Improvements to Ponary Massacre Site

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henryk
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Improvements to Ponary Massacre Site

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Post by henryk » 06 Jan 2015, 20:20

http://www.thenews.pl/1/10/Artykul/1927 ... uote]Works begin on site of Ponary Massacre

06.01.2015 13:22

Ponary, the site of a large massacre commited by Nazi troops during WW2, will be modernised in an attempt to raise awareness about the incident.

The Ponary site is in dire need of renovation. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

“The monuments in Ponary, commemorating the murder of around 100,000 people, are outdated,” said Jaša Markas Zingeris, director of Vilnius’ Museum of Jews which is responsible for the site. “There has been talk about the need to reconstruct this place during the past twenty years. I am happy that work has finally begun.” Markas Zingeris added that a priority was to “preserve the authenticity of the site,” explaining that “The tragedy occurred in a forest, we cannot change this area into a park.”

An international competition to choose the best projects for modernising the site received 16 entries. It is understood that the currently existing monuments will remain while the paths leading to them will be improved and the onsite educational centre will be expanded.

The Ponary Massacre was the largest crime committed against the Jewish and Polish population in the Kresy region, a term used for Poland’s eastern lands which were lost as a result of the Second World War. The majority of the people massacred by Nazis at Ponary between 1941 and 1944 were Jewish and Polish, though people from other nationalities such as Russians and Lithuanians were also killed.

The Ponary site is now in a district of Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. The site covers 20 heaters (ed-ovens?) and apart from large state-constructed monuments includes numerous smaller monuments to individual victims. (sl)

Source: Polskie Radio[/quote]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponary_massacre
The Ponary Massacre (Polish: zbrodnia w Ponarach) was the mass murder of up to 100,000 people, mostly Jews, but also Russians, Poles,[1] Lithuanians and others, by German SD, SS and Lithuanian Nazi collaborators,[2][3][4][5] such as the Ypatingasis būrys units,[2][3][6] during World War II and the Holocaust in Reichskommissariat Ostland. The executions took place between July 1941 and August 1944 near the railway station of Ponary, now known as Paneriai, a suburb of what is today Vilnius, Lithuania. Some 70,000 Jews were murdered in Ponary,[7] along with estimated 20,000 or more Poles[1] and 8,000 Russians, many from nearby Vilnius.[2][4][8]

According to Monika Tomkiewicz, author of a 2008 book on the Ponary massacre, 80,000 people were killed, including 72,000 Jews, 5,000 Soviet prisoners, between 15,000 and 20,000 Poles, 1,000 people described as Communists or Soviet activists, and 40 Romani people.[9]

Background
Following the occupation of the Republic of Central Lithuania into Poland, the town of Ponary became part of the Wilno Voivodship, (Kresy region). In September 1939, the region was taken over by the Soviets, and after about a month transferred to Lithuania. After the annexation of Lithuania by the Soviet Union, in June 1940, the Soviets began constructing an oil storage facility near Ponary in conjunction with a military airfield. That project was never completed, and in 1941 the area was occupied by Nazi Germany. The Nazis decided to take advantage of the large pits dug for oil storage tanks to dispose of bodies of unwanted locals. Their policy was to kill every Jewish individual in Lithuania, and the Baltic countries became the first place Nazis would mass execute Jews.[10] Out of 70,000 Jews living in Vilnius, only 7,000 survived the war.[11]

Massacre
Ponary massacre on the map (in top right corner, marked with a white skull and red letters)
The massacres began in July 1941, when Einsatzkommando 9 arrived in Vilnius, rounded up 5,000 Jewish men of Vilnius and took them to Paneriai where they were shot. Further mass killings, often aided by Lithuanian volunteers from Ypatingasis burys,[11] took place throughout the summer and fall.[6] In September, the Vilna Ghetto was established.[11] By the end of the year, about 21,700 Jews had been killed at Paneriai.[11]

The pace of killings slowed in 1942, as slave workers were appropriated by Wehrmacht.[11] The total number of victims by the end of 1944 was between 70,000 and 100,000. According to post-war exhumation by the forces of Soviet 2nd Belorussian Front the majority (50,000–70,000) of the victims were Polish and Lithuanian Jews from nearby Polish and Lithuanian cities, while the rest were primarily Poles (about 20,000) and Russians (about 8,000).[2][3] The Polish victims were mostly members of Polish intelligentsia – academics, educators (such as Kazimierz Pelczar, a professor of Stefan Batory University), priests (such as Father Romuald Świrkowski), and members of the Armia Krajowa resistance movement.[3][8] Among the first victims were approximately 7,500 Soviet POWs shot in 1941 soon after Operation Barbarossa begun.[5] At later stages there were also smaller numbers of victims of other nationalities, including local Russians, Romani and Lithuanians, particularly communists sympathizers and members of general Povilas Plechavičius' Local Lithuanian Detachment who refused to follow German orders.[3]

As Soviet troops advanced in 1943, the Nazi units tried to cover up the crime under the Aktion 1005 directive. Eighty inmates from the nearby Stutthof concentration camp prisoners were formed into Leichenkommando ("corpse units"). The workers were forced to dig up bodies, pile them on wood and burn them. The ashes were then ground up, mixed with sand and buried.[3] After months of this gruesome work, the brigade managed to escape on 19 April 1944. Eleven of the group survived the war; their testimony contributed to revealing the massacre.[citation needed]

Commemoration
Information about the massacre began to spread as early as 1943, due to the activities and works of Helena Pasierbska, Józef Mackiewicz, Kazimierz Sakowicz and others. Nonetheless the Soviet regime, which supported the resettlement of Poles from the Kresy, found it convenient to deny that Poles or Jews were singled out for massacre in Paneriai; the official line was that Paneriai was a site of massacre of Soviet citizens only.[5][12] This led some — including Polish Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek — to compare this to the Katyn massacre.[3] On 22 October 2000, a decade after the fall of communism, in independent Lithuania, an effort by several Polish organizations resulted in raising a monument (a cross) to fallen Polish citizens, during an official ceremony in which representatives of both Polish and Lithuanian governments (Bronisław Komorowski, Polish Minister of Defence, and his Lithuanian counterpart), as well as several NGOs, took place.[3][5][13]

The site of the massacre is commemorated by a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, a memorial to the Polish victims and a small museum. The executions at Paneriai are currently being investigated by the Gdańsk branch of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance.[2]

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