Ponary: The Killing Forest Outside Vilna

A few miles southwest of Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, the railway line runs through a quiet pine forest near a stop called Paneriai — in Polish, Ponary; in Yiddish, Ponar. Between July 1941 and July 1944, German SS and police units and Lithuanian collaborators murdered roughly 100,000 people in this forest. About 70,000 of them were Jews, most from the city that Jews had called “the Jerusalem of Lithuania.” Ponary was not a camp with barracks and gas chambers. It was a place of open pits, where people were brought by truck, by train, or on foot, and shot.

The Jerusalem of Lithuania

Before the war, Vilna was one of the great centers of Jewish life in Europe. It was home to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, to famous yeshivas and libraries, to Yiddish newspapers, theaters, schools, and political movements of every kind. In 1941 the city held roughly 60,000 Jews, including refugees who had fled from German-occupied Poland after 1939.

German forces entered Vilna on 24 June 1941, two days after the invasion of the Soviet Union. Within weeks, the killing began. Before the war the Soviet authorities had dug large circular pits in the Ponary forest for a planned fuel depot. The German occupiers saw in them a ready-made place for mass murder, hidden among trees yet close to the city and the railway.

The Killings Begin

In early July 1941, men of Einsatzkommando 9, one of the mobile killing units that followed the German army east, began rounding up Jewish men in Vilna, often on the pretext that they were needed for labor. They were taken to Ponary and shot. The Germans relied heavily on a Lithuanian unit known as the Ypatingasis būrys, or Special Squad, a group of volunteers who carried out a large share of the shootings throughout the occupation.

The killings accelerated over the summer. At the beginning of September 1941, after a staged “provocation” was used as a pretext, thousands of Jews were seized from the old Jewish quarter and murdered at Ponary. On 6 September the remaining Jews were forced into two ghettos in the narrow streets of the old city. In the weeks that followed, the smaller ghetto was emptied completely and its inhabitants sent to the forest. A series of so-called “actions” continued through the autumn, in which people without the right work permits, or simply those who could not hide in time, were taken away. By the end of 1941, German reports counted tens of thousands of Jews from Vilna and the surrounding region murdered, the overwhelming majority at Ponary.

A Witness at the Edge of the Forest

Much of what we know about the daily reality of the killings comes from Kazimierz Sakowicz, a Polish journalist who lived in a house near the edge of the forest. From July 1941 he recorded what he saw and heard: the arrival of the trucks and trains, the sound of shooting, the clothing and belongings that the killers sold afterward. He wrote on scraps of paper and hid them in bottles buried in his garden. Sakowicz was killed in 1944, but parts of his diary were recovered after the war and later published. It remains one of the very few contemporary eyewitness records of a mass shooting site written by a bystander as events unfolded.

“Let Us Not Go Like Sheep to the Slaughter”

Inside the ghetto, word of Ponary spread slowly and was hard to believe. Survivors who crawled out of the pits and made their way back to the city described what they had seen, yet many people could not accept that entire communities were being murdered. For a group of young Jews in the ghetto’s youth movements, those reports changed everything. On 1 January 1942, the poet Abba Kovner read a manifesto to a gathering of young people. It declared that Ponary was not a labor camp but a place of death, that Hitler intended to destroy all the Jews of Europe, and called on them not to go “like sheep to the slaughter.” It was among the first public statements anywhere to recognize that the Nazis were carrying out a plan of total annihilation.

Weeks later, the United Partisan Organization (FPO) was founded in the ghetto. When the Germans moved to liquidate the ghetto in September 1943, most of its remaining inhabitants were deported to labor camps in Estonia or to their deaths; many of the elderly, women, and children were murdered. Members of the FPO escaped through the sewers to the forests and fought on as partisans until liberation.

Erasing the Evidence

As the Red Army advanced in 1943, the German leadership set out to destroy the evidence of its crimes in the East, in an operation known as Aktion 1005. At Ponary, from the autumn of 1943, a unit of around 80 prisoners, most of them Jews, was forced to dig up the mass graves and burn the bodies on huge pyres of wood. The bones were crushed and the ashes mixed with soil. The prisoners lived chained in a pit and knew they would be killed when the work was finished.

Over several months, with spoons and their bare hands, they secretly dug a tunnel beneath the fence of their pit. In April 1944 they broke out at night. Most were shot during the escape, but about a dozen survived and reached the partisans. After the war, their testimony was among the most important evidence of what had happened in the forest.

Liberation and Memory

Soviet forces captured Vilnius in July 1944. Of the city’s prewar Jewish population, only a small fraction survived, among them those who had fought as partisans, hidden with non-Jewish neighbors, or endured the camps. Besides Jews, the victims of Ponary included Polish civilians and members of the Polish underground, Soviet prisoners of war, and others the occupiers considered enemies.

In 1948 survivors erected a monument at the site with inscriptions in Yiddish and Hebrew. The Soviet authorities soon replaced it with an obelisk dedicated to “victims of fascism,” with no mention of Jews, a pattern repeated across the Soviet Union, including at Babi Yar in Kyiv. Only after Lithuania regained independence did the memorial come to name the Jewish victims explicitly. Today the Paneriai Memorial, managed by the Vilna Gaon Museum of Jewish History, includes a small museum, memorials to Jewish and Polish victims, and paths that lead visitors to the pits themselves.

Why It Matters

Ponary reminds us that the Holocaust did not happen only in distant camps. A large share of its victims were shot close to their homes, in forests and ravines within sight of towns, by killers who included their own neighbors. It also shows how fragile the truth can be: the perpetrators tried to burn it, and a postwar regime tried to blur it. That we know what happened in the forest is owed to a bystander who chose to write, to prisoners who dug their way out, and to survivors who insisted on being heard.