Zalman Matzkin — Association of Jews of Vilna and vicinity in Israel

Ponar - The story of a survivor of the corpse cremation units

 It used to be a well-known recreational area in this part of the country. The small train station, about 12 km from Vilna, was also a familiar landmark. The train station was hidden among tangled woods that stretched over an area of ​​tens of kilometers. Now the ashes of about 70,000 Jews from Vilna and the surrounding area are scattered there, together with that of several tens of thousands of other nationalities.

Ponar. In 1939, after occupying this area, the Soviets began building cisterns at the place - huge cisterns inside pits dug in the ground. The cisterns were meant to contain tons of fuel for use by the Russian military. Thousands of people from all over the region worked digging these pits, and the place played an important part in the economic life of the area until 1941.

On June 24, 1941, the Germans captured Ponar. From the beginning, they were enthusiastic about these huge pits, and planned to turn them into mass graves for tens of thousands of Jews whom they led to the place by train.

At the end of 1943, the Germans began to lose various battles and decided to eliminate all evidence of their activity in Ponar. To this end, they brought fifty men - young and sturdy workers - and gave them a "task": to dig up the bodies, take them out of the pits and burn them. I, Zalman Matzkin, was one of the fifty.

We arrived in Ponar in December '43. The first task was to cut down trees in the forest. From morning until dark we would cut down huge trees. At night, they would walk us back to Vilna. We still did not know the reason why we were cutting down trees. The German commander Drap just told us that if any of the workers tried to escape, everyone would pay with their lives.

One day, the German commander informed us that to save time it was decided that we would live in one of these huge pits. He gave us a seven-day extension to get organized. We saw that they brought huge quantities of gasoline and tar barrels and other combustibles, as well as camouflage nets, and understood what was going to happen. We also understood that the Germans did not want anyone to know what was being done in the area; hence they would cover everything with camouflage nets. From January 10, 1944, we were no longer returned to Vilna, and began to live in pits about nine meters deep. They would take us down a ladder every evening, and take up the ladder until the next morning to prevent our escaping at night. When we were at the bottom of the pit, the German commander shouted at us: "Here in the Ponar area are 120,000 bodies of people who were shot dead by the Lithuanians. It is your job to dig the bodies out of the sand and burn them. Hard work. To prevent your escaping, you will work chained up all day. We will bring you back here at night." The Germans left a guard at the top - at the entrance to the pit- and left.

We realized that we too would be eliminated in the end when we finished the job to ensure there would be no evidence left of the activities carried out by these human animals. Our death was a sure thing, so our free time and thoughts were devoted constantly to escape.

We were divided into teams. Each pair of workers was supervised by a Gestapo soldier. My task was to be one of the diggers of the pits where the bodies laid; some ran with makeshift stretchers, others were part of cremation units. Less than 10 minutes passed from the start of the excavations when we hit relatively fresh bodies as if they had been killed only a few days before. We dug up the bodies; other crews came with wheelbarrows-stretchers and took the bodies for cremation. They would arrange a layer of tree trunks, each about 7 meters long, and throw about 200 bodies on them, another layer of tree trunks, more corpses, and more of the same. Fuel was then poured over the bodies covered by thatch which was then set on fire. Each such position had about ten layers, meaning about 2,000 bodies. This is how we worked for about a month, and at night returned to the pits. The Germans erected a double barbed wire fence around the pit and laid mines to prevent our escape. There was no end to the corpses; many times we recognized acquaintances among them. Some of us, myself included, recognized the bodies of some of our relatives. Among us were those who carried the bodies of their wives and children on the wheelbarrow. All this was done in silence, to avoid the harsh response of German guards. Satan himself could not have devised a more diabolical plan.

As we progressed in our "work," we realized that our end was also approaching. How could we escape? How to get out of our pit at night without being discovered? Various plans did not materialize. One evening, I suggested we dig a ditch under the pit, such as would reach beyond the barbed wire fences and mines. At first it sounded like a dream, like a fantasy, but little by little people became convinced that this was the only way. We started collecting digging tools (soup spoons, metal plates) for digging, and together with eight other friends who joined us, we started digging every night. The work was difficult; we had to dig quietly so that the guard would not hear or suspect - and what to do with the sand that would pile up? We first asked to be allowed to build a pantry where we could store our food rations. The Germans agreed. The pantry was partly used for storage, but behind it was the opening of the excavation. We started on February 8, ‘44. The plan was to dig another two feet deep and then straighten out parallel to the ground. We put the piled up sand in our clothes and got rid of it during the day. In the morning we burned bodies, and at night we dug.

At that time, we saw that the Germans were leading other large groups - "transports" of Jews from Lithuania and Latvia which were shot on arrival, and we would burn the exposed bodies. To finish the job faster, the Germans brought in another group of 24 people - some Jews and some Russian POWs from the Kiev region. Since we needed more people for the excavations, we shared our secret work, and another 20 diggers joined us every night. The rest still did not believe it would work and did not cooperate.

When we saw the killing pits begin to empty, and new "transports" were not coming, we realized that the story would soon be over and our end would come as well. We started digging at night more urgently. When they saw we were progressing, even the most skeptical who had not joined before, joined in the work of digging. We accepted them because we needed more working hands, each digging hand brought us closer to freedom. We told ourselves that even if not all of us managed to get out, at least we could tell what had happened at Ponar.

At the end of March 1944, the tunnel was ready. We started planning the escape and the order of departures. Some of the people were from the Ponar area, and therefore we decided that they would go out first to chart the escape route for us. The goal was to team up with partisans who were in the surrounding forests. We wanted a particularly dark and moonless night hence had to wait a few more days. The long-awaited day finally arrived. We went out to work in the morning as usual. At three in the afternoon we were taken back to the pit. We fasted and recited Psalms, even those who were not religious. We told the German guard that today was our Shabbat, the seventh day of Pesach - a holiday - hence we fasted and prayed. One of us, a rabbi, gave a sermon and held a funeral oration for the martyrs. His last words were: "Brethren, whoever remains alive will do everything to avenge the blood of the martyrs shed here." At about ten at night we entered the tunnel. Honestly, I deserved to be the first because of the amount I had done, but for various reasons I was fourth. The narrow tunnel was about thirty meters long, twenty men held their breath - the air was compressed; then, suddenly we felt a gust of cold wind - we were outside.

One of the first to walk out in the dark stepped on a metallic object and a slight noise was heard. The Germans immediately set off an alarm and their mighty projectors, and began firing using all the weapons they had. We were greeted by a hail of bullets and ran. Not all of us managed to escape. Some of us were shot on the spot. There was no going back. We started to disperse and run in all directions, and not according to plan. Five of us, including Mordechai (Motke) Zeidel, fled in the direction of the partisans. One fell; three covered themselves with mud to disguise themselves from the Germans who searched everywhere using dogs. The next day we lay in the mud all day without a drop of drinking water. Sunday night was still dark without a moon. We got out of the mud, ran towards the stream and from there to the forests toward Rudniki. The partisans, led by Abrasha Sabrinsky and others like Tuvia Rubin, heard about the escape and came and took us with them. We owe them our lives and our survival success.

Ponar's savagery did not remain a secret. We fulfilled our duty to those murdered. We are the living testimony. We saw the murdered with our own eyes; we dug the pits with our own hands, and with our own hands cremated their bodies, until no trace remained. What is left is for us to keep the commandment: Remember what Amalek did to us. Remember!

Reported and narrated by the late Zalman Matzkin, submitted by Prof. Haim Matzkin, the narrator's son.