me of her discovery ofsome Sakowicz documents in the museum's collection. During the Soviet period, however, access to them was impossible. After the restoration of Lithuanian indepen dence in 1989, the staff of the newly established Jewish State Museum ofLithuania submitted frequent requests for access to these documents to the Historical Museum, where many of the collections of the Museum of the Revolution had been trans ferred, but were refused permission to see the documents. In the 1990s the Jewish State Museum applied to the Lith uanian Ministry ofCulture for permission to see the documents, and we were granted access to the second part ofSakowicz's di ary for just two days. After photocopying the sheets, I began the long task ofdeciphering these new pages. Most belonged to the first part ofthe diary. The second part comprised a total offifty one documents. The sheets were of various sizes, though none was more than twenty-eight centimeters long. They included one photograph and one document from the ghetto (see Octo ber 26, 1943) that Sakowicz found in Ponary. The events de scribed in these sheets took place between September 10, 1942, and November 6, 1943. At the time I was deciphering Sakowicz's diary I knew little about the man himself. When the Polish edition ofthe diary was being prepared for publication, the editor,Jan Malinowski, was able to contact Sakowicz's relatives and gather some informa tion about him. Kazimierz Sakowicz, the son of Elias and Sofia, was born in Wilno in 1894 and studied law in Moscow. After re- x Foreword turning to Wilno he served on the staff of various newspapers. He later opened a print shop that published journals, such as the Przegl I would like to express my gratitude to the Jewish State Museum of Lithuania, especially Deputy Director Rachel Kostanian, for giving me access to the archival holdings. In addition, museum personnel assisted my study ofSakowicz's diary by helping me locate statements by witnesses and other materials from the mu seum's collections mainly diaries and testimonies from resi dents of the Wilno ghetto with which I was able to verify the accuracy of the diary. I am also deeply grateful to Jan Malinowski for publishing the first edition of the diary in Polish with my annotations and for uncovering information about its author. xii Foreword I dedicate my labor of locating, deciphering, and re-creat ing the diary to the members of my family who perished at Ponary onJuly 5, 1944: my father, Samuel Margolis; my mother, Emmy; and my brother, Josef. Preface YITZHAK ARAD Kazimierz Sakowicz's Ponary diary is a unique document, with out parallel in the chronicles of the Holocaust. It provides a by stander's view of the activities of the Nazi extermination ma chine in the restricted arena of Ponary, a wooded area in the countryside some ten kilometers southwest of Wilno on the road to Grodno. Once it served as a holiday resort for the people ofWilno, and a paved road and railroad connected it to the city. In 1941, during the Soviet occupation of the region, the Soviets began excavating giant pits to serve as storage tanks for airplane fuel, but before they finished the task, the Germans attacked the Soviet Union,onjune 22, 1941. The subsequent occupation of the region by the German army two days later left the excavation of the pits and construction of the storage tanks unfinished. During the German occupation, these pits became the site of the mass murder ofsome 50,000 to 60,000 men, women, and chil dren, who were shot on the edge of the pit and then buried within it. The vast majority of the victims described by Sako wicz in his diary were Jews from the Wilno ghetto and envi rons. A few thousand were members of the underground or hostages-Poles, Communist cadres, Soviet prisoners of war, and some anti-German Lithuanians. Ponary thus became the XIV Preface gravesite of the Jews of Wilno, which, under its Jewish name, Vilna, was known as the "Jerusalem ofLithuania." Sakowicz, a Polish journalist who lived in Ponary, decided to keep a record of the atrocities taking place almost outside his front door. He was taking a risk in committing to paper his meticulous chronicle of the unspeakable crimes he witnessed: the genocide being perpetrated by the Germans and their Lith uanian collaborators. Sakowicz was certainly aware that discov ery of his diary would cost him, and perhaps also his family, their lives. We can only coajecture as to what motivated him to continue his perilous task. Was it an intellectual urge to tran scribe an event whose scope and atrocity were unprecedented in European history? Did he envision publishing the diary after the war, or using it as the basis for a book? Perhaps his goal was to produce a document that could serve as an indictment of the murderers. Whatever his motive, Sakowicz did not live to fulfill it, but now, sixty years later, his diary, published in both Polish and English, stands as a testament to the events Sakowicz wit nessed and a monument to the man who so bravely recorded them. Because ofthe conditions under which the diary was buried, described in the Foreword by Rachel Margolis, some pages were severely damaged. But thanks to Dr. Margolis, an inmate ofthe Wilno ghetto who escaped to fight as a partisan, the diary was resurrected from the archive in which it had remained hidden throughout the Soviet period, laboriously deciphered, and pub lished in the original Polish in 1999. In the Polish edition the en tries are not always chronological, owing to Sakowicz's practice of writing on loose sheets and stuffing them into lemonade bot tles in no clear order. In this, the first English edition ofthe diary, the entries have been reordered chronologically. Preface xv In his diary, Sakowicz describes the final stage in the de struction of the Jews of Wilno, their last journey and hours in the valley of death that was Ponary. The diary offers testimony from a bystander, an "objective" observer who saw tens of thou sands ofJews murdered in front of his eyes on an almost daily basis over a period of two years and four months. The diary is written as a chronicle: the diarist evinces no personal involve ment or manifestations of emotion or identification with the Jewish victims. He begins, "July 11: Quite niCe weather, warm, white clouds, windy, some shots from the forest. Probably exer cises." This matter-of-fact opening sets the tone for what fol lows, although sometimes Sakowicz's scorn at the conduct of the Jewish victims, the way they go unresisting to their deaths, shows through, especially in contrast to his proud description of the demeanor of the Polish victims, whom he feels behaved "honorably" in the face of death. In Sakowicz's accounts of the behavior ofthe perpetrators, particularly the Lithuanians, whom he, as a Pole, despised, we feel his disgust at their greed-trad ing in their victims' personal effects- and in their drunkenness, which Sakowicz stresses repeatedly. We can also discern his dis taste for the Soviet Union in his references to Soviet partisans as ''Bolsheviks" and his description of their seizures of food and clothing for survival as "banditry." Sakowicz also provides details about events in Ponary and the region that he did not witness personally but heard about from his neighbors, occasionally some time after the fact. The events he describes-the murderers leading the victims to the fenced-off area and the pits, shooting them, and covering the bodies with lime-constituted the final stage in the destruc tion of the Wilno Jews. Before the Jews were murdered, they XVI Preface went through several stages: roundups, confinement in the ghetto, eviction from their homes, selection for either Ponary and extermination or labor camps, and finally transport to Ponary and death. Many ofSakowicz's descriptions are extremely terse, com prehensible only to the diarist himself-perhaps they were meant as a sort ofaide-memoire for future expansion. The trans lation endeavors to preserve Sakowicz's style. But to help read ers understand the events described so elliptically in the diary, we have provided introductions to the various sections that offer details of the events that preceded the victims' arrival at Ponary. Sakowicz's diary is unique. No similar documentation has survived from any of the other mass murder sites at which Jews were shot: Babi Yar in Kiev, Maly Trostinets near Minsk, Bog danovka in Transnistria, and hundreds ofother places in the oc cupied Soviet Union. That Sakowicz's diary offers "objective" testimony from a bystander rather than from a victim, devoid of any emotional agenda that might call its credibility into ques tion, places it among the most important of the Holocaust testi monies. Note on the Text Because Kazimierz Sakowicz wrote his diary in Polish, place names for the period 1939 to 1944 are given in Polish; if the Lithuanian name is more familiar, it is given in parentheses. Vilna (Lithuanian Vilnius) therefore appears as Wilno. Sakowicz dated his entries somewhat erratically, and theed itor has had to piece them together. Datelines were sometimes Sakowicz's own and sometimes supplied by the editor. Occa sionally Sakowicz wrote two or more separate entries for the same date. In such cases, we have retained his datelines. In addi tion, he would sometimes return to an entry and add new infor mation under the date; thus some entries refer to events that happened after the date in the dateline. Sakowicz set a number ofwords in quotes, which have been retained. Bracketed ellipses ([ ... ]) indicate illegible or obvi ously missing material. L Ponary Diary Events in Wilno, September 1939-July 1941 For generations before its liquidation during World War II, the Jewish community ofWilna was a major center ofJewish secular and religious culture; world Jewry referred to the city as the ''Jerusalem ofLithuania." From the second halfof the eighteenth century Wilna was part oftsarist Russia. Then in 1920 it came under Polish control, until September 19, 1939, when the Red Army occupied the city in accordance with the Ribbentrop-Molo tov Pact apportioning Poland and other parts ofEastern Europe between Germany and the Soviet Union. Afew weeks later the dis trict was transferred to Lithuanian control. The local Jews wel comed the Soviets and later the Lithuanians, thinking that these rulers would protect them from the German menace. Indeed, dur ing the months of Lithuanian control, Wilna, sandwiched be tween the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, offered a center ofvi brant Jewish life, and about 14, 000 Jewish refugees moved to the city from German-occupied Poland. In July 1940, the Red Army invaded Lithuania, annexing the country to the Soviet Union as a Soviet republic. The Soviet authorities banned activity by Jewish organizations and politi cal parties. Jewish educational and cultural institutions were closed down and Jewish leaders arrested. The entire educational system was put under government control. In the state schools where Yiddish was spoken, classes in Jewish history and religion and in the Hebrew language were prohibited; the new curriculum was steeped in Communist ideology and sang the praises ofSoviet 2 Ponary Diary rule and Soviet /,eaders. Jews, especially the recentry arrived refugees (including several leaders of the Polish Jewish commu nity) and the Zionist youth movements, which continued to func tion clandestinely, sought ways to emigrate to the Land of Israel (Palestine) or other countries in the free world. Between Septem ber 1939 and the German invasion on June 22, 1941, about 6,500 Jews managed to /,eave Soviet Lithuania. At the same time, a handful ofJews who had been members of the former Communist undergrounds in Poland and Lithuania found places in the new Soviet regime, chiefly in lower- and mid d/,e-echelon positions ofthe sort that had been off-limits to Jews in independent Poland and Lithuania. This situation, plus the fact that the Jews as a whole were favorably disposed toward the So viet regime (which they saw as a bulwark. against Nazi Ger many), intensified the antisemitism that had always been ram pant among the local Poles and Lithuanians. Another factor in the new surge in antisemitism during this period was the Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF), established in November 1940 by exi/,ed representatives ofthe political parties in Lithuania who had escaped to Germany when the Soviets oc cupied the country. The LAF had underground branches inside Lithuania, where they disseminated vicious antisemitic proj>a ganda though /,eaflets smuggled into the country. The leaflets called for a poj>ular rising ifGermany attacked the Soviet Union and the elimination, by whatever means, ofthe Jews from Lithu anian soil. One ofthe LAF leaflets-headed "What Are the Ac tivists Fighting For?"-stated, "The Lithuanian Activist Front, September 1939-J uly 1941 3 by restoring new Lithuania, is determined to carry out an imme diate and fundamental purging ofthe Lithuanian nation and its land ofJews, parasites, and monsters . ... [This] will be one ofthe most essential preconditions for starting a new life."1 On June 14 - 15, 1941, a week before the German invasion, the Soviet authorities in Lithuania banished "anti-Soviet ele ments" to Soviet Asia. Almost a fifth ofthe 20, 000 deportees were Jews, some from Wilno. Even though more Jews, proportionally, were being deported than Lithuanians, the action did nothing to diminish Lithuanian antisemitism and Judeophobia. The fear of further Lithuanian deportations heightened the tension among the locals and increased the animosity toward the Soviet regime and the Jews just before Germany attacked the Soviet Union. ~ do not have precise figures for the population and ethnic composition of Wilno on the eve ofthe German invasion. The last prewar census was conducted in 1931, when the city was under Polish rule. It listed 195,000 residents of the city, including 128,000 Poles {65.6 percent}, 54,600 Jews {28 percent), and 2,000 Lithuanians (1 percent). The remaining 10,000 (5 per cent) were Belorussians, Russians, Ukrainians, and others. This enumeration distorted the true picture. Because Wilno was a bone ofcontention between Poland and Lithuania, the Polish au thorities wanted to show that the Lithuanians constituted a neg- 1. Liudas Truska, The Upsurge ofAntisemitism in Lithuania in the Years of SOV.Ut Occupation (1940-1941) (Vilnius, 2001), 23. [Lithua nian and English] 4 Ponary Diary ligi,bk minority in the city by infla,ting the number of Poks. Ac cording to Lithuanian 2. Einsatzgruppe A Report, Nuremberg Document L-180 [Trials of the War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal in Nurem berg, Blue Set). 6 Ponary Diary One ofthe first anti-Jewish actions was a roundup ofJewish men on the city streets, conducted chiefly by the Lithuanian "par tisans." Most ofthose picked up were taken to work for the Ger mans and sent home when their work was done. Some, however, did not return; rumor had it that they had been detai/.ed to work at more distant sites. As became clear some months later, though, those who did not come back had been murdered by their abduc tors at Ponary. The organized mass murder ofthe Jews ofWilno began with the arrival ofEinsatzkommando 9, a subunit ofEinsatzg;rufrPe B, one offour German killing brigades, on July 2. Before they reached Wilno, Dr. Alfred Filbert, the Einsatzkommando com mander, informed his men oftheir mission in the occupied Soviet Union: exterminating the Jews and key officials of the Soviet regime and the Communist Party. Filbert explained that the or der came from Hit/.er and requested absolute obedience from his junior commanders and soUiers. 3 In early July the status ofthe Lithuanian administration in the city changed. The Lithuanian council, which had claimed sovereign power subject to the Lithuanian provisional govern ment in Kowno, was abolished and replaced by a municipal gov ernment directly subordinate to the German commander in the city. The Lithuanian military units were disbanded; some of their members were reorganized into police units- both munici- :3. Yitzhak Arad, Ghetto in Flames: The Struggk and Destruction of the Jews in Vilna in the Holocaust (Jerusalem and New York, 1980), 65- 66. September 1939 July 1941 7 pal police and mobile battalions-under the command of the German Ordnungspolizei (Order Police). Others were formed into a special 150-man unit, the Ypatingi Buriai (special ones). This unit was attached to Einsatzkommando 9 and heliped arrest Jews and murder them at Ponary. The roundups and murders in July targeted men almost ex clusively, as was the practice of the Einsatzgruppen throughout the occupied Soviet Union. It was not until late July and early August that an order went out to begin the total extermination of the Jews, including women and chi'ldren. In the initial roundups intellectuals and publicfig;ures were selected for elimination, and Einsatzkormnando 9 ordered the Lithuanian police to draw up a list ofsuch persons. 4 Nevertheless, except for one or two Aktionen (killing actions) that targeted this group, all social classes were represented among the Jewish men picked up and murdered at Ponary from early July to early August 1941 . Sakowicz began keeping his diary on July 11, 1941. He did not refer to the executions ofJews and Communist cadres carried out by the Ypatingi Buriai and Einsatzkommando 9 during the previous two and a half weeks after the Germans entered Wilno. It is possible that these killings, some ofwhich involved groups of only a few dozen people, did not attract his attention or were not perpetrated in Ponary. Fiftyfour Jews were murdered on July 4 and 93 more on July 5. The Ypatingi Buriai was then placed un- 4. Yitzhak Arad, Shmuel Krakowski, and Shmuel Spector, eds., The Einsatzgruppen Reports (New York, 1989), 15. 8 Ponary Diary der the command ofEinsatzkommando 9, a reinforcement that made it possibk for the Einsatzkommando to greatly increase the scope of its killing activities in Wilno. Einsatzgruppen Report No. 21, dated July 13, notes, ''Jn Vilnius by July 8 the localEin satzkommando liquidated 321 Jews. The Lithuanian Ord nungsdienst [Ordnungspolizei] which was placed under the Ein satzlwmmando was instructed to take part in the liquidation of the Jews. 150 Lithuanian police were assigned to this task. They arrested the Jews and put them into a concentration camp [Ponary] where they were subjected the same day to Special Treat ment fSonderbehandlung-a euphemism for killing}. This work has now begun and thus about 500 Jews, saboteurs among them, are liquidated daily."5 A witness to the roundups of Jews during the first weeks of the occupation later remembered: "Gestapo [that is Einsatzkom mando] men come in cars and stop outside Jewish homes. They haul the men out and order them to bring along a towel and soap. The peopk are ostensibly being taken to work for a few days, but they never come back. Groups ofyoung Lithuanians and Poles appear on the streets, wearing white annbands. They round up Jews and take them to the police orjail." 6 The force that carried out the murders at Ponary consisted of three subunits, each comprising several members of the Ein- 5. Ibid. 22. The 150 Lithuanian officials were the Ypatingi Buriai unit. 6. Mark Dworzecki,Jerusalem of Lithuania in Revolt and Holo caust (Tel Aviv, 1951),20- 21. [Hebrew] September 1939-July 1941 9 satzkommandc and dozens ofLithuanians. One subunit brought the peopk to Ponary, generally in Einsatzkommando trucks. An other guarded the killing site, both outside-to prevent peopk, in cluding German soUiers, from af>Proaching the shooting pits and inside, to keep the victims from escaping. Upon arrival vic tims were placed in a secure waiting area; here they were toU to undress and hand over any valuabks they had in their possession. They were then toUJ. to blindfoU one another or to wrap their heads in a shirt and close their eyes. They were kd, naked, from the waiting place to the shooting pit in groups of10 to 20, walk ing singkfik, hoUing one another's hands. At the head ofthe line wa/Jud a Lithuanian, who guided the first prisoner to the shoot ing pit. As soon as a group kft the waiting area the killers wouU begin preparing the next group. Members ofthe third subunit, at the shooting pits, lined up the victims up at the edge ofthe pit and shot them. The victims wouU fall into the pit, where any who showed signs oflife wouU be shot again. The peopk in the waiting area, on!) a few dozen meters from the pits, could hear the shots ckar!J but couU not see what was going on. At the end ofthe day)' killing, the pits wouU be covered with a layer ofsand . Sometimes this was done by the last group ofJews, who were then shot and covered with sand by Lithuanians from the firing squad. In July 1941, whi/,e Einsatzkommando 9 was active in Wilno, about 5, 000 Jewish men were murdered, along with af ew Communists and non-Jewish Soviet officials. In July and August 1941, the Jews ofWilno still knew nothing about what was hap pening at Ponary. They believed that the men picked up in the 10 Ponary Diary rou,ndups had been sent to work for the Germans. The fact that the victims were generally men ofworking age reinforced this be lief. At the beginning ofAugust, Herman Kruk, an inhabitant of the Wilno ghetto, wrote in his diary: "Yesterday about 400 women gathered in the courtyard ofthe Judenrat and demanded that the Judenrat bring back their husbands, who had been working/or three weeks, and send others in their place.'fl The victims' clothes, along with any money and valuables they had taken with them - for they, too, believed that they were being taken to work sites and would need such things-were usu ally kept by the murderers. The money and valuables collected at the waiting area near the shooting pits were taken by members of the Einsatzkommando, who were supposed to hand them over to their superiors to be forwarded to the German authorities in Berlin. Originally, the victims' clothes and other personal effects were left as booty for the Lithuanian murderers. They took some things for themselves, their families, and their girlfriends; the rest they sold to the local population. Among the locals, brokers started buying Jewish articles from the Lithuanian murder squad for resale. Later, when the Aktionen became more orga nized and inclusive, instructions were issued to deliver all the vic tims' property, including their clothes and other effects, to vari ous German authorities. Even then, despite the orders, some of 7. Herman Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939-1944, ed. Ben jamin Harshav; trans. Barbara Harshav (New Haven: Yale University Press,2002), 73. July 1941 11 the stolen goods remained in the hands ofthe Lithuanian police men, who continued their illicit trade. Begi.nning at the end ofAugust 1941, when thousands ofpeo ple were taken to Ponary in a single operation, the killing actions took place in three phases carried out simultaneous(J: Phase 1: Jews were rounded up, dragged from the streets or their houses and hauled offto Lukiszki Prison. Phase 2: The prisoners were held in Lukiszki: because it was not possible to kill the thousands ofdetainees in one day, the pris oners would remain at Lukiszki until the murderers were able to deal with them. As the roundups continued, the number ofpris oners in Lukiszki increased; eventually there were thousands of Jews in the prison for days. Phase !3: The prisoners, on foot or in vehicles, were trans ported to Ponary, where they were murdered. JULY 1941 July 11 Quite nice weather, warm, white clouds, windy, some shots from the forest. Probably exercises, because in the forest there is an ammunition dump on the way to the village ofNowosiolk.i. It's about 4 P.M.; the shots last an hour or two. On the Grodzienka8 I discover that manyJews have been "transported" to the forest. And suddenly they shoot them. This was the first day ofexecu- 8. The Wilno-Grodno high road. 12 Ponary Diary tions. An oppressive, overwhelming impression. The shots quiet down after 8 in the evening; later, there are no volleys but rather individual shots. The number of Jews who passed through was 200. On the Grodzienka is a Lithuanian (police) post. Those passing through have their documents inspected. By the second day,July 12, a Saturday, we already knew what was going on, because at about 3 P .M. a large group ofJews was taken to the forest, about 300 people, mainly intelligentsia with suitcases, beautifully dressed, known for their good eco· nomic situation, etc. An hour later the volleys began. Ten people were shot at a time. They took off their overcoats, caps, and shoes (but not their trousers!). Executions continue on the following days: July 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18,and 19,a Saturday. The Shaulists9 do the shootings, striplings of seventeen to twenty-five years. At the Juchniewiczes' [house]1° a military post was installed which guards the area. A group (5 people) of Jews goes to the post for shovels. It turns out that they are going to bury those shot yesterday. This goes on for a week. Then the post in thejuchniewiczes' is wound up. Only the Shaulists do the shooting and guarding. At the Grodzienka post they detain Jews returning to the city from Drusk11 or from the city12 and 9. Lithuanians who manned the firing squad at Ponary. The Sauliu Sajunga (Riflemen's association) had been a paramilitary nationalist or ganization before Lithuania fell into Soviet hands. Many ofits members rose up against the retreating Soviet Army and then volunteered to serve the Germans. 10. Inhabitants of Ponary. 11. Druskieniki, a resort town about 120 kilometers southwest of Wilno. 12. Presumably Wilno. July 1941 13 then a group on its way to "work" joins them. In this way two Jews, among others, were "added," young people going to Wilno by road together with a Jewish woman. The next three days-July 20, 21, and 22-are quiet. July23 A nice day. About 500 people are transported. Executions until late; cries of"I am not a Communist!" "What are you doing?" They began to escape; shootings throughout the forest the whole night and during the morning. They were caught, shot, and finished off. Many intelligentsia. A few reachedjagiellonow; they were caught and shot, but presumably a few escaped via the Grodno highway. Since July 14 [the victims] have been stripped to their underwear. Brisk business in clothing. Wagons from the village of Gorale near the Grodzienka [railroad] crossing. The barn- the central clothing depot, from which the clothes are carried away at the end after they have been packed into sacks. Brisk business. They buy clothes for 100 rubles and find 500 rubles sewn into them. Shaulists with bulging knapsacks, with watches, money, etc. Brisk business-for a bottle of skaidrioji (. 75 liters), 13 clothes, etc. On the road theJewish women ask, ''Where is the work?" Fromj uly 23 until the end ofthe month they shoot, with the exception ofSunday,July 27. All together,inJuly, in the space of 17 days, they have shot an average of 250 300 daily, that is, 4,675 total, only men, with one woman "added." In addition to IS. Presumably some kind ofvodka or other homemade alcohol. 14 Ponary Diary this, practically every day a few or a few dozen people are brought by car, probably Communist bigshots. So that all to gether about 5,000 people have been shot. Ravens, the ravens remain, shots dispersed them. Piotr Kiejzik, a pupil of the priest Bielauskas of the Lithuanian shelter at Zarzeczy, goes mad. Kiejzik is a thief, he stole the Ruch printing press in Podbrodzi, and other things. Events in Wilno,August 1941 In late July 1941 the military government in Lithuania was re placed by a German civil administration, creating the General bezirk Litauen under Theodor von Renteln. The Generalbezirk was part of the Reichskommissariat Ost/and, run by Hinrich Lohse; it also included Latvia, Estonia, and western Belorussia. Wilno became a Gebietskommissariat governed by Hans Hingst, and Wilno Province (excluding the city) was the Wilna Land Gebietskommissariat, headed by Horst Wulff. One ofthe first anti-Jewish measures taken by the new Ger man civil administration of Wilno was the imposition ofa fine on August 6 offive million rubles (500,000 Reichsmarks) on the community, to be paid the next day or the mnnbers ofthe Juden rat would be executed. This was an astronomical sum, consider ing that that the local Jewish population had lost most ofi ts assets during the Soviet period or in the confiscations ofthe month and a halfof German rule. But the threats produced a superhuman August 1941 15 effort that raised the money some of it in the form of valu ab/,es-and delivered it to the Germans. On August 9, Einsatzkommando 3 was given responsibility for the Wilno district. About thirty ofits members arrived in the city and became a permanent operational station ofSecurity Po lice and SD (hereafter Sipo), placing the Ypatingi Buriai unit that had been carrying out the murders in Ponary under its com mand. While the Sipo was getting organized, the murders ofJews decreased. Sakowicz's estimate of2, 000 victims shot in August ev idently includes Jews from outside Wilno as well as non-Jews; it is also possible that the number is somewhat overstated. SS-Stan dartenfohrer Karl Jager, the commander of the Einsatzkom mando 3,filed a report on December 1 stating that between Au gust 12 and the end ofthe month the Einsatzkommando under his command killed 425 Jewish men, 19 Jewish women, and 17 Communists (both men and women) in Wilno. t 4 AUGUST 1941 Shooting August I and 2, groups of more than 300 each. Kiejzik settled in at the Wereszkos'. The clothes are carried away after 9 in the evening, so that nobody will see, because no one can go out. They pass by us. I ask one ofthem ifhe will sell me the pota toes he is carrying in a sack on his back. Not saying anything he I 4. Yad Vashcm Archive 053/1. 16 Ponary Diary walks on to the Wereszkos'. Kiejzik blackmails Jews such as the Ponas and the Szapiro families in the Ponary colony. At the Ponas house he stole a radio and, as I hear, many other things as well. He fakes inspections- "search for weapons"- and carries away clothing and other things. For the Germans 300 Jews are 300 enemies ofhumanity; for the Lithuanians they are 300 pairs ofshoes, trousers, and the like. From August 3 through August 5, they don't shoot. August6 About 300 people, all with bundles, several wagons with valises at the back. They are going via Ponary- the settlement-"for work." August 7 No shootings. AugustB About 200 people are shot. They only shoot in the afternoon. They beat them with clubs on the way. Dawid Kassel: We were on the road, we worked. August 9 and August 10 No shootings. August 1941 17 Au~tst II For the first time, [the Jews arrive] in the morning, at about 8 o'clock (because what kind of "work" is there at night?). The daughter ofa certain Z. Bialostocki from Francziszkanska Street came; [she told us] they were taken on Saturday, August 9, to Lukiszki, and then on Monday to Ponary. The daughter had a certificate, 15 but she was already too late, because they were shot about 9-11 in the morning and it was already 3 P.M. The passenger car NV-370 had two amused Lithuanian "ladies" (dames) in the company of a certain "gentleman" who were on a day excursion to see the executions. After the shoot ings they returned; I did not see sadness on their faces. In July there was a case in which, in order to torture a party ofJews on the field near Nowosiolki, gymnastics were thought up. Au~t I 2 through Au~t I 5 No shootings. Au~tI6 In a group of 200, a middle-aged, emaciated Jewish woman in a navy-blue dress with white dots went arm in arm with a man. 15. Sakowicz seems to mean that the daughter brought a certificate stating that her father was employed and should not have been picked up. 18 Ponary Diary She was the first woman in the group from Wilno. Many chil dren aged twelve to fifteen years and old people, who are carried because there are no more wagons. Wagons for a few days, then they didn't bother with such things. August 17 and August 18 No shootings. August 19 There were already two women [among the victims]. A young blonde, intelligent looking-all together about 100 people. Many young people. A Karaite16 taken from the street was already in the pit when a German, who was present at the beginning of the execution and to whom he turned claiming that he was not a Jew, freed him. He drank water at the Rudzinskis' and then went to Wilno. Supposedly he lives on Kijowska Street. They shoot in groups, from behind, in the back, or with grenades or machine guns, when it's raining or late. One escaped in his underwear as far as Deginie. He was hunted down and shot. Children were herding cows, and he ran I 6. Karaites were members of a Jewish sect that emerged in the eighth century. Their center in Lithuania was the township of Troky (Trakai) near Wilno. Some claimed that their racial origin was not Jew ish but Turko-Mongolian, and the Germans did not consider them Jews so they were not subject to the Final Solution policy. August 1941 19 to them, but they ran away. A few meters farther the rye was al ready tall. Normally they shoot I 0 at a time. They blindfold only those who so desire. The second group sees the first killed, hut they don't bury the first group. No! They step over the corpses to the next (candidates )-corpses. August 22 It turns out that on the plcshchadka 17 on August 22 one of the Jews struck a German with a bottle on the temple. The German fell down, and they carried him. This happened when the Ger man tried to take the valuables from the man condemned to death. Since August 22 the Germans have been taking the valu ables, leaving the Lithuanians with the clothes and the like. August 22, 11:30. My wife and I gather up the buckwheat to take away. At this moment we see Kiejzik running up the road in the direction of the Grodno highway. I say to my wife that Jews are being brought, because Kiejzik is hurrying to "work" (in a new suit). I follow after him-on the highway more than 100 people are being led, among them 7 Jewish women, one of whom is quite handsome, very young. Twenty minutes later a volley of gunfire reverberates. Next to the hut is a woman; it turns out that she is the servant of the owner of the sawmill, Sza piro. She explains that yesterday Szapiro's son, 18-year-old I 7. "Square," close to the shooting pits, where the victims un dressed. 20 Ponary Diary Sioma Szapiro-a pupil in his last year at the Polish gymnasium (in Bolshevik times that gymnasium was located on Dominikan ska Street, opposite the town hall)-was picked up on the street when he went to work in the morning. She brought him an over coat, food, and other things. I don't know what happened to her. She is a Christian; so far as I could see she brought for him, among other things, a pupil's coat. After a strong wind and many clouds, beautiful weather (it was Friday). At 4 P.M. Arbon N5401 18 returns to Wilno; an hour later, near the house, as I was gathering the buckwheat, Kiejzik acts like himselfagain . From the bundle of bed linens on his back clothes can be seen. He goes calmly, he is not embar rassed in front of anyone. He is walking in the company of a Lithuanian. Saturday, August 23 Fine warm weather. At 8:30 in the morning; Arbon N5491 is coming from the direction of Wilno. What is going on? This time a few Germans on the bus, a few civilians, and 12Jewish women, young ones I believe. The bus turns on the main high way and heads toward the forest. A short time later I hear some crying and spasmodic moan ing. After a moment, a volley; later a few individual shots, then everything quiets down. At 9:30 the Arbon passes the Grod zienka (without the women) in the direction of Wilno. With the Karaite it was the case, I think, that on August 18 18. Arbon was a local bus company. August 1941 21 he had already been assigned to the fourth successive group of I 0 slated to be shot. It seems that on August 23 there were two groups ofJewish women, each made up of 6 women, or 12 women all together. The first group-youngjewish women-were shot by a Lithua nian. Kiejzik boasted to Hawelowna that stripped naked they looked very pretty. The second group, delivered a few hours later, was liquidated not by the Shaulists but by the Germans. Apparently the Germans corroborate that the ones shot were nude; they did not deliver them to the Shaulists but shot them themselves. In all likelihood this was the reason why the Lithuanians were angry and got their revenge by spreading rumors that the Germans "contaminated the race with the Jewish women." Be cause the Germans, after bringing the Jewish women, removed the Shaulists as far as the gate; nearly an hour elapsed from the arrival until the first shots were fired. That Kiejzik told the truth about the nudity can be corroborated, because the next day silk stockings were being sold. August 2 4 and August 25 No shootings. Augu.st26 Eighty-eight people were shot, of whom 6 were Jewish women. The majority, as can be seen from their clothing, etc., did not 22 Ponary Diary come from Wilno, but from outside the city, from the small towns. And so Ponary has become something of a central base. Markowski got the date confused from July and August to Au gust 25. During August there were shootings on the 1st, 2nd, 6th, 8th, 11th, 16th, 19th, 22nd, 23rd, and 26th: all together, ten days, 2,000 people shot. Last week, that is,July 27-29, the Shaulists were already saying that next week there would be as many shot in one day as were shot in the whole month ofAugust. And that is how things turned out. Events in Wilno, September 1941 Following an Aktion in which thousands ofJews were munured, the Jews ofWilno were shut up in a ghetto on September 6, 1941. Unlike previous Aktionen, in which only men were killed, the ghetto Aktion did not discriminate; the victims were men and women, chiUren and oU peoj>le. This change was the result ofa decision to liquidate all the Jews in the occupied areas ofthe So viet Union. The procedure the Germans followed to establish the ghetto in Wilno differed from their methods elsewhere. In other places they would usually select a predominately Jewish neighborhood and bring in Jews from other parts ofthe city or neighboring towns to join the local poj>ulation. In Wilno the authorities first killed the Jews in the neighborhood they had selected and then brought in September 1941 23 Jews from the other parts ofthe city to the now empty neighbor hood. The reason for the change, claimed the Germans, was that the Wilna Jews had shot at German soUJ.iers. The Aktion, which is known as the Great Provocation, was actual1' the result ofa staged attack by the Sipe. On the afternoon of Sunday, August 31, two Lithuanians in civilian clothes en tered a house in theJewish neighborhood from which they fired on a group of German soUJ.iers milling outside the Pan Cinema. No one was injured in the shooting, but the Germans were able to ac cuse the Jews ofmaking the attack and to represent the Aktion as a reprisal. On September 1, Hingstpublished the following state ment: "Yesterday, Sunday afternoon, shots were directed from an ambush at Gennan soUJ.iers in Vilna [Wilna]. Two ofthese cow ardly bandits were identified-they were Jews. The attackers paid with their lives for their act-they were shot on the spot. To avoid such hostile acts in the future, new and severe deterrent measures were taken. The responsibility lies with the entire Jew ish community."19 The removal ofthe Jews from the area selected for the ghetto and their transportation to Lukiszki and from there to Ponary lasted from August 31 to September 2. The people were hel,d in cells or the prison yard at Lukiszki for a day or two, with no food or sanitary facilities. During this period the Lithuanian guards robbed them oftheir money and valuabks. Starting on September 1, the Jews were taken from Lukiszki, transported to Ponary, and 19. Quoted in Arad, Ghetto in Flames, 102 3. 24 Ponary Diary shot. In Jager's report he notes that the death toll on September 2 in Wilno was "864 Jews, 2,019 Jewesses, 817 Jewish chiUlren (punitive action because German soUliers had been shot by Jews)." 20 In his diary Kruk put the figure higher, at about 5,000, which is closer to Sakowicz's estimate. 21 This Aktion also claimed the lives ofmost of the members ofthe Wilno Judenrat, whose offices were in the area from which the Jews were removed. The disproportionate number ofwomen killed to men was owing to the fact that many of the men had already been murdered in July and August. It was after this Aktion that news ofwhat was happening at Ponary began to filter back to the Jews in Wilno. Sakowicz de scribes women and chiUlren who were only wounded and, appar ently after dark, managed to crawl out from under the pile of corpses and escape. (The men had been shot first, in the morning and early afternoon, so that even those who survived the shooting and fell into the pit alive were buried by the corpses that fell on them later and were suffocated or died oftheir wounds in the pit. The women and chiUlren were shot later in the day; those who were still alive were able to climb out of the pit after nightfall, when the firing squad and guards had gone home.) Most of the survivors were captured and shot, but a few managed to reach Wilno. KrukrecordsinhisdiaryunderSeptember4, 1941, that 20. Yad Vashem Archive 0 l 8 /245. 21. Kruk, Last Days, 8.3. September 1941 25 six women and girls who had escaped the pits in Ponary had re turned to Wilno and been treated in utmost secrecy at the Jewish hospital. He notes that they were the first to bring back the story of what was happening to the people taken to Ponary, a report that he treats with near-disbelief: "With trembling hands, I write the words . . .. It sounds like an echo from the other world. Indeed, that is what it is." He goes onto recount the story ofan eleven-year old girl, Judith Trojak, who was one of those who had escaped Ponary. At about 8 in the morning, Lithuanians suddenly ap peared and ordered everybody to get dressed and go down to the courtyard. ... "The janitor took everyone's keys to their apart ments and then they took us from there to jail [Lukiszkij. We stayed in jailfrom Monday to Tuesday. "On Tuesday morning they led us all out into the jail yard and all were sure that we would be released. But an order came to leave all our belongings and get into the waiting trucks. Traveling in the covered trucks, a women saw that we were riding through a forest. Later we heard shooting. ... We didn't understand what was happening with the men because they were led away on foot. "When we got out ofthe trucks, we were taken to a forest, among sand hills, and there we waited." ... AU day long, they heard shots . ... "Not until 5 in the afternoon did they take the 10 ofus. From there, we walked about five minutes. They blindfolded us and stood us infront ofa pit. ... There in the pit lay a lot of dead bodies, whole mountains ofthem!" She was dragged out ofthe grave by a woman. Five or six women gathered there, all ofthem wounded. 26 Ponary Diary With hel,p from the peasant woman, Trojak and two women man aged to return to the ghetto. 22 On September 5, rumors spread among the Jews that they were about to be confined in a ghetto. At dawn on September 6, Lithuanian police units fanned out in the streets where Jews lived and in the neighborhood earmarkedfor the ghetto-the area that had been cl.eared ofits residents in the Great Provocation Ak tion. Two ghettos were set up and closed off, and the city was di vided into districts. The Jews ofthe first district were deported to Ghetto No. 1, those from the second to Ghetto No. 2, and those from the third to Lukiszki Prison. The removal of40, 000 Jews to the ghettos and 6, 000 to Lukiszki took place in the space oftwenty f our hours without any involvement from the Judenrat, which had been liquidated several days earlier. The transfer was imple mented by the Lithuanian municipal police and members of a Lithuanian police battalion, whose commandant was Antanas lskauskas. New Judenrate were established in both ghettoes to arrange matters ofhousing in the densely populated ghettoes and organize essential services such as burial, health care, and water supplies. Jews taken to Lukiszki were held until September 10, when they were transported to Ponary and murdered. While they were in Lukiszki their money and valuables were taken from them. Ac cording to Jager's report, 993 Jewish men, 1,670 Jewish women, and 771 Jewish chiUren-3,334 in all-were shot in Wilno 22. Ibid., 89 91. September 1941 27 (Ponary) on September 12. 23 This figure is much larger than the number gi.ven by Sakowicz but is less than the 6,000 found in Jewish sources. The German authorities intended Ghetto No. 1for artisans and workers who heU Scheinen [certificates] and Ghetto No. 2 for everyone else. Consequ.ent!J there was a mass transfer ofthou sands ofpersons between the two ghettos. On September 15, about 2, 000 Jews en route from Ghetto No. 1 to Ghetto No. 2 were di verted by their Lithuanian guards to Lukiszki andfrom there, af ter two days, to Ponary, where they were shot. According to Jager's report, 337 Jewish men, 687 Jewish women, 247 Jewish chil dren-a total of 1,271 Jews - and 4 Lithuanian Communists were murdered in Wilno on September 17. 24 Sakowicz presents this Aktion through the story oftwo non Jews who were included with the Jews brought to Ponary to be shot. SEPTEMBER 1941 Tuesday, September 2 Wind. A strong rain, cold, clouds. At 7 in the morning I go to Pirczupki. Along the road, down the main road, and into the square a passenger car comes, followed by two trucks carrying Jews. When I was near Chazbijewicze, shots had already been 2.S. Yad Vashem Archive 05.S/I. There is a mistake in Jager's re port. The real number is 3, 434. 24. Ibid. 28 Ponary Diary fired. Half an hour later on the road there was a long procession of people- literally from the [railroad] crossing until the little church- two kilometers (for sure)! It took them fifteen minutes to pass through the crossing. There were, as it turns out, 4,000- so says Jankowski; others claim that it was 4,875, exclusively women and many babies. When they entered the road (from the Grodno highway) to the forest, they understood what awaited them and shouted, "Save us!" Infants in diapers, in arms, etc. Eighty Shaulists did the shooting, while the fence around [the pit] was guarded by 100 Shaulists. They shot while they were drunk. Before the shooting they tortured men and women horribly (Jankowski).25 The men were shot separately. The women were stripped to their underwear. [They had] many items-furs, valuables- because they thought they were going to the ghetto. The Lithuanian platoon commander went on to the road in a woman's fur, he was drunk (Kalinowski). The way they shot, the group [of shooters] stood on the corpses. They walked on the bodies! [The bodies were] imme diately covered over the next day. There were many wounded. One woman escaped to Dolna. She was shot in the arm. Next to her in the pits she saw two of her children killed, and in another pit her husband perished. That day the Heneks met 5 bleeding Jewish women, their clothes torn to shreds. Two thousand Jews were brought here, among them men, women, and children. On September 3 and 4 there was a brisk business in women's clothes! Next day a small child was found in the forest near the pit, playing in the sand. He was thrown into the pit and 25. When Sakowicz's information is secondhand, he inserts the name of the source in parentheses. September 1941 29 shot (Jankowski). In another case an infant was torn from the breast it was suckling and shot (Krywkowa). These shootings were a punishment for the bogus shooting at German soldiers in Wilno on Sunday, August 31. There, on the outskirts of the city, Hingst announced that Jews would be punished for the shooting on the previous Sunday. The shoot ings took place over the whole day, after which the Shaulists continued to drink [until] the next day. On the day after September 3 (Wednesday), a Jewish woman went to the J ankowsk.is' on her way to Wilno. A Lithua nian saw her-a Shaulist. Hejumped onto the porch, and asked "Juda?" When she answered "Yes,Juda!" he began to beat her mercilessly and dragged her to the forest, where he shot her. The Lithuanians took many valuables because the people "dispatched" to the ghetto were told that they could take these with them; thus they brought their valuables, warm clothing etc. Lithuanian women came for the clothing. Septembe1· 8 A sensation an inspection in Ponary in the apartment of Kiejzik, who is then arrested. September I 2 Again, about 2,000 are shot. September I 7 A sensation- Kiejzik is among the Jews marched up, and there is another peasant from Chazbijewicze who was seized beyond 30 Ponary Diary the wire where he went to steal clothing. Both of them were forced to put on coats with Jewish stars. Kiejzik was sent to the first line of those to be shot. He was killed. It turns out that one of the main reasons he was shot was that he dared take watches from the Jews when they belonged to someone else, in any case not to the Shaulists. Events in Wilno, October-November 1941 On October 1, 1941-Yom Kippur-there was an Aktion in both ghettos. Around noon, when the synagogues were packed with worshipers, Germans and Lithuanians entered the ghettos and began to arrest people. The Aktion came as a total surprise to the residents. According to Kruk, 1, 200 men were taken from Ghetto No. I and I, 700 from Ghetto No. 2, including many who held Scheinen and had thought themselves immune. In his diary Kruk describes that day~ events in Ghetto No. I: "People started looking for hiding places. Jews in prayer shawls ran through the streets looking scared. The prayer houses emptied out. Everyone looked for a hole to hide in."26 The detainees were taken to Lukiszki and from there, over a period ofa few days, in small groups to Ponary. About 4,000 Jews were caught by this "Yom Kippur Aktion." Ghetto No. 2, whose residents did not have Scheinen, was liq uidated in three further Aktionen between October 3 and October 21. In the first, on the night of 3-4 October, more than 2,000 26. K.ruk,LastDays, 122- 23. October-November 1941 31 peo-ple were taken away. They were tol,d that they were going to another ghetto where there was a labor shortage. When they real ized that they were actually going to Lukiszki, they fell to the ground and refused to move, the first case ofpassive mass resis tance by the Jews of Wilno. The Germans and Lithuanians be gan shooting; dozens ofJews were killed or wounded, though a few got away. Jager's report notes that 432 Jewish 1nen, 1,115 Jew ish women, and 436 Jewish chiUren were murdered on October 4. The second Aktion took place on October 15-16. According to Jewish sources, some 3,000 peo-ple were taken away in this Ak tion, although Jager reported only 1, 146 killed: 382 Jewish men, 507 Jewish women, and 257 Jewish chiUren. The thirdAktion, which completed the liquidation ofGhetto No. 2 and its residents, took place on October 21. Germans and Lithuanians went from house to house searching/or hiding places. That day about 2,500 Jews were taken from the ghetto directly to Ponary and murdered. Jager's report states that 718 Jewish men, 1, 063 Jewish women, and 586 Jewish chiUren were shot in Wilno on October 21, mak ing the total number ofdeaths for the three Aktionen 5, 496. 27 While Ghetto No. 2 was being liquidated and its residents murdered, preparations were under way for the partial liquida tion of Ghetto No. 1. AU the work certificates issued to the Jews were canceled and replaced by new certificates, called Cele Shay nen (yellow certificates) because oftheir color. Each of the new certificates protected its hoUer, his or her spouse, and two oftheir 27. Yad Vashem Archive 053 / l . .'32 Ponary Diary children, indicating that the Germans intended to reduce the ghetto population to 12, 000from the 27, 000-28, 000 still living there. The Judenrat quickly arranged fictitious families offour for Schein holders who had no spouse or children. The first '"Yellow Schein Aktion" took place on October 24. Thousands of peopl.e without Scheinen disappeared into pre pared hiding places, while Schein holders and theirfamilies were ordered to go to their workplaces outside the ghetto, which was then searched from top to bottom. About 6, 000 Jews were taken to Lukiszki and then to Ponary, where they were murdered. Jager noted that 5,644 Jews were kiUed in Wilna on October 25, 27, and 30. On October 25, 1,766 women and 812 children were kiUed, but no men; the toll on October 27 was 946 men, 184 women, and 73 children. In his diary, Sakowicz provides a simi lar description ofthe breakdown ofvictims on those dates. The second Yellow Schein Aktion was conducted on November 3 -5. Schein holders and their families were transferred for three days to the now-empty Ghetto No. 2, while Ghetto No. 1, cleared of its "legal" residents, was searched from house to house. Many of those discovered were kiUed on the spot when they refused to leave their hiding places. About 1,300 "ill.egal" Jews were taken to Lukiszki and then to Ponary. Jager reported that 340 men, 749 women, and 252 children were shot in Wilna on November 6 a total of1,341. The Jews who had been evacuated to Ghetto No. 2 were returned to Ghetto No. 1 on November 5. In his report, Jager noted that an additional 171 Jews were murdered on November 19 and 63 more on November 25. Some ofthese last victims ofthe October-November 1941 SJ Yellow Schein Aktionen were found hiding in bunkers in the empty Ghetto No. 2 and others in the city outside the ghetto; the rest were peopu who had been held in Lukiszki for various rea sons. According to Jager's report, nine Soviet prisoners of war and nine Poks were al.so killed on November 19, 20, and 25. 28 Sakowicz wrote about killings on October 2 and 3 (the Yom Kippur Aktion) but not about those on October 4. Later he refers to the liquidation ofGhetto No. 2 and the Yellow Schein Aktionen in Ghetto No. 1. Around this time that the Germans provided uniforms to the members ofthe Lithuanian police, and in his en try for November 1 Sakowicz notes that the Lithuanians who made up the firing squad were wearing military uniforms. On October 27,for the first time, Sakowicz mentions Soviet prisoners ofwar who were shot along with groups ofJews . Most of these prisoners were Soviet soldiers who had remained behind German lines when the Red Army retreated and instead ofreport ing to prisoner-of war camps had gone into hiding, wandered in the forests, or found work in villages. When caught they were taken to Lukiszki and then, in accordance with standing German orders, sentenced to death by firing squad as partisans. Other prisoners were escapees from POW camps. Those executed in Ponary included several hundred Soviet citizens, government and Communist Party officia/,s who had been sent to Lithuania when it became a Soviet republic in the summer of 1940. They and their families had not been evacuated but remained in German- 28. Ibid. 34 Ponary Diary occupied Wilno and its environs. Most of them were shot at Ponary as members ofthe Communist Party. OCTOBER 1941 Shootings on October 2, 3, 16, 21, 25 and 27. Thursday, October 16 In cool weather, quite strong for October, frost (an unexpected cold front, which arrived on Monday, Tuesday). Tuesday 4Jewish women escaped via Deginie. October 21 About 1,000 are transported, women and small children among them. Because it was unusually cold, especially for the children, they permitted them to take offonly their coats, letting them wait for death in clothes and shoes. Terri.bk Saturday, October 25 At about 8:20 in the morning a long procession of the con demned appeared on the road near the little chapel. When they neared the crossing, I observed that it was made up exclusively of women old and young, children in carriages, suckling ba- October 194 l 35 hies. Some of them slept peacefully. The weather was exceed ingly beautiful; sunshine. At the same time, the first volleys of gunfire reverberated in the forest. Women and children trans ported from Lukiszki since 7 in the morning by two trucks (NN4003 and 4005) were also shot. An interesting thing is that when the trucks returned from the forest, the Lithuanian sol diers sitting inside were already dividing the possessions among themselves. How could they have had time! Jankowski, Wy socki, and others [remained] at the railway hut. Szligielmilch lost his nerve and fled. 29 When the head of the procession neared the crossing it was exactly 8:52; when the last file passed it was 9:17. They walked quite slowly; their awful fatigue was reflected on their faces. And the volleys rang out at the same time. The condemned began to get nervous. One of them turned to Wysocki, who was standing next to the hut, and asked, "What is this place?" Even though "conversation" with the condemned was forbidden on pain of death (they could shoot him; there was such a case, when they took a man on October 16 who, in answer to the question of [a prisoner], informed him that it was Ponary), he answered in an irritated voice, spelling out the word "Po-na-ry." Weeping arose in the ranks. TheJewish women began to fall back. Then, on the officer's order (there were twelve of them- six at the front with a captain), the soldiers began to beat the women with their rifle butts. One of the Jewish women said to a soldier,"I gave you all my money and you promised to let me and the child go, and now you lead me to death!" The soldier smiled. A second youngjewish woman, nineteen to twenty years 29. These men are Sakowicz's neighbors. 36 Ponary Diary old, in a gray overcoat and black fur collar, intelligent, with a boy about three to four in a navy blue coat, falls to the ground (full of mud), kisses the feet of the noncommissioned officer and begs for her life, grasps his muddied shoes and pleads. To free his leg he kicks her in the jaw with the tip of his shoe, freeing himself with the same leg from her grasp. On her torn cheek blood gushes out, mixing with the mud. The Jewish woman lies there and pleads spasmodically. The second soldier beats her with the rifle butt. She grabs the rifle butt, kisses it, kneeling on the road at the entrance to the killing grounds. Then the soldier snatches the crying boy, swings him around, and throws him like a log past the wire; there the rifle butt is raised to kill the child. TheJewish woman rushes forward and runs past the wire and shields the child. And when all is said and done, this is what it was about, wasn't it? The shooting carried on continuously until 5 P.M. Many wounded. At night they tried to escape. Shooting the whole night. Jewish women went in a procession over the dead bodies; the same on October 27. There is no time to cover every line [of bodies with sand]. October 25 It is said that when one of the villagers came to the Lithuanians with moonshine for "Jewish rags," he received an entire sack of rags in exchange for the vodka. The sack was unusually heavy. In the nearby forest the peasant, curious about what was inside, untied the sack, and began to look through the items. Under the things he glimpsed a murdered Jew stuffed inside. He hid the October 1941 37 body under the hyssop. The Lithuanians who gave him the sack ordered him to disappear quickly. Workers on the road, seeing that the peasant was hiding something under the hyssop, [waited until) he walked away, and then ripped up the moss and found the Jew. Note: October 25, one of the Jewish women, hearing the shooting, attempts to escape. She is caught and at the officer's order they execute her on the road. The officer also beats and mocks [the victims]. The Ger mans carry away the rags to Wilno by wagon. Monday, October 27 Through the crossing, nearly all men (among them about fifteen Soviet soldiers); at the end of the procession, several dozen women. Snow was falling mixed with rain. One of the women with a teenage boy and another Jew escapes. The Jew is killed. The woman and the boy escaped via Ponary in the direction of Czarna Krynica. Note: Shaulists in civilian clothes, as well as a military es cort, have already begun doing the shooting. They continue to torture. October30 Beautiful weather, sunny. At 9 in the morning four trucks full of Lithuanian soldiers and officers arrive. Immediately after, four trucks arrive full of old women and children. The shooting be gins. At l 0:00 near the chapel the second procession appears. 38 Ponary Diary When they enter the Grodno highway, several people try to es cape. Shots. Did they escape? I don't know. At the crossing, the women are at the front, men at the back. The women have only a few guards around them; the men are surrounded by a thick chain ofsoldiers. They shoot volleys from machine guns; the ex ecution is carried out in three places (echo of volleys). In the evening at about 7 :30 violent shooting began in the forest. Such shootings have been repeated in the last weeks very often. It now appears that some ofthe badly injured attempt to escape under the cover of night. Some of them succeed if they have enough strength; the badly wounded, not having the strength to run quickly, are caught. Now at 9 in the evening, the shooting comes from a few different places. Clearly heard is the shooting in the forest, at a fast pace and coming closer. Evidently someone is running and firing. He is in pursuit. After entering the gate, a Jewish woman realizes where she is going; she persuades her child (teenage boy) to escape. The boy takes advantage ofan opportune moment and runs. A Lith uanian officer notices. He shouts at them to stop and shoots. The child stops, the officer runs up, and with several shots (a burst of fire) kills him. T he child falls. The mother lunges at him, but the soldier stabs her with the bayonet. She falls. Other Jews are ordered to pick her up and carry her. Whether she was wounded or dead, I don't know. NOVEMBER 1941 .November 1 Jewish men and women with children are shot. November 1941 39 On November I, God-fearing representatives of the Catholic Lithuanian nation liquidated four truckloads ofJews. They have already begun shooting in their military clothing. November I (Saturday) was All Saints' Day. It did not disturb their executions. November6 It seems that on November 6 there will be . . . mass murders. Jewish men and women are brought by trucks. November17 Four trucks bring just men. Then a hunt is staged: the con demned run through the forest and are hunted down. Evidence of this is the fact that there are individual shots sounding at dif ferent parts ofthe forest. The ''hunt" lasts about two hours, and then it quiets down. Trucks. Hunting. They scattered. November 19 More than 200 women and children were brought. It was cold, with a cool wind. They had no bullets; they went to the build ings to warm up. But instead of bullets they took the little ones from their mothers and killed them with rifle butts. It seems that there were cases (previously) in which they hadn't bothered to shoot every "whelp" so they [the children] were thrown in. 40 Ponary Diary November 21 Again, women and children, (a few) men. During the time the murders are carried out volleys ofgunfire sound in the forest. A Shaulist with a rifle left the base and on the road (it was market day-Friday) he began to sell women's clothing: a few topcoats, dresses, and galoshes. He sold the last pair of coats, navy blue and brown, for 120 (one hundred and twenty) rubles and as a "bonus" he also threw in a pair of galoshes. When one of the peasants (Waclaw Tankun of Stary Miedzyrzecz) asked whether he would still sell [him something for his wife], the Shaulist replied. "Let them wait" and he would "choose" a Jewish woman exactly her size. Tankun and his wife were horrified, and when the Shaulist left they went away quickly. The Shaulist reappeared with the clothing. He was angry that the "yokels" weren't there because he had ''gone to the trouble" ofchoosing a Jewish woman from the fourth line whose height was about that of the villagers. November 25 Trucks, women, children, a few men. A total of nine trucks. At the entrance to the gate they tried to jump out. Beaten. Events in Wilno, December 1941 Six small Aktionen, the last in the first great wave ofmurder that began with the occupation ofthe city, were conducted in Wilno in