Kazimierz Sakowicz - Ponary Diary, 1941-1943: A Bystanders Account of a Mass Murder

Ponary Diary, 19411943

A Bystanders Account of a Mass Murder

Kazimierz Sakowicz

EDITED BY Yitzhak Arad

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 Wilenskiej.

Translation copyright 2005 by Yad Vashem.

All rights reserved.

This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sakowicz, Kazimierz, 18941944.

[Dziennik pisany w Ponarach od 11 lipca 1941 r. do 6 listopada 1943 r. English]

Ponary diary, 19411943 : a bystanders account of a mass murder / Kazimierz Sakowicz ; edited by Yitzhak Arad. 1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-300-10853-8 (alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-300-10853-2 (alk. paper)

1. JewsPersecutionsLithuaniaVilnius. 2. Holocaust, Jewish (19391945)LithuaniaVilnius. 3. World War, 19391945Atrocities. 4. Vilnius (Lithuania)Ethnic relations. 5. Sakowicz, Kazimierz, 18941944Diaries. I. Arad, Yitzhak, 1926II. Title.

DS135.L52V5569413 2005

940.5318094793dc22

2005013119

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

by Rachel Margolis

by Yitzhak Arad

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 of some 50,000 to 60,000 Jewish 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 (Sakowiczs Ponary riflemen) as well as by the German occupiers of the city.

When I first learned of the existence of this document I resolved to track it down and publish it so that the widest possible audience could learn the truth about the last years of Wilno, the Eastern European cultural center known as the Jerusalem of Lithuania. The only member of my family to survive the Holocaust, 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 of Shmerke Kacherginsky and Abraham Sutskever, I learned about numerous documents relating to the Holocaust that had survived the war. Among these newly discovered documents was Sakowiczs diary, which had been written on loose sheets that were then placed in empty lemonade bottles, sealed, and buried in the ground. After the war, Sakowiczs neighbors dug up some of these bottles and gave them to the Jewish Museum.

Many years later I was employed as director of the historical 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 of yellowing handwritten sheets. Some were pieces of plain paper ranging from 5.5 to 25 centimeters long; others were the margins of a 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 Sakowiczs diary, which, along with other documents from the earlier Jewish Museum, had wound up in the Central State Archives of Lithuania. Working under special lighting and using a magnifying glass, I was eventually able to sort out and decipher the heartrending entries, which covered the period from July 11, 1941, through August 1942. Because of my familiarity with the Wilno dialect and Russian, I was able to decipher everythinga total of sixteen documents. But these pages, the first section of Sakowiczs diary, turned out to be only a fraction of the diary.

In various articles and books on the Holocaust period I encountered quotations from other entries in the diary, written in a later period. I recognized Sakowiczs style and hasty writing, even in distorted transcriptions. For example, his terms Lithuanian killers and Ponary riflemen were replaced by Lithuanian 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 employee of the Museum of the Revolution in Vilnius had told me of her discovery of some Sakowicz documents in the museums collection. During the Soviet period, however, access to them was impossible. After the restoration of Lithuanian independence in 1989, the staff of the newly established Jewish State Museum of Lithuania 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 transferred, but were refused permission to see the documents.

In the 1990s the Jewish State Museum applied to the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture for permission to see the documents, and we were granted access to the second part of Sakowiczs diary for just two days. After photocopying the sheets, I began the long task of deciphering these new pages. Most belonged to the first part of the diary. The second part comprised a total of fifty-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 October 26, 1943) that Sakowicz found in Ponary. The events described in these sheets took place between September 10,1942, and November 6, 1943.

At the time I was deciphering Sakowiczs diary I knew little about the man himself. When the Polish edition of the diary was being prepared for publication, the editor, Jan Malinowski, was able to contact Sakowiczs relatives and gather some information about him. Kazimierz Sakowicz, the son of Elias and Sofia, was born in Wilno in 1894 and studied law in Moscow. After returning to Wilno he served on the staff of various newspapers. He later opened a print shop that published journals, such as the Przeglad Gospodarczy (Economic Review), on Mickewicz Street, where he and his wife, Maria, lived. The couple had no children. In 1939, when Wilno and the surrounding region were occupied by Soviet troops and handed over to Lithuania, Sakowicz had to close his print shop and find cheaper lodgings. He moved to a frame cottage in Ponary, a suburb of Wilno. From there he rode his bicycle back into town, taking odd jobs to support his family. The cottage was located in the woods, adjacent to an area where, during the period of Soviet control of Lithuania (194041), a fuel storage facility to serve the nearby airbase had been under construction. Large pitstwelve to thirty-two meters in diameter and five to eight meters deephad been excavated for fuel tanks. The pits were connected by ditches in which pipes were to be laid. But the facility was never completed. Instead, the Naziswho occupied Wilno on June 24, 1941used the pits and ditches for the extermination of tens of thousands of people. Ponary became one of several sites of large-scale massacres in Eastern Europe. Executions by shooting continued there for three years, from July 1941 until July 1944.