Ponary or the extermination of Lithuanian Jews by their neighbors

The publication of the chilling testimony of an eyewitness to the murders of Lithuanian Jews in the Ponary forest.

We owe to Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine the publication in France of two fundamental works devoted to the extermination of the Jews of Europe. She translated The Man Who Knew, biography by Dina Porat, of Abba Kovner, the legendary supporter of Wilno, published by Éditions du Bord de l'Eau, in 2017. Today, Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine brings a new document to the history of the Holocaust. She translated and annotated from Polish an astonishing testimony, which has remained unpublished to this day in French. This is the eyewitness account of the mass murder of the Jews of Lithuania: Ponary's Diary, 1941-1943 by Kazimierz Sakowicz, a Polish Catholic whose home was located on the very site of the executions in the Ponary Forest.

Abba Kovner, the supporter of Wilno

In 1941, Abba Kovner (1918-1987) was a 23-year-old poet, member of the socialist Zionist movement HaShomer HaTsair (the young guard). He was the first Jew to found an armed group of very young men and women in order to oppose armed resistance - even desperate - to the Einsatzgruppen, which had undertaken to liquidate the Jews of Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, White Russia, Ukraine.

On the night of December 31, 1941, he read at the headquarters of The Young Guard, at No. 2 Strashun Street, in front of more than one hundred and fifty boys and girls, the first call to obtain arms and to organize combat groups. , within the ghetto itself. He was the first to sense that the Nazis were aiming to exterminate not only the Jews of Wilno, but all the Jews of Europe, and that trying to gain time while waiting for the arrival of the Red Army or, as Jacob Gens, president of the Judenrat, appointed by Franz Murer, believed by making himself useful to the Germans was futile and hopeless. Kovner warned the Jews not to let themselves be led to death without resisting. He titled his appeal: "Let us not be led like sheep to the slaughterhouse!"

“Young Jews, don't believe the liars. Of the eighty thousand Jews of Vilna only twenty thousand remain alive. Before our eyes, we took our parents, our brothers, our sisters. Where are the hundreds of people arrested by city police supposedly to be sent to work? Where are the women and children who were taken half-naked during the terrible night of the first massacre? Where have all the Jews arrested in the synagogues on Yom Kippur gone?

“The one who was taken out of the ghetto will never come back, because from the Gestapo all roads lead to Ponary and Ponary is death.

Ponary is not a camp. There, everyone is shot. Hitler decided to exterminate all the Jews of Europe. We are its first victims.

Let us not be sacrificed like sheep! It is true that we are weak, that we cannot count on any outside help, but there is only one worthy response to the enemy, and that is to resist.

Brothers ! It is better to perish free with arms in hand than to live in submission, pardoned by murderers. Let's fight until the last breath!

January ¹ , 1942. Vilna Ghetto. »

He was not heard because, in the ghetto, only this minority of highly politicized young people, from different organizations, had understood that the Nazis had undertaken to exterminate all the Jews in the territories they occupied. The Jews of Wilno could not resign themselves to the idea that there was no other way out than death.

On July 16, 1943, Itzhak Wittenberg (1907-1943), the commander of the FPO, founded on January 21, 1942 (in Yiddish: Fareinigte partisaner organisazie: United organization of partisans) had said, when it was a question of joining a detachment supporters in the forest:

“When we know that the Germans are preparing to exterminate the ghetto, we will lead everyone into battle and we will open a passage to the forest. »

But, on July 9, members of the FPO were arrested, and SS Bruno Kittel, who had been a civilian actor and singer, demanded that Wittenberg be handed over to him. Wittenberg was arrested on July 15, 1943, at one o'clock in the morning. He was handcuffed, but at the entrance to the ghetto he managed to escape. At dawn on July 16 Bruno Kittel sent a final SS ultimatum. Wittenberg should give himself up no later than six o'clock in the evening. Otherwise, aircraft and tanks would burn the ghetto and all its inhabitants. Some partisans thought that Wittenberg should not comply, others that he should sacrifice his life. He made the decision to surrender alone, not resolving to abandon the Jews of the ghetto.

Before giving himself up, Wittenberg asked to be left alone, and went to spend a few minutes in the office of Jacob Gens, who feared that Wittenberg could reveal much under torture.

Wittenberg went to give himself up to the Gestapo, who were waiting for him at the gate of the ghetto. His body was found dead in the corridor of the Gestapo, without a mark on the body. Dina Porat writes: “The Nazis would not have killed a prisoner of this importance without trying to extort information from him and the result could have been disastrous. According to the testimony of one of the Judenrat housekeepers, there were three glasses in Gens' office and only one was missing. So it can't be ruled out that People poisoned Wittenberg before he was taken away, as supporters ran out of time to procure the cyanide he demanded. This is at least the opinion of all the actors of the time. »

That said, the young people of the FPO, including Boris Goldstein, with incredible audacity stole from the German warehouses where they worked five machine guns, fifty grenades, thirty revolvers, several rifles and a lot of cartridges. Assisted by a handful of Polish democrats, they procured many more, including explosives, and went to blow up trains.

Abba Kovner, fled through the sewers and reached the forests with the survivors of his group of fighters, during the final liquidation of the ghetto.

On July 14, 1944, on the road to Wilno, Polish nationalists were trying to convince the Soviet command to hand over the Jewish partisans to them, so that they would not enter the liberated city.

NB: After the war, after having organized clandestine emigration to Palestine, Abba Kovner took part in the War of Independence within the Givati ​​Brigade, of which he was one of the founding members. Became a famous poet, he chaired the Union of Writers, and founded the Museum of the Diaspora in Tel Aviv. After having organized the Aliyah Bet, that is to say the clandestine emigration of tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors to Mandatory Palestine, where the English had instituted the White Book, limiting the number of immigrants to 15 000 a year, he went to live with his comrades in arms, the Partizaners of Wilno, at Kibbutz Ein HaKoresh, where he lived until his death. Abba Kovner is also the founder of the Moreshet/Yad Yaari Institute and its publishing house. This institute is the equivalent of Beit Lohamei HaGetaot for the Hashomer HaTsaïr movement. Moreshet Yad Yaari is, like Yad Vashem, a Holocaust documentation institute. It is above all devoted to the intellectual and cultural heritage of the annihilated Jews.

A look back at the Ponary Forest massacres

Le Journal de Ponary, 1941-1943, a book of capital importance, brings back into their proper proportions certain ideas that have flourished since an amateur thought he would become a historian.

We owe him the lamentable expression "Shoah by bullets", which suddenly invaded the media, eager for the so-called "sensational". As if the History of the Shoah, moreover very well documented, needed to be deconstructed in favor of a linguistic novelty. This terminology claims to designate specifically the mass shootings of a million and a half victims, supplanted from 1942 by the gas chambers.

The Shoah is a whole that should not be divided by a sub-phenomenon that constitutes this barbarism. This resulted in the publication of brief, disparate and incomplete “testimonies”, extremely late, from descendants of local populations, presented as compassionate and, at worst, passive for fear of reprisals. We will see that it was not.

Let us first locate the site of the extermination of 70,000 Jews from Wilno and its surroundings. In The Black Book by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, more than a hundred well-documented pages are devoted to the crimes committed by enthusiastic Lithuanian militiamen, wearing black Gestapo uniforms, under the command of SS Schweinberger, Martin Weiss, Franz Murer, the master of the ghetto, and Bruno Kittel, its liquidator, once a film actor and singer.

Before the Second World War, Ponary was an idyllic place, a few minutes from Wilno. In The Black Book we can read:

“Ponary is a holiday resort seven kilometers from Vilna (name of the city in Russian) by road from Grodno. On the right, the Vilia river meanders between rolling banks. This place is known for its scenic beauty. It was sung by Adam Mickiewicz. Napoleon reportedly said he would gladly carry Ponary to France with his own hands.

“The Germans chose this place: on the right, there is a convenient road to bring the victims, on the left, a railway line, Vilna-Warsaw, which stops a quarter of a kilometer from Ponary. The Germans built rails leading to a huge hole.

Quite an interesting read- @wikiHow: How to Recover From Empty Nest Syndrome http://wikihow.com/Recover-From-Empty-Nest-Syndrome

— Dan Wed Sep 29 15:52:08 +0000 2010

When this “death factory” was ready and the word “Ponary” began to sow terror in the population, the Germans printed a map of the city where this place was not even mentioned. It was designated by a green “Forests” patch. As if Ponary had never existed. »

The rediscovery of the moving testimony of Kazimierz Sakowicz

Let us first recall the circumstances of the discovery of the Diary of Ponary, by Kazimierz Sakowicz, the reconstruction and transcription of which are due to Rachel Margolis.

The author of this column, held from July 11, 1941 to November 6, 1943, was a Polish Catholic. Access to this document was forbidden to historians in the post-war years, as it constituted evidence against the Lithuanian “Ponary shooters”. These executioners, enthusiastic, alcoholic torturers, who fired for hours on end from the top of the graves at the Jews, and arranged with the peasants to "market" on Sunday mornings, after mass, clothes, shoes, watches, the jewelry, the gold teeth, the prams of the little victims. Women's lingerie, children's and baby clothes, and women's shoes had more value in exchange for vodka, bacon, and cash.

Rachel Margolis was the sole survivor of her family. She had fled the ghetto and joined the partisan unit The Avengers.

The day after the liberation of the city, Rachel and a few survivors decided to create a small temporary museum there. Among them, the great poet Avrom Sutzkever (1913-2010), the writer Shmerke Kaczerginski (1908-1954) and Abba Kovner.

They discovered several testimonies, written between 1941 and 1943. The most spectacular is that of Kazimierz Sakowicz, written on narrow sheets rolled up and introduced into lemonade bottles, sealed, then buried in his garden. It was her neighbors who dug them up and brought them to the provisional museum of Rachel Margolis.

Many years later, a historian, Rachel Magolis was appointed director of the Department of History of the State Jewish Museum of the Soviet Republic of Lithuania. She discovered in the Central Archives, a folder containing yellowed sheets of all sizes, covered with handwriting and sketches. Without erasures, but visibly written with a shaking hand, and often difficult to decipher.

Other parts of the diary were later found by an archivist from the Museum of the Revolution in Vilnius.

The entire Journal was reunited only after the fall of communism in 1990 by researchers from the State Jewish Museum. The second part of the journal was finally opened for consultation.

Little was known about the Sakowicz man. Rachel Margolis conducted research with editor Jan Malinowski. They learned that Sakowicz was a reserve officer in the Polish army. He was close to the Armia Krajowa, the underground Polish army, the main organ of the Resistance, attached to the government in exile of General Anders, in London.

After studying law in Moscow, he returned to live in Wilno. He published articles in various periodicals and had opened a small printing press which published them. Under the Soviet occupation, he was forced to close his business in town, and moved to Ponary, just opposite the future site of the massacre, where huge circular pits had been dug by the Red Army in 1940, at the era of the Nazi-Soviet pact. These pits were intended to become fuel reservoirs for the Red Army.

For three years, Sakowicz will therefore record with meticulousness, precision, the unspeakable facts of the mass crime of which he is the witness day after day.

He observes the executions from a skylight in his attic, or sometimes hidden behind the palisade which encloses his garden. One of the pits is exactly in front of his house, he sees precisely what is happening on the road that leads to Ponary, near the pits in the forest, and in the pits themselves. Sakowicz is a precise man. He counts, day after day, sometimes several times a day, and even at night, the number of murdered victims, the way they are led, undressed, beaten with whips or rifle butts to the pit. Although he feels no real sympathy for the Jews, let alone for the partisans, whom he calls "bandits", he is outraged, sickened and stunned by the ignominy shown by the Lithuanians who dismember infants , then throw them into the pits, which rape the young girls and then kill them, who step on the victims, still alive, to even out the piles of bodies and throw a thin layer of sand on them. Their boots are dripping with blood, and they laugh. The leaves of the trees are covered with children's brains. They are happy when the pile of clothes is large and of good quality. The peasants wait for them on the road and buy everything they can get. It's the market. It is not uncommon for them to take their families to see how Jews are killed. A dog tears out the intestines of the corpses and brings them back to the farmer's wife. She hangs them on a palisade. Everyone is really celebrating! On Sundays, to go to mass, the women and children strut about in the clothes of the victims. Lithuanians participated so heavily in the murder of Jews that 95% were wiped out in the Holocaust.

The continuation of extermination by other means

This is the truth about the extermination of the Jews during the enthusiastic mass shootings, which continued while the gas chambers were already operating in the heart of Poland in the camps of Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Majdanek, Auschwitz. In Auschwitz, it was Zyklon B, manufactured by the firm Bayer, still in activity today within the German chemical industry; in the other camps, gases from diesel engines of Russian tanks were used. There was also Chelmno, where the Jews were asphyxiated in specially equipped trucks so that the gases were redirected into the truck where they were piled up. The driver dumped his cargo in a nearby forest, where the corpses were stored, before being burned at the stake in the open air by members of the Sonderkommandos.

Hunger, torture, pseudo-scientific experiments carried out in vivo, all of this is also the Shoah.

Need I add that the extermination of the Jews in the mass shootings was widely documented by eyewitnesses and first-rate accounts, before the term “Holocaust by bullets” was coined! Finally, a Soviet scientific investigation commission visited the places where the graves and the sites of mass shootings were located in the occupied territories of the USSR: Babi Yar, Rumbula, Bikierniki, Ponary, Kovno, Swenciany, to name just a few.

The crimes were also largely documented by writings: those of Itzhak Arad, those of the Black Book, collected and written by Vassili Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg, those of Avrom Suztkever, Abba Kovner, Shmerke Kaczerginski. The truth is that the so-called "Holocaust by bullets" is an empty shell.

There is a German book entirely devoted to the Einsatzgruppen: Hitlers Einsatzgruppen. Die Truppen des Weltanschauungskrieges 1938-1942.

sad epilogue

The text of Sakowicz's Diary ends abruptly on November 6, 1943. We do not know what really happened. His first cousin told Jan Malinowski that the diary had been kept until July 1944. Some pages can therefore still perhaps be found.

We know that Sakowicz was found lifeless next to his bicycle on July 5, 1943, a few days before Wilno was liberated. Was he the victim of a settling of accounts, or hit by a stray bullet? He is buried in the cemetery of Rossa, among the fighters of the Armia Krajowa.

Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine met Rachel Margolis (1921-2015) in Rehovot, Israel, in August 2014, at her daughter Emma's house. As a young partisan, she blew up bridges, German trains, took part in ambushes against the SS. She published her Memoirs, published in English in 2010 by Brighton Academic Studies.

Recognized as one of the heroic fighters of the ghetto, she was nonetheless prosecuted in 2008 for “war crimes” by the Lithuanian prosecutor's office! She was not the only one: Itzhak Arad, internationally renowned historian and FPO fighter, was the subject of an arrest warrant. On April 22, 2006, the Lithuanian daily Respublika, published on its front page: "The expert who has blood on his hands..." An investigation was opened by the Lithuanian prosecutor's office against Arad for "crimes against humanity! He had fought against the assassins of his family and his people, and was proud of it.

When the Lithuanian police wanted to arrest Rachel Margolis, she was fortunately visiting her daughter in Israel, and never returned to the city which had seen the death of all her family. Labeled a “terrorist” by Lithuanian newspapers, she said it left her cold. “I was a fan and believe me, I saw others. I fought against the Nazis when I was twenty, I'm ready to fight a second time when I'm over eighty. Against those who henceforth honor them! she told The Jerusalem Post on September 28, 2012.

On the other hand, Lithuanians who killed Jews in Ponary, "the soft underbelly of the genocide, perpetrated by the locals" are today honored in Lithuania by street names, squares, steles.

This is what Alexandra Laignel Lavastine rightly qualifies as “atmospheric revisionism. »