BOOKS | PONAR | LITHUANIA
BOOK REVIEW
by Roland Binet (De Panne, Belgium)
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In 2016, Chris Heath read an item in the New York Times about a tunnel that had been discovered “at a Holocaust killing site”. It was referring to
Ponar near Vilna (Yiddish Ponár, Polish Ponary, today’s Paneriai outside Vilnius, capital city of Lithuania). It is around ten kilometers (six miles) southwest of Vilnius city center. This caught his attention and he decided to write a book about this heroic feat. The main title is borrowed from two lines that Shmerke Kaczerginski had written in his poem “Shtiler, Shtiler” (Quieter, quieter) that was put to music and sung in the Vilna Ghetto.
Ponar: 100,000 persons killed by bullets from summer 1941 to spring of 1944, about 70% of them Jews including women, children, and the elderly.
Ponar: List of twelve escapees from Ponar who survived (April 1944): Josef Bielic, Abraham Blazer, Yitzhak Dogin, Yuli Farber, Shlomo Gol, David Kantorovich, Zalman Matzkin, Lejzer Owsiejczyk, Konstantin Potanin, Motke Zeidel, Adam Zinger, Peter Zinin
At the end of 1943 and at the beginning of 1944, some men and women had been ordered to Ponar, imprisoned there, living and sleeping in pits, chained, not for immediate execution but for a macabre task at a point in the war where the Nazis were concerned about what might be found of their genocide should they lose the war. The team brought there was approximately eighty strong and its task had been to dig out the corpses and burn them. Four women did menial work. This was “Operation Blobel” or “Aktion 1005”. Heath notes that some men had perhaps seen a discarded newspaper page about Jews who had escaped from The Ninth Fort in Kaunas (Kovno, Yiddish Kóvne), which gave them the idea to flee, but this is dubious. They knew full well though that after completion of their task, they too would be shot. Twelve escaped and the rest were shot (including those who refused to join the escape).
Heath broadens the core purpose of telling their story — before, during and after the war — by immersing himself body and soul in the Holocaust as it developed in Vilna and on the mass murder site Ponar. He did exhaustive research, spent years in the study of documents in diverse languages and in archives in a number of countries, in the study of books as well as documentaries and testimony of surviving witnesses. He also did interviews himself with family members of survivors. He sought advice from renowned Lithuanian film maker Saulius Beržinis. He also had telephone conversations with Jerusalem based Wiesenthal Centre director Efraim Zuroff who advised him (I don’t understand why Heath sometimes uses the qualification “so-called Nazi-Hunter” which is clearly pejorative). He also met and talked with members of archaeologists’ teams, both Lithuanians and Americans, who had made surveys of the Ponar site in order to find where the entrance of the tunnel had been as well as to document its reconstructed path.
Heath is a talented story teller. His recounting of the lives of the escapees before they were drafted into the burning brigade and during their time in that hell on earth, their lives until Soviet forces freed the country from the Germans, and later when they could take up their civilian lives again, reads like a thriller. He succeeds remarkably in making us understand what constant haphazard occurrences of luck had been necessary to preserve their lives during the war. He takes us into the pits where they lived and slept. He tells us that the basic tasks of body burning had been subdivided into different work details: diggers, hook men, dentists, carriers, pyre builders, wood providers, burners, bone crushers, sifters, trace erasers.
There are a few pages devoted to the awful view these men saw when they began to dig up the pits to unearth the corpses and pile them onto the pyres for incineration. We learn what it is to dig an escape tunnel with a handful of tools, shoring it up, living in anxiety to be discovered and shot on the spot when roll calls came at night. He describes in detail the escapers’ evasions, what it was like crawling in the long tunnel, cutting off the barbed wire fences. And, when they were discovered, the bright lights all over the landscape, spraying of fire from rifles and machine guns. How some of the escapees had their hands smelled by dogs in pursuit coming quite close to them, and because of their own cadaver-stench taking them for corpses and ignoring them. The stench of corpses on the escapees was so strong that when some of them joined the partisans, they smelled of death for days and were avoided. In later life Motke Zeidel suffered from an obsessive-compulsive disorder — the constant need to wash his hands.
Abraham Blazer was a Polish Jew who did well under the Soviet occupation, he had first survived a shooting in Ponar, had been recaptured and finally sent to the burn brigade; he also had been one of the leading initiators of the project to dig a tunnel and escape (he died in Israel in 1948 after having been reunited with his wife and their son in Lithuania; he had written his story in Polish, 92 pages, abruptly ending on the words ‘the ghetto will be liquidated’). Heath also meticulously pursues the fate of every one whose name was mentioned in the small museum at the Ponar site. Most survivors went to Israel, some to the United States. Yuli Farber settled in the USSR, became an academic, taught at a Moscow university and published books in the field of communications.
The first important voice who gave public testimony about his ordeal was Schlomo Gol who was asked to testify at the Nuremberg Trial. The name “Ponar” was not mentioned in the affidavit nor in his public testimony although he testified that among the corpses in the pits he had recognized his own brother’s body (his account, “Escape from Ponar” was published in 1954, in Hebrew). Two other survivors from the tunnel, Motke Zeidel and Yitzhak Dogun, had been interviewed at length for the breathtaking nine-hour documentary Shoah by Frenchman Claude Lanzmann. It is worth mentioning that Dogun might not have survived at all because in April 1944 he had discovered members of his family slain in a pit; he nearly went berserk but still went with the first group of escapees. Both men also gave interviews in 1994 and 1995 over their ordeal; they also both found the strength to return to Ponar.
In 1980, the Black Book narrated – according to Heath in 7,000 words – Yuli Farber’s account. Why does Heath name only Ilya Ehrenburg as sole author? It is historically established that Vassily Grossman co-authored the book and preserved a copy from the MVD’s house searches, and gave it to a friend. It finally got published in the West.
The book is formidable for readers who require an overview of what Ponar had been as one of the iconic symbols of Nazi destructive ideology, local collaboration, dehumanization of whole segments of populations and extermination of the Jews mainly by Lithuanian killers. Heath has managed to find nearly every single article, every book, every film or documentary that ever dealt with that subject. Did you know that the first publication was an article, called “Ponary” in May 1944, one month after the escape, in a partisans’ newspaper called Za Wolność? Later, two of the famed “Paper Brigade” members, Yiddish poets Abraham (Avrom) Sutzkever and Shmerke Kaczerginski, wrote accounts of what had happened at Ponar. In September 1944, the newspaper Tiesa published a five-part series by Kaczerginski including interviews of some of the escapees.
The book includes a lengthy account of Kazimierz Sakowicz’s well-known diary which had first been published in Poland in 1999, and published in English in 2005 under the title Ponary Diary 1941-1943: A Bystander’s Account of a Mass Murder. Two Israeli film makers, Limor Pinhasov and Yaron Kaftori made a documentary based on Sakowicz’s book, ‘Out of the Forest’, first shown in 2002. They had gone to Lithuania and interviewed people still living in the vicinity of Ponar, who, evidently told of what they had seen as children and revealing that some of their parents had cooked for the killers (Lithuanian film maker Saulius Beržinis located most of the still living witnesses). Heath, too, went in 2017 to the Ponar area with Beržinis and heard first-hand about the scavenging that transpired after the war when “some of them would come at night with torches and would dig up the corpses and take the teeth.”
Heath also writes about some of the contemporary issues in Lithuania regarding the Jews: the desecration of the site in 2011, the “Double Genocide” theory, the morally sickening “investigations” by Lithuanian prosecutors against partisan heroes Yitzhak Arad, Rachel Margolis and Fania Brantsovsky, and the draft of the 2020 parliamentary bill declaring that Lithuania did not participate in the Holocaust. He mentions Rūta Vanagaitė’s book Mūsiškiai (Our People) and how she was publicly hounded. His descriptions of the Vilna Ghetto, its conditions and how the Jews fared there is quite adequate. I disagree with his opinion that the Holocaust started right in Lithuania (there had been two recent documentaries on BBC 2 along the same lines), and that there had been no massive killings of Jews prior to June 1941 in Lithuania. This is forgetting that the real blueprint for the Holocaust began right in September 1939 in Poland with outright killings by Einsatzgruppen (20,000 at the end of the month, Poles as well as Jews), and later by the Nazi annihilationist policy of enslaving, dehumanizing and starving the Jews in ghettos. Thousands had already died of hunger alone before June 1941.
Should the book get a new edition, some errors might be corrected: on page 6, the correct date should read “summer of 1940”; on page 8, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia should be added to the list of countries of Western-Europe occupied by Germany; ‘KGB’ should be replaced by NKVD (in 1945) on page 247; on page 238, Eichmann is described as “one of Hitler’s key deputies”. And, sorry, but the subtitle smacks of shaman or feel-good books. The qualification “story of the Holocaust” is totally irreverent.
Chris Heath is not a historian, but his book deserves a wide public because it deals fairly and thoroughly with a horrific, painful, barbaric, aspect of the war and a killing field of the Jews and other enemies of Nazi Germany that many cultivated readers in the West have no idea it ever existed and flourished with the active participation of Lithuanian killers, a fact still negated by so many ruses and tricks, by campaigns of harassment, defamation and delegitimization by Lithuanian state-sponsored agencies.
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RELATED:
Defending History’s 15 Nov. 2010 report on the “Revolving Posters at Ponar” episode
Defending History’s Ponar section