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Part VIII, June 11, 2004
By Laurel Corona
 VILNA, Lithuania—By the time today’s date, June 11, had arrived, the Avengers had already survived the winter, and they knew their remaining time in the woods would be short. The Germans were in a chaotic retreat and the Soviet Army advanced on Vilna daily. Within a few weeks the partisans would leave the forest and join the Soviet Army to assist in the liberation of their city.
I ask Fania Jocheles-Brancowski, a former partisan with Abba Kovner’s Avengers, how they celebrated that event. She says very simply, “We didn’t,” and she falls silent. I realize my question has been insensitive. What was there to celebrate?
They were liberating only Lithuanians and Poles, risking their lives for a city that had rejected and despised them, and in fact was an accomplice in the murder of those they loved.
They would find the ghetto empty and silent. Some would find their childhood homes occupied by others who had no intention of leaving. There would be no homecoming anywhere. How complicated their feelings must have been about being alive, so complete was the ruin around them. Some would charge into the future bent on revenge. Abba Kovner would reconstitute the Avengers in Israel and plot vengeance against the Germans for years. Some, like Leizer and Zenia, were anxious to put the war behind them and were biding their time until a means presented itself to begin a new life, whatever and wherever it might be.
I notice as I walk back toward the car that Zenia, the camp cook, would probably be gone before the wild strawberries under my feet had a chance to ripen. Their flowers look up toward the sky, tiny white prophets of the potential within.
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We have one more stop. It is a little like being hypnotized, feeling the compulsion to visit a place the heart and the gut want to run from. Ponary. Here, just a few kilometers outside Vilna, the Nazis set in motion the Final Solution. Here, 100,000 victims, 70,000 of them Jews, were marched to the edge of pits while firing squads reloaded. The last thing the victims smelled in this life was gunpowder and rotting flesh. The last thing they saw was the dead or dying who minutes before had been in line in
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front of them. The last thing they heard was the cocking of rifles and the order to shoot. Then, ten at a time, they went to join the six million.
Only three months after the Nazi invasion of Lithuania, an astonishing three-quarters of Vilna’s Jews were already dead. Most of them died here at Ponary. For those who lived to reach the ghetto, the task became figuring out how to stay alive until the Germans were defeated. For many it seemed best to keep the Nazis appeased. Go along to get along. Hitler’s well-guarded intention to annihilate the entire Jewish population was so far beyond imagination or logic that it took time for Jews to lose their illusion that Ponary was a labor camp and that their relatives and friends were simply being kept incommunicado there. Even though Abba Kovner, who would become the head of the FPO and later commander of the Avengers, wrote in a manifesto only six months after the German invasion that, “All roads of the Gestapo lead to Ponar…and Ponar means death,” the Germans were so crafty at manipulating the Jews’ thoughts and psyches that the impassioned pleas of Kovner for the ghetto not to go like sheep to the slaughter fell mostly on deaf ears.
Today, as I leave the car and stand at the trailhead of the Ponar memorial, I struggle to understand the magnitude of the crimes committed here, and I think I would have resisted believing the rumors too. A freight train rolls by only a few feet from where I am standing, its brakes squealing as it slows down for a stop somewhere up ahead. I do not think I am breathing, the sound is so fearsome. The largest single massacre at Ponary took place on a train transport the Jews believed was taking them to nearby Kovno. The train must have sounded just like this as it came to a stop here instead. In one day, 4000 people died.
As we walk toward the first pit, I look into the woods and see leaves shaking, though there’s no hint of a breeze. I think for a moment it’s the spirits of the dead trying to get my attention, before I realize they’re just aspen saplings--a tree uncommon enough in Southern Californian to spook a visitor from San Diego. But then again, why could it not be ghosts? Late in the war, when their defeat was certain and the Nazis wanted to cover their atrocities, they forced a group of Jews to exhume the rotting corpses from the pits and burn them. Two escapees reached the Avengers camp, telling a story about how the ashes were scattered around the woods at Ponary.
Today the dead are part of the soil into which these aspens sink their roots and gather the strength to reach upward for a patch of open sky.
I hurry to catch up with Fania and the others, who have reached the first of the pits visible at Ponary. It takes a minute to understand that this grassy amphitheater is the earthworks for one of the execution sites. It is round, and about the size of a baseball infield. The killers stood at the top of the embankment, while the victims marched down a wooden ramp into the pit. There they lined up in front of ditches, into which they fell when they were shot. We move on to another pit, about twice the size of the first, and then a third. Regina tells me that altogether there were twelve pits discovered at Ponar.
We walk quietly back toward the entrance. Regina, who has endured my asking dozens of questions over the last few days about the names of trees and birds and plants, steps off the path and picks a flower. This one, she says, is called a forget-me-not.
I have a vision of the forsaken, standing at the edge of the pits, spending their last seconds in a world that has not cared enough for them. Forget us not. As I type this in my hotel room in Vilna, the flower lies wilted on the desk beside me.
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This is the eighth and final installment of a journal by author Laurel Corona describing her 2004 research trip to Vilna in connection with the award-winning book Until Our Last Breath: A Holocaust Story of Love and Partisan Resistance (St. Martin’s Press, 2008). While writing the book, Corona traveled to Lithuania with coauthor Michael Bart to gather information about his parents, whose activities in the Jewish resistance form a major element in the book.