Ponary, known in Lithuanian as Paneriai, is a wooded site about ten kilometres south-west of Vilnius. Between July 1941 and August 1944, approximately 70,000 Jews and around 30,000 non-Jews, mostly Polish intellectuals and Soviet prisoners of war, were shot and buried there. Ponary is the killing ground of Vilna Jewry. Almost the entire pre-war Jewish population of Vilnius, the city that Jews had called the Jerusalem of the North, was murdered at Ponary.
Why Ponary
The site was prepared, inadvertently, by the Soviet authorities. In early 1941, the Soviets had begun digging large storage pits in the Ponary forest, intending to use them as fuel tanks for a planned air force base. The project was abandoned when Germany invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. German forces took Vilnius two days later, on 24 June. The pits were already dug, approximately four to six metres deep, large enough to hold thousands of bodies. The Einsatzgruppen and their Lithuanian auxiliaries turned them into killing pits within weeks of the city’s capture.
The killings
The killing at Ponary was carried out almost entirely by the Sonderkommando Arajs and by Lithuanian auxiliary police units working under the direction of Einsatzkommando 9 of Einsatzgruppe B. German SS personnel supervised but did not typically conduct the shootings directly. This pattern, widespread in the Baltic states and Ukraine, placed primary physical responsibility on local collaborators while maintaining German direction and ideological framing.
Jews were brought to Ponary from the Vilnius ghetto and from surrounding towns in groups, typically by truck. They were made to undress, their valuables were taken, and they were shot at the edge of or inside the pits. The process was rapid. In the major killing actions of September and October 1941, tens of thousands of Jews were murdered within a matter of weeks. By the end of 1941 roughly 40,000 Jews had been killed at Ponary.
The poet and partisan Abba Kovner learned of the killings at Ponary in December 1941 and issued his call to the Jewish underground in Vilnius: “Let us not go like sheep to slaughter.” He had established, through contact with escapees and through observation of the patterns of deportation, that Ponary was not a labour camp but a death site. His warning was one of the earliest clear-eyed statements within any ghetto that the Germans’ intentions were total annihilation.
The evidence tunnel
In the autumn of 1943, as the Soviet army advanced westward and German forces began to retreat, the SS ordered the exhumation and burning of the bodies at Ponary to destroy the evidence. Prisoners from the Vilnius ghetto were brought to the site and forced to dig up and burn the bodies. A group of these prisoners, the so-called “Burning Brigade,” spent months at Ponary under SS guard. In late March and early April 1944, a group of forty prisoners dug a tunnel beneath their compound using spoons and their hands, working over a period of months. On the night of 15 April 1944, forty prisoners escaped through the tunnel. Eleven survived to reach partisan units in the forest. They were among the primary witnesses to what had happened at Ponary.
After the war
Ponary is now a memorial site in Lithuania. The pits remain visible. The Lithuanian government’s relationship with the history of Lithuanian participation in the killings has been contested: Lithuanian auxiliary units were deeply implicated in the murders, and the postwar Soviet narrative, which attributed the killings to Germans alone, suppressed acknowledgement of this. More recent Lithuanian scholarship and official commemoration have addressed the question of local participation more directly, though not without controversy.
See also
Sources
- Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, University of Nebraska Press, 2009
- Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy, Collins, 1986
- Yitzhak Arad, Ghetto in Flames: The Struggle and Destruction of the Jews in Vilna in the Holocaust, Yad Vashem, 1980
- Rachel Kostanian-Danzig, Spiritual Resistance in the Vilna Ghetto, Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum, 2002
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Ponar Massacre, encyclopedia.ushmm.org