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Diario di Ponary: Testimonianza diretta del genocidio ebraico in Lituania, 1941-1943
Piccole strisce di carta infilate in bottiglie di limonata conservano il ricordo delle migliaia di colpi di fucile esplosi nel bosco di Ponary, località nei dintorni di Vilnius, a partire dal luglio 1941 fino al novembre 1943, periodo nel quale oltre 60.000 ebrei polacchi e russi furono lì massacrati e gettati in enormi fosse dai nazisti tedeschi e dai lituani collaborazionisti. A registrare la Shoah della cosiddetta “Gerusalemme di Lituania” fu il giornalista Kazimierz Sakowicz. In un diario sconvolgente e oggettivo, Sakowicz ha annotato il numero delle vittime, la vendita dei loro vestiti agli abitanti del luogo, i flussi di camion che per oltre due anni sono transitati davanti alla sua abitazione trasportando prigionieri diretti al luogo delle loro esecuzioni. Sebbene l’autore non sia sopravvissuto alla Seconda guerra mondiale, queste pagine, tradotte per la prima volta in italiano, arrivano a noi come una delle poche e meglio documentate testimonianze della follia antisemita in terra lituana.
147 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 1, 2005
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
June 19, 2018
This is an important primary source which records the murder of thousands of Jews and non-Jews at Ponary in Lithuania by Germans and Lithuanians between 1941 to 1943.
January 18, 2010
Ponary Diary is Kazimierz Sakowicz's objective notes reporting out on the extermination of Jews, Poles, and Soviets in his town of Ponary. He writes entries on pieces of paper then stuffs the sheets into lemonade bottles before burying them in his yard. The bottles are dug up after the war and pieced together; the entries were first published in Polish in 1999.
Entries are interspersed with historical information and context that helps the reader understand what is going on, which I found very helpful. I could compare and contrast the hindsight information collected from various sources against the first person accounts and see how they fit together and complement each other.
The objectiveness of the material - thousands of people, mostly Jews, being shot to death, naked, in a shallow pit dug into the ground - makes it a little easier to get through the pages without breaking down. The objectiveness also allows more of an opportunity to think about what happened, which left me with a heavy heart and horrible feeling in my stomach.
I wonder what Sakowicz's intent was when he started detailing the events of Ponary. I also wonder how he felt witnessing the truckloads of people, hearing the screams, then the shots, followed by silence. Unfortunately, we will never know because he was shot while riding his bicycle in 1944.
Entries are interspersed with historical information and context that helps the reader understand what is going on, which I found very helpful. I could compare and contrast the hindsight information collected from various sources against the first person accounts and see how they fit together and complement each other.
The objectiveness of the material - thousands of people, mostly Jews, being shot to death, naked, in a shallow pit dug into the ground - makes it a little easier to get through the pages without breaking down. The objectiveness also allows more of an opportunity to think about what happened, which left me with a heavy heart and horrible feeling in my stomach.
I wonder what Sakowicz's intent was when he started detailing the events of Ponary. I also wonder how he felt witnessing the truckloads of people, hearing the screams, then the shots, followed by silence. Unfortunately, we will never know because he was shot while riding his bicycle in 1944.
November 12, 2014
Ugh. This is not a book, but a historical document. And what a document. A lot of it reads like the following,
Friday, August 13
One of the policemen says that near the hut he finished off a Jew, who lived for three days longer. Sieniuc's dog brought his guts from the base. Again ravens.
Laconic reports, almost like snapshots, of a mass murder which goes on and on and on and on, 1942, month after month, 1943, month after month, the Lithuanians shoot and loot Jews, the Germans shoot and loot Jews, some try to escape and are shot and die, some MAYBE manage to escape (a few hundred survived the Vilna Ghetto), partisans, communists, Poles, Jews, Jews, Jews.
I feel sick. I can't read much of this nightmare at one time, but have to portion it out and take care of my emotional well-being along the way. I somehow think that for the topic, I should probably rather have picked up "Bloodlands" or "Ordinary Men", but just like when curiosity killed the cat, I couldn't lay off this book.
An important historical document. But awful. Horrible. And it NEVER STOPS!
Friday, August 13
One of the policemen says that near the hut he finished off a Jew, who lived for three days longer. Sieniuc's dog brought his guts from the base. Again ravens.
Laconic reports, almost like snapshots, of a mass murder which goes on and on and on and on, 1942, month after month, 1943, month after month, the Lithuanians shoot and loot Jews, the Germans shoot and loot Jews, some try to escape and are shot and die, some MAYBE manage to escape (a few hundred survived the Vilna Ghetto), partisans, communists, Poles, Jews, Jews, Jews.
I feel sick. I can't read much of this nightmare at one time, but have to portion it out and take care of my emotional well-being along the way. I somehow think that for the topic, I should probably rather have picked up "Bloodlands" or "Ordinary Men", but just like when curiosity killed the cat, I couldn't lay off this book.
An important historical document. But awful. Horrible. And it NEVER STOPS!
June 5, 2017
Sakowicz is one of a remarkable set of heroes of the Holocaust, who set about--at great risk to themselves--to document the atrocities they witnessed. Sakowicz, with a journalist's nose for news, stealthily observed what he could and clinically recorded a long series of appalling actions, some by the occupying Gestapo but most by local Lithuanians. Not a fun read, and best taken in small doses, but thought-provoking to say the least.
March 3, 2015
5 stars for being a singular historical document, totally indispensable for anyone curious not only about Lithuanian Holocaust history but Holocaust history in general. it's a unique perspective, uncanny and horrifying in its veracity. giving it anything less than 5 stars seems silly -- you can't critique a person's diary. the translation seems fine, and the context is helpful.
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June 28, 2023Nedaviau balo, tačiau tai tikrai nereiškia, jog knyga prasta. Atvirkščiai - šis istorinis šaltinis ir dienoraštis, leidžia mum nepamiršti to tamsaus, be galo slogaus ir niūraus istorijos etapo.
Dienoraščio autorius viską perteikia taip, kad net pirmą kartą apie žydų genocidą ir holokaustą išgirdęs žmogus suprastų ir galėtų susidaryti įspūdį, koks siaubas ir nežmoniškumas tai yra.
Dienoraščio autorius viską perteikia taip, kad net pirmą kartą apie žydų genocidą ir holokaustą išgirdęs žmogus suprastų ir galėtų susidaryti įspūdį, koks siaubas ir nežmoniškumas tai yra.
August 15, 2025
I grew up reading and learning about the Holocaust from my youngest years. My father was a Holocaust survivor from Poland, and I don’t ever remember a time when I didn’t know about it, even in my early memories. I was raised on his stories of survival as an intact family by hiding out in the forests, graveyards, hay stacks, or anywhere they possibly could to survive another day. In 2018, we knew my father’s pancreatic cancer had been progressing, and his doctor told us that if we wanted to take a big trip, that was the time to do it, before he got any weaker.
He didn’t bring me to see his childhood home in Poland, he didn’t bring me to see where he spent his childhood hiding in fear of extermination. He brought me on a trip to Israel: the very first country where he wasn’t hated for being a Jew. He wasn’t a minority. It is in Israel that the first pictures of my father were taken in his life that he was photographed with a smile on his face, when he was already a teenager, who had survived a genocide that killed 6 million Jews, and 90% of the Jewish people in Poland.
In Israel, we made it a priority to visit Yad Vashem (English translation: A Memorial and a Name), an incredibly moving Holocaust Museum. I cried a lot, but by the time we left, everyone had tears in their eyes. The museum itself is a stark, geometric concrete structure, that feels almost claustrophobic as you walk through, following the path designated, with the walls seeming to close in around you as the Holocaust goes on. One of the most memorable parts of the visit was when my father pointed out a poem written about the Ponary Massacre. This was written by Alexander Wolkowyski and translated into Yiddish with two stanzas added by Shmerke Kaczerginski while they were held in the Vilna Ghetto:
"Quiet, quiet, let’s be silent,
Graves are growing here.
They were planted by the enemies,
See their bloom appear.
All the roads lead to Ponar now,
There are no roads back.
Papa too has vanished somewhere
And with him our luck.”
I felt like it was finally time to learn more about this little-known massacre that killed the Jews of Vilna, known as ‘the Jerusalem of Lithuania.’ The Ponary forest, just a little over 6 miles outside of the city of Vilna, was used to forage mushrooms and berries, as well as for holidays and recreation. There were wide, deep pits with embankments that the Soviets were planning to use for fuel storage, but abandoned the site when the Germans advanced into Lithuania.
Before I even started, I knew that it was going to be a difficult read. But I had no idea quite how difficult until I started reading. To start with, the author was a Polish man living in Ponary, who kept this diary and buried the pages in empty lemonade containers. He was shot dead while riding his bicycle in 1944. The deliberate choice of the word ‘a bystander’s account’ was appropriate—Sakowicz writes about the shooting deaths of about 70,000 Jewish men, women, and children with complete detachment, and maintains that distance even when the deaths included Soviet POWs and Poles.
Due to the fact that the diary is incomplete, and the entires assume that the reader knows what was going on overall. Instead, it was edited to include the historical timeline of events, as well as the different factions operating in the forest—Soviet partisan, Jewish people in hiding or part of resistance organizations, and Polish resistance members. It was much appreciated, so that I could understand the changing landscape.
It didn’t take long for me to be shocked. The very first entry stood out to me as a sign of his detachment from what he was writing about:
“July 11
Quite nice weather, warm, white clouds, windy, some shots from the forest. Probably exercises, because in the forest there is an ammunition dump on the way to the village of Nowosiolki. It’s about 4 P.M.; the shots last an hour or two. On the Grodzienka [Wilno-Grodno high road] I discover that many Jews have been “transported” to the forest. And suddenly they shoot them. This was the first day of executions.”
What he is describing here is Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and what has included the Holocaust by Bullets. Around 70,000 Jews were brought into the forest, stripped, beaten into the pits, and shot by Germans and their Lithuanian collaborators.
I could only wonder what the author was thinking while journaling a mass murder in real time. None of us know what we would do in that situation, but even keeping these notes was enough to get him killed. I can’t imagine writing about being able to see truckloads of people stripped, beaten, and then murdered, and I couldn’t even conceive of how he was able to write about it in such a detached way, talking about the weather before segueing into carloads, then truckloads, and finally train cars full of human beings to be exterminated.
His bias shines through, referring to Soviets hiding in the forests as ‘partisans,’ while referring to Jews hiding in the forest as ‘bandits.’ He doesn’t seem to feel anything towards the massacre he saw: while 70,000 Jews were being systematically shot, even when Poles and Soviet POWs were added to the death rolls. I would have liked to know what he was thinking and feeling while writing these entries, and if he wondered if someday he would be next. I wondered why he even recorded it—to document a historical event? His own unique type of resistance to an oppressive and constantly threatening dictatorship?
For me, the most horrifying part of this was that a flourishing community of people who lived there, worked there, studied there, and loved there for hundreds of years was able to be almost completely exterminated with indifference from the non-Jewish friends and neighbors, for the most part. This wasn’t an easy read, but I felt like it was a really important one. My father told me that during the Holocaust, his family made a promise that if any of them survived, they would bear witness. I was raised with my father speaking about his own experiences in public settings every chance he got, and seeing him be so willing to revisit the worst years of his life on a regular basis inspired a strong drive for me to continue to read Holocaust memoirs and nonfiction accounts. If you can handle it, this short read is well worth the time. If not, I strongly suggest picking up another nonfiction about the Holocaust.
He didn’t bring me to see his childhood home in Poland, he didn’t bring me to see where he spent his childhood hiding in fear of extermination. He brought me on a trip to Israel: the very first country where he wasn’t hated for being a Jew. He wasn’t a minority. It is in Israel that the first pictures of my father were taken in his life that he was photographed with a smile on his face, when he was already a teenager, who had survived a genocide that killed 6 million Jews, and 90% of the Jewish people in Poland.
In Israel, we made it a priority to visit Yad Vashem (English translation: A Memorial and a Name), an incredibly moving Holocaust Museum. I cried a lot, but by the time we left, everyone had tears in their eyes. The museum itself is a stark, geometric concrete structure, that feels almost claustrophobic as you walk through, following the path designated, with the walls seeming to close in around you as the Holocaust goes on. One of the most memorable parts of the visit was when my father pointed out a poem written about the Ponary Massacre. This was written by Alexander Wolkowyski and translated into Yiddish with two stanzas added by Shmerke Kaczerginski while they were held in the Vilna Ghetto:
"Quiet, quiet, let’s be silent,
Graves are growing here.
They were planted by the enemies,
See their bloom appear.
All the roads lead to Ponar now,
There are no roads back.
Papa too has vanished somewhere
And with him our luck.”
I felt like it was finally time to learn more about this little-known massacre that killed the Jews of Vilna, known as ‘the Jerusalem of Lithuania.’ The Ponary forest, just a little over 6 miles outside of the city of Vilna, was used to forage mushrooms and berries, as well as for holidays and recreation. There were wide, deep pits with embankments that the Soviets were planning to use for fuel storage, but abandoned the site when the Germans advanced into Lithuania.
Before I even started, I knew that it was going to be a difficult read. But I had no idea quite how difficult until I started reading. To start with, the author was a Polish man living in Ponary, who kept this diary and buried the pages in empty lemonade containers. He was shot dead while riding his bicycle in 1944. The deliberate choice of the word ‘a bystander’s account’ was appropriate—Sakowicz writes about the shooting deaths of about 70,000 Jewish men, women, and children with complete detachment, and maintains that distance even when the deaths included Soviet POWs and Poles.
Due to the fact that the diary is incomplete, and the entires assume that the reader knows what was going on overall. Instead, it was edited to include the historical timeline of events, as well as the different factions operating in the forest—Soviet partisan, Jewish people in hiding or part of resistance organizations, and Polish resistance members. It was much appreciated, so that I could understand the changing landscape.
It didn’t take long for me to be shocked. The very first entry stood out to me as a sign of his detachment from what he was writing about:
“July 11
Quite nice weather, warm, white clouds, windy, some shots from the forest. Probably exercises, because in the forest there is an ammunition dump on the way to the village of Nowosiolki. It’s about 4 P.M.; the shots last an hour or two. On the Grodzienka [Wilno-Grodno high road] I discover that many Jews have been “transported” to the forest. And suddenly they shoot them. This was the first day of executions.”
What he is describing here is Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and what has included the Holocaust by Bullets. Around 70,000 Jews were brought into the forest, stripped, beaten into the pits, and shot by Germans and their Lithuanian collaborators.
I could only wonder what the author was thinking while journaling a mass murder in real time. None of us know what we would do in that situation, but even keeping these notes was enough to get him killed. I can’t imagine writing about being able to see truckloads of people stripped, beaten, and then murdered, and I couldn’t even conceive of how he was able to write about it in such a detached way, talking about the weather before segueing into carloads, then truckloads, and finally train cars full of human beings to be exterminated.
His bias shines through, referring to Soviets hiding in the forests as ‘partisans,’ while referring to Jews hiding in the forest as ‘bandits.’ He doesn’t seem to feel anything towards the massacre he saw: while 70,000 Jews were being systematically shot, even when Poles and Soviet POWs were added to the death rolls. I would have liked to know what he was thinking and feeling while writing these entries, and if he wondered if someday he would be next. I wondered why he even recorded it—to document a historical event? His own unique type of resistance to an oppressive and constantly threatening dictatorship?
For me, the most horrifying part of this was that a flourishing community of people who lived there, worked there, studied there, and loved there for hundreds of years was able to be almost completely exterminated with indifference from the non-Jewish friends and neighbors, for the most part. This wasn’t an easy read, but I felt like it was a really important one. My father told me that during the Holocaust, his family made a promise that if any of them survived, they would bear witness. I was raised with my father speaking about his own experiences in public settings every chance he got, and seeing him be so willing to revisit the worst years of his life on a regular basis inspired a strong drive for me to continue to read Holocaust memoirs and nonfiction accounts. If you can handle it, this short read is well worth the time. If not, I strongly suggest picking up another nonfiction about the Holocaust.
Read
June 13, 2021Books like this one defy rating. Thoroughly disturbing and shattering the peace of mind.
March 21, 2024
poignant
March 28, 2025
A Bystander's Account Of A Mass Murder - A place where 60,70k people at least were killed.
A guy with an attic, with a view of the site.
He sees, and he writes.
He writes straight, bereft of emotion.
It seems murders do not bother him.
A group is brought to site, or sometimes a few.
Before coming there some of them didn't even knew.
Taking them to Kovno or Camps in the East.
These were the words they were told.
At the site they strip, and leave their belongings. They are asked to walk to the pit.
Some cry, some plead. Some run, some spit.
Men, women, children alike.
Tossed into the pits time after time.
Daily number range from zero to hundreds, f
or that one day even thousandeth.
They pile the dead on top of one another, some alive are shot twice.
Some brave to run at the last chance, some lucky to escape.
Ok, this how he writes his words, looking from the attic he notes it all.
The cars, the trucks, the officers, he mentions them all..
At each page we read 'what is going on?',
a genocide at the doorsteps of the dawn.
On each day there are shots fired,
from pistol, guns and rifles.
Some continuous like a opera of sorts,
some in periods with breaks among the lots.
Ravens, animals, and men all take advantage,
of the horror situation for some game.
They take and sell the valuables for some shine,
and under the moon they all spend the night.
And all this he notes and he notes,
the names, the places, and the fur, sheepskin coats.
Be it winter, summer, or spring; the rounds and the trials goes the same.
For each on the road and at the base, real becomes their horror, and ending is their time.
Kazimier notes this all and writes, O! today a warm, and beautiful summer night!
A guy with an attic, with a view of the site.
He sees, and he writes.
He writes straight, bereft of emotion.
It seems murders do not bother him.
A group is brought to site, or sometimes a few.
Before coming there some of them didn't even knew.
Taking them to Kovno or Camps in the East.
These were the words they were told.
At the site they strip, and leave their belongings. They are asked to walk to the pit.
Some cry, some plead. Some run, some spit.
Men, women, children alike.
Tossed into the pits time after time.
Daily number range from zero to hundreds, f
or that one day even thousandeth.
They pile the dead on top of one another, some alive are shot twice.
Some brave to run at the last chance, some lucky to escape.
Ok, this how he writes his words, looking from the attic he notes it all.
The cars, the trucks, the officers, he mentions them all..
At each page we read 'what is going on?',
a genocide at the doorsteps of the dawn.
On each day there are shots fired,
from pistol, guns and rifles.
Some continuous like a opera of sorts,
some in periods with breaks among the lots.
Ravens, animals, and men all take advantage,
of the horror situation for some game.
They take and sell the valuables for some shine,
and under the moon they all spend the night.
And all this he notes and he notes,
the names, the places, and the fur, sheepskin coats.
Be it winter, summer, or spring; the rounds and the trials goes the same.
For each on the road and at the base, real becomes their horror, and ending is their time.
Kazimier notes this all and writes, O! today a warm, and beautiful summer night!
February 23, 2025
Kazimierz Sakowicz lived in a house near the road through town. He had a perfect view of at least two of the pits in Ponary Forest that the Germans and Lithuanians were using as death pits. They were killing all the Jews of Vilnius and surrounding towns and putting them in these huge pits. They were also killing communists, political opponents, Russians, and anyone else against Hitler. They took the Jews from the Ghetto and placed them in prison until they had room in the pits and then marched them through the town to Ponary and killed them. Their clothes and other belongings were left for the soldiers to salvage or place in sacks to be sent to a sorting center and sent to Germany. This occurred from 1941-1943.
During this time, Kazimierz Sakowicz wrote a diary on calendars, pieces of scrap paper, in notebooks, and on any paper he could find. The dated entries were just notes of what was going on. He noted how many men, women, and children were murdered each day. He named names of those who helped in the killing. What he did could have resulted in his death if he had been caught. He hid these scraps of paper in lemonade jars and buried them. He knew he would be sent to his death if he was caught.
After the war, his diary was found by a young girl from the town who had been in the ghetto but had managed not to be sent to the forest like the rest of her family. She would take his diary and have it printed so the world could see what he had seen.
During this time, Kazimierz Sakowicz wrote a diary on calendars, pieces of scrap paper, in notebooks, and on any paper he could find. The dated entries were just notes of what was going on. He noted how many men, women, and children were murdered each day. He named names of those who helped in the killing. What he did could have resulted in his death if he had been caught. He hid these scraps of paper in lemonade jars and buried them. He knew he would be sent to his death if he was caught.
After the war, his diary was found by a young girl from the town who had been in the ghetto but had managed not to be sent to the forest like the rest of her family. She would take his diary and have it printed so the world could see what he had seen.
September 19, 2025
The Lithuanian Holocaust - an exercise in local cruelty. Watch as local Lithuanians round up and shoot Jews. Or maybe they will beat them to death. This is a common theme in Lithuania, the locals do much of the damage. This is a straight-forward account of actions taken against the local Jews and sone other parties as well. A fascinating point, how quickly an economy of trading Jewish possessions takes root among the locals.
There are some heartening moments when the Jews resist or flee. We don't hear enough about this and most of our assumptions about Jews passively accepting the bullet is wrong.
There are some heartening moments when the Jews resist or flee. We don't hear enough about this and most of our assumptions about Jews passively accepting the bullet is wrong.
February 1, 2025
Horrifying and shocking bystander account of the mass murders committed at Ponary, Lithuania during the Holocaust. The writer/diarist pulls no punches
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