Ponary is a town near Vilnius. This place remains unknown in the minds of most modern Poles. In 2000, the council for protection of the memory of the fighting and martyrdom managed to erect a monument commemorating Poles who had been murdered there. Jews erected their own monument dedicated to Jewish victims. Up to this day, it has been impossible to convict all known perpetrators of this crime - members of the Lithuanian unit "Ponary" of voluntary riflemen, subordinate to the Gestapo, coming from the paramilitary nationalist organization Lietuvos Szauliu Sajunga (The Union of Lithuanian Riflemen), called
szaulisi by the Poles. During Soviet times, there was a monument in Ponary with the inscription that only Soviet citizens died there at the hands of the Nazis. There was no word about Poles or Jews.
Two women exposed the case of the murder in Ponary: Doctor Rachela Margolis and Helena Pasierbska. The father of the former, a Jewish doctor, was killed by the
szaulis. The latter was saved by a miracle and later formed the Ponary Family Association. During the 90s, when it was possible to reveal the truth, Doctor Margolis started to decipher the notes of the Polish journalist Kazimerz Sakowicz, who had hidden them in bottles in his garden in Ponary. In July 1944, Sakowicz was also shot by the
szaulis, who guessed he knew too much and could identify them as the perpetrators. The bottles were found after the war and were initially placed in the Jewish Museum in Vilnius; after the liquidation of the latter during an anti-Semitic campaign of 1949, some of them were taken by the Central Museum of Lithuania and some by the Museum of the Revolution. For a few dozen years, the yellowed pages from the bottles were located in a folder labeled "unreadable". Only in the 90s, did the State Museum of Jews of Lithuania acquire the forgotten and never-read documents so that doctor Rachela Margolis could study them.
Already in July 1941, the Lithuanian units of the
szaulis, which collaborated with the Germans, started to commit mass murders in the vicinity of Sakowicz's house. It is estimated that the Lithuanian
szaulis murdered over 100,000 people. Most of them were Poles of Jewish descent, transported there from the Vilnius ghetto and other towns of Wilenszczyzna. It is probable that about 80,000 were killed. In Ponary, the Polish community suffered a terrible blow as well--the elites were murdered. According to various estimates from 12,000 to 20,000 were shot. Gypsies and Russian Old Believers were also exterminated. Among the victims were also Soviet prisoners and Lithuanian communists. Ponary was chosen as a place for the murders because, in 1940, the Soviets started to build a liquid fuel base for airplanes there. Five pits for fuel containers were made - 12-32 meters in diameter and 5-8 meters deep. The
szaulis drove the victims to the edge of those pits and shot them with machine guns; the bodies then fell into the pits. The Jews were driven on foot from the Vilnius ghetto 10 km away, or transported on trains from other towns; Poles were usually transported by trucks directly from the Lukiszki prison or the Gestapo detention house at Ofiarna Street. During the most "busy" days, the
szaulis were capable of murdering up to four thousand people.
Grzegorz Górny,
Raport z rozstrzelanego świata ( A report from a shot world),
Rzeczpospolita 245 (6322), October 19-20 2002, p. A10