On 24 June 1941, when Vilnius was occupied by Nazi German troops, the persecution and killing of Vilna Jews started. On 6 September 1941, the ghetto was set up in the Old Town, where 40,000 Jews were confined. The place you are standing (the current Rūdninkų Square) is a part of the territory of the former Vilna Big Ghetto.
At the beginning of September 1943, liquidation of the Vilna Ghetto started: working-age men were separated and brought to Nazi concentration camps established in Estonia and Germany, and women – to Kaiserwald concentration camp in Latvia. Non-working-aged adults and children were brought to Auschwitz-Birkenau and Paneriai. Specialists most needed by Nazis were temporarily kept alive and had to work in the forced labour camps. On 24 September the Vilna Ghetto was liquidated.
Prisoners of the Vilna Ghetto were driven or transported about 10 kilometres up to the mass massacre site (current Agrastų Street, 15). This road stretched along the current Savanorių Avenue, rising up the Paneriai Hill, and further – along the then Gardin road. We recreated this route on the map and in the city too. It consists of seven stops of the Memorial Road to Paneriai (based on the photos of Akiva Gershater) and six signposts.
Akiva Gershater (1888–1972), an Esperantist, bibliophile, and philatelist of Vilnius was among those who were placed in the Vilna Ghetto. He, like the other few thousand, managed to survive. It is believed that, after the Soviet recapture of Vilnius from Nazis, Gershater, at the request of the Jewish Museum established in 1944, walked the ten-kilometre road to Paneriai – starting from the White Pillars at the beginning of the then Savanorių Alley and ending with Aukštieji Paneriai (Upper Paneriai) each time making a stop and taking pictures of that road.
It is an extraordinary road. Particularly by this road, officers of the Security Police of Nazi Germany and Lithuanian policemen (1941–1944) drove, transported from the Vilna Ghetto, via Lukiškės Prison or forced-labour camps to the mass murder site in Paneriai and shot tens of thousands of Vilna Jews – residents of Yerusholaim De-Lita, which had existed for 600 years. Together with them, several thousand Jews from other towns of Eastern Lithuania (Švenčionys, Salos, Ašmena) were murdered.
If we could step back in time to pre-war Vilnius, asking city residents about what they associate upon hearing the word “Paneriai” (in Polish Ponary), the majority would confirm that they are very positive, similar to how they feel after mentioning the names of Birštonas or Druskininkai. In the small warm valleys of Aukštieji Paneriai and at the river, Vilnius residents liked picnicking; a town-garden was the setting in “Jogailaičiai”, and the location was granted with the status of a resort place in 1939.
After the Nazis occupied Vilnius, the Paneriai image sharply and dramatically changed and the place itself transformed. Paneriai became a territory of an unprecedented crime – the Holocaust, compared to which, according to the writer Józef Mackiewicz from Vilnius, “all the crimes of peacetime faded away”, and the word that had been evoking just positive thoughts and sensations became one that made “blood start hardening in the vessels” after hearing it. The Nazis chose for murdering, pits of the fuel base uncompleted by the Soviets in Paneriai.
Perhaps the naked numbers numbers do not make any impression, but they must also be known: from 57,000 Jews residing in Vilnius, only several thousand survived. It is estimated that in total 70,000 Jews were shot in Paneriai.
The murders in Paneriai were sadly committed by renowned Vilnius Special Unit (in German Sonderkommando) of the Nazi Security Service (SD), which was commanded by Lieutenant Juozas Šidlauskas from July 1941, and by Lieutenant Balys Norvaiša from November of the same year, both supervised by SS-Hauptscharführer Martin Weiss and others.
Author of idea and texts: Zigmas Vitkus, PhD (Klaipėda University).
