THE ORIGIN

operation came from a Polish journalist, Kazimierz Sakawicz, whose diaries were published in 2005:

July 27, 1941: Shooting is carried on nearly every day. Will it go on for ever? The executioners began selling clothes of the killed. Other garments are crammed into sacks in a barn at the highway and taken to town.

Sakawicz witnessed how slapdash the operation could be:

July 30: About 150 persons shot. Most of them were elderly people. The executioners complained of being very tired of their “work”, of having aching shoulders from shooting. That is the reason for not finishing the wounded off, so that they are buried half alive.

On August 2 Sakawicz witnessed how the executioners carried out their work: they were all inebriated:

Shooting of big batches has started once again. Today about 4,000 people were driven up... shot by 80 executioners. All drunk.

Some of the most extraordinary stories to emerge from Ponar’s shooting pits came from survivors and were described by Sakawicz. Men, women and at least one child lived despite a shot to the back of the head.

Rachel Glicksman was only 15 when she was forced into the ghetto in Vilnius. She remembered naked escapees from Ponar Forest finding their way back into her city: “At night there was a curfew, so they approached houses and banged on the windows and asked to be thrown something to cover themselves. That’s all – that was the only assistance they asked for.”

The deaths at Ponar and other shooting pits around Eastern Europe continued even as the Nazis looked to intensify their methods of killing. Following their work at Ponar, the Nazis experimented with gas vans and then finally the extermination camps.

AS CAMPS such as Auschwitz accelerated their ambitions for industrialised murder, the pace of killings at Ponar slowed. From 1942, as the Germans were getting bogged down in the East, Vilnius itself went into a period of relative calm and stabilisation. The Germans needed many of the remaining Jews for slave labour.

But by 1943, it became obvious that Hitler’s operations in the East had turned into an existential disaster. The Nazis might have been fastidious in logging their weekly kill totals but they had no desire for the world to understand the reality of their bureaucratic list keeping. Hitler’s dreams were dying and there would be consequences. It didn’t take much imagination for those in charge to realise that a hundred thousand decaying bodies buried only a few miles outside a European capital would be evidence enough to hang anyone associated with it.

And so the SS began the clear up of Ponar. Paul Blobel had been in charge of the murders at Baba Yar in Ukraine. In 1941 he had murdered 33,000 Jewish men, women and children. In 1942 he had been relieved of his