Next day, they put us on trucks, about 25 or there about people to a truck. It took us outside Vilna
about somewhere, maybe I'm not sure, 10 kilometers or so and that was Ponar.
P-O-N-A-R. Ponary in Polish. Ponary. At the time, nobody knew about the place
but when we arrived there,
there was a a huge mass grave, a huge ditch, prepared.
And there were two machine guns facing the truck, manned by Lithuanians. And we were told that we
cannot talk, we cannot make any commotion, or else the machine guns will go off at the truck.
There was one German with a camera who was supervising the operation, and what they
were doing was they were taking each man off the truck, ordering him to march towards the ditch,
and drunk Lithuanians -- some of them in uniform, some of them in civilian clothes -- were
using a handgun to shoot in the back of the head of the victim. The others on the truck
were standing there in disbelief and frozen. And when my turn came, I went towards the grave
and, I -- I did not believe that this was the last moment of my life -- I just couldn't believe it.
And I was going with a terror in my heart, and shortly before the
ditch, I simply fell. And by miracle, there was a synchronous shot that went off from the
Lithuanian at the same split second. And because I fell and he shot simultaneously,
he believed that he I fell as in consequence of his shooting. Now they were all drunk, and they
they they were not as alert probably,
so they took the next victim or the possibly the one after and who fell on top of me.
Anyway, the the trucks were coming and the people were being shot. This went on for hours and hours.
And when they finished, all the people who were in the park during the night,
the machine guns went off and they sprayed because many people were not quite dead.
So they sprayed with bullets inside the grave, most of them were inside the grave but very few
outside the grave. And I wasn't hit even at that point and then everything was silenced.
I think I possibly passed out for a brief time, I couldn't tell you how long. But
then I, when everything was quiet, I opened my eyes, I looked around, I didn't see anybody move
or anything going on, so I dug myself out from the body above me, got up and marched toward the
place where we came from, because the place was surrounded with barbed wire. So I marched toward
the gate from which the truck entered. Well to my big surprise, there were two guards at the gate
and they saw me from distance and one of them took a shot at me but missed me.
And the terrain was hilly, so I bent down and I ran away and I went back towards the grave,
and I must tell you that this moment was the hardest moment in my entire life
of Nazi occupation or at any time, because here I was -- young, healthy, uninjured -- and
I couldn't get out because I had to climb over the barbed wire. And they would
take me off from distance, so my only alternative was to dig very quickly under the barbed wire
with my bare hands, which I did but I had this terrible fear, if I don't make it in time I will
not make it, they'll come and shoot me. But I did make it in time, I scratched myself up,
I dug myself out underneath, and got out of the of the place and ran. And ran down a hill for quite
a little bit. And then I saw a house. I entered that house, it was a Polish peasant.
I told them my story, they were very kind to me. I washed up,
they gave me a shirt to change,
and I went back to the city, went home. When I came home, I told it to my family,
I told it to the people in our apartment house where we lived,
and nobody -- I mean nobody -- believed me except my family. You have to realize, that
this was just a couple of weeks after the Germans came in and nobody heard about such stories.