Vilna Ghetto and Ponar

May the silenced speak once again

Foreword

It's not my intention to shock or disturb anyone with the following material. It is solely my aim to tell as much of the truth as possible about what happened to my family in Vilnius during the Second World War. To this end I have left out the worst details which have no direct link to my family members. What is left, a very short summary, is gruesome enough in my opinion. If however the reader wishes to know more about these events in the Vilnius region then I recommend the sources below along with a number of other books and internet sites.

Trip 1, Vilnius, 6th-8th July, 2010

Vilna Ghetto

Silver birches raced by as the aeroplane furiously tried to come to a standstill. Touchdown at the Kaunas International Airport, Lithuania. As far as I know the first family member to return to Der Hejm, the Yiddish homeland, since WWII.

From there my wife and I drove a hired car to Vilnius.

With very little time, we checked into the hotel and went straight into the old town, into the former ghetto.

This plaque above showing the map of the two ghettos marks exactly the spot where the gates to the Vilna Ghetto in the Rūdninkų Street were situated. Our hotel also stood in this street. The hotel itself was just outside the main ghetto (see photo below left). The entrance to the ghetto was a few metres further up the street.

The ghetto gates in Rūdninkų Street. [VG]

The location of the Vilna Ghetto is marked by a plaque hanging on the building above. [VG]

From there we went straight to the Žemaitijos Street (then known as Strašūno Street). This is where Betty's sister, Faigel Daiches (née Lulinska), Faigel's husband, Leib, and their two daughters, Basia, 13 years of age at the time, and Rasza, 12 years old, were moved to during the forming of the two ghettos [JG].

Photo Faigel and Leib Daiches on their wedding day, Vilna, early 1920s (collection Diana Epstein)

The forming of the ghettos and the forced removals lasted about 24 hours from Sunday 31st August, 2 p.m. until the afternoon of Monday 1st September 1941. 29,000 Jews were moved to the main ghetto. 9,000 Jews, mostly elderly, disabled and infirm were moved to the smaller ghetto which only lasted until 21st October 1941 [GS].

My wife took the following photograph when she visited Lithuania in March 2008. Both she and I had no idea at the time of the significance of this building.

We discovered during this visit that this is the very block of apartments that my family were moved to, Žemaitijos number 9, formerly Strašūno number 11 [GA]. Looking at the facade it must have been quite a grand building when it was built. At some point, as is indicated by the sign saying "Saul's First-class Kerosene Store" in Yiddish and Polish, part of the building, presumably the courtyard, was turned into a petrol store. This sign is one of the few of its kind still preserved in Vilnius.

A glance inside the courtyard reveals that seemingly little has changed since 1945.

Nowadays the apartment block is inhabited by students and the poor.

Holocaust Exhibition "The Green House"

The next stop the following day was the Holocaust Exhibition, part of the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum, off the Pylimo Street. The exhibition in this  picturesque "Green House", as it is also referred to, tells the horrific story of the shoah in Lithuania, and in particular describes the people, events and locations of the tragedy which unfolded in Vilnius.

The first mark the Jews of the ghetto had to wear was a yellow 'J' within a yellow circle on a white piece of cloth.

After this a number of different variations on this theme followed. The last and possibly the most humiliating of all, however, was the dog tag [GS].

On the dog tag above you can see a W and G for Wilna Getto, in the middle an identification number and at the bottom an M for "Mann" or a W for "Weib" (woman). These dog tags were issued during the census of May 1942, in which we were able to trace the Daiches family. The books which were compiled from the Ghetto Prisoner Lists census records and which were on view in the museum also state the occupation of the head of the household. The Nazis had no use for the very young, the elderly and the infirm. They only needed able-bodied Jews. Slave labour for the war effort. Leib Daiches was registered as a tinsmith (Lith. skarininkas) [ZM]. A trade which has all but disappeared, I had to look it up on the internet! It's this work which kept his family alive for so long while thousands of Jews including Faigel's own sister, Dvora, and Dvora's husband were being taken away to the Ponar forest to be executed.
The Daiches family shared an appartment with the Rozen family; Mendel and Michla Rozen and their two daughters, Ester (16) and Chana Rozen (15), only a couple of years older than the Daiches girls. Conditions would have been very cramped. In total 349 people were cooped up in this building. [JG] For two years they lived here in constant fear and uncertainty. The fact that Betty's other sister Dvora and her husband are not registered in the census of 1942 means that they were killed sometime between August 1941 and May 1942.

Photo Dvora and Sholem Golomb, Vilna, 1920's (collection Diana Epstein)

After visiting the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum (see Chapter Vilna, Wilno, Vilnius) we left for Ponar.

Ponar

The deeper we entered the forest on the road towards Ponar the more stifling the air around us seemed to become. Passing the village of Paneriai as it's known in Lithuanian I couldn't help thinking that the ancestors of the villagers we passed would have heard regularly the gunshots of the executioners, the screams of the massacred, would have seen the smoke of the exhumed bodies being burned by the Nazis in 1943 to cover up their crimes.

Finally we reached the site. It took a few minutes before we mustered the will to get out of the car. Everything in us begged us to go back, back to the "civilised" world.

Before the war Ponar was a popular place for the Vilnians to visit at weekends to cool down during the hot summers and to picnic. When the Soviets invaded in June 1940 they dug a number of pits in the Ponar forest to store large oil tanks [WP]. Their work however was unfinished when the German army invaded Lithuania. The Nazis had a whole new purpose in mind for the site. This would become one of their many kingdoms of death.

The condemned were transported by road and by rail. In their thousands.

At the outbreak of the war around 77,000 Jews lived in Vilna. 38,000 Jews were forced into the two ghettos [GS]. In just a few days' time the Nazis and the Lithuanian Special SD Squad managed to shoot and kill around 40,000 Jews. After that, during further operations, on average a thousand to three thousand people at a time, men, women and children, were taken from the ghetto to be exterminated. Jews from the whole region were also brought here as well as about 20,000 ethnic Polish and around 8,000 Soviet prisoners of war. In total almost 100,000 people were murdered on these grounds.

There wasn't a living soul around. Only the whispers of the dead in our heads. Walking through the forest we came across several pits. The prisoners were led into the pits, were forced to undress themselves and were subsequently shot dead. To save bullets, small children and babies were simply thrown into the pit to suffocate  and starve under the weight of the victims who were thrown in on top of them.

Jews assembled in one of the pits while execution in progress [VG]

One of the killing pits today

Corpse-burning pit [VG]

Above the pit in which in 1944 the corpse-burning unit (Sonderkommando), formed out of 80 prisoners of the Stutthof concentration camp, exhumed and burned the bodies in an attempt to cover up the Nazis' crimes. [VG] Amazingly this unit managed to escape, digging a tunnel 30 metres long from out of the pit and into the forest. Eleven survived the war to tell the world of the attrocities. [WP] Below is a photo of the same pit as above. In the middle is a replica of the conveyor belt which was used to transport the exhumed bodies to the corpse-burning area.

Corpse-burning pit today

We felt physically sick and just wanted to get over and done with what we had come to do. Nervously fumbling to get the stones we had brought from our garden in Holland out of their packaging I tried to pull myself together to say the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead.

I laid eight stones at the Jewish monument which wasn't erected until 1991. The older Soviet monuments only mention in vaguer terms victims of fascism. A stone for Faigel, for Leib, for Basia, for Rasza, for Dvora, for Dvora's husband who's first name we don't know, for all the other family members whom we will never know and for all the victims of the Nazis who tried to wipe out our people.

Afterword

Below a text by S. Bistrickas outside the tiny memorial centre of Ponar.

We were about to leave when suddenly a man, the caretaker of the memorial centre, approached seemingly out of nowhere. I was so glad to see another living soul that I immediately shook his hand.  An elderly man but tall and vital, he was very warm and welcoming, in a quiet and dignified way. My wife started a conversation with this man in Russian, the only language they shared (my Dutch wife studied Russian twenty years ago). Showing us around the small but extremely informative museum he insisted that if we wished to return that we were to call him, any time, day or night.
One of the things I find hard to accept is that our family members do not have a date of death. Among the exhibits were the meticulous lists that the Nazis kept of all who were executed. This gives me good hope that their date of death can be retrieved from the archives kept by the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum.


[JG] JewishGen, http://www.jewishgen.org/databases/Holocaust/

[GS] Grigori Szur, De Joden van Wilno - Een kroniek 1941-1944, Uitgeverij Jan Mets, Amsterdam, 1997

[GA] Genrich Agranovski, Irina Guzenberg, Darlis design and colour, Vilnius, 2008
[VG] Chronicles of the Vilna Ghetto, http://www.vilnaghetto.com/
[WP] Wikipedia, Ponary massacre, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponary_massacre
[ZM] Jewish museum. Lists of prisoners. Vol. 1., Vilnius, 1996