Arad Names Lithuanian Guards. Lithuania’s Paneriai Language Anonymizes Them
On September 15, 1941, an ostensible transfer between the Vilna ghettos became a route through Lukiškės to Ponary. Lithuania’s own memorial can name the Lithuanian killing unit. Recent official commemorative language often does not.
As of September 8, Lithuania’s Ministry of Culture program schedules the national ceremony honoring the victims of the genocide of Lithuanian Jews for 12:30 p.m. on September 23, 2026, at the Paneriai Memorial. The speeches are not public. Lithuania’s recent vocabulary at Paneriai is.
If the recent pattern holds, expect “Nazi occupation authorities,” “Nazis and their collaborators,” Jews whom Lithuania “lost,” victims who “were murdered,” or the “forces of hatred and intolerance.” Each phrase can leave the Jewish dead visible while making Lithuanian actors less specific than the documentary sources permit.
For September 15, 1941, Yitzhak Arad used a more exact noun. In his editorial notes to Kazimierz Sakowicz’s Ponary Diary, 1941–1943, Arad wrote that about 2,000 Jews moving from Vilna Ghetto No. 1 to Ghetto No. 2 were “diverted by their Lithuanian guards” to Lukiškės Prison and, two days later, taken to Ponary and shot. Arad does not further identify the September 15 guards by unit in that sentence.
Arad’s source trail
In Ghetto in Flames (1980), pp. 133–134, Arad describes the September 15 operation in greater detail. Roughly 2,500–3,000 people assembled to move from Ghetto No. 1 toward Ghetto No. 2. Only about 600 reached it. The rest were taken to Lukiškės and then to Ponary and murdered. For that passage Arad cites Herman Kruk’s Yiddish Togbuch fun vilner Geto (YIVO, 1961), pp. 76–77, and Lazar Epstein’s unpublished diary, p. 19. Arad’s bibliography identifies Epstein’s diary as YVA JM/2822.
The Lithuanian role at Lukiškės was already documented in the same book. During the August 31–September 2 Aktion, Arad records that Lithuanian guards at the prison confiscated Jewish prisoners’ money and valuables. He describes Lukiškės as the transit station between roundup and Ponary.
Arad connects the September 15 removal to the Jäger Report entry for September 17. Jäger records 337 Jewish men, 687 Jewish women and 247 Jewish children murdered in Vilna: 1,271 Jews. The same line adds four Lithuanian Communists, whom the stated total does not include.
Sakowicz’s September 17 entry records the shooting column. Kiejzik and another non-Jew, a peasant from Chazbijewicze, were forced into coats with Jewish stars and put among the Jews. One was Piotr Kiejzik, a local man whom Sakowicz’s August entries show hurrying “to work” whenever Jews were brought, and lodging at the Wereszkos’; arrested on September 8, he was reported shot on the 17th, and on December 12 Sakowicz recorded, “Kiejzik returned pale and cropped.” Arad’s note marks the earlier report as incorrect. The entry confirms killing at Ponary that day and non-Jews mixed into the doomed column. It does not supply a victim total for that transport.
The figures therefore remain separate. Arad’s 2005 account says about 2,000 Jews were diverted. Jäger records 1,271 Jewish victims on September 17. The sources do not permit those numbers to be treated as identical.
At Paneriai, the Lithuanian unit is not anonymous
Arad does not identify the September 15 escort. The principal Lithuanian killing unit at Paneriai is identified, by the state.
The Paneriai Memorial’s own historical page says the mass killings there were carried out by the SD Special Squad of Vilnius, subordinate to the German Security Police. It describes the unit initially as a Lithuanian auxiliary police squad of about 100 men and names Petras Jakubka and Mečys Butkus as its first organizers, Juozas Šidlauskas and later Balys Norvaiša as commanders, with SS officer Martin Weiss as the actual commander.
The September 23 ceremony will take place at a memorial whose own historical page can name the Lithuanian auxiliary police unit and its commanders.
The language Lithuania has already chosen
On September 25, 2025, the Foreign Ministry’s English release said “the Nazi occupation authorities” liquidated the Vilna Ghetto and murdered most of its Jews in Paneriai. The same release then said Lithuania “lost around 190,000 Jews.” The Lithuanian version calls them “nužudytų mūsų bendrapiliečių žydų” — murdered Jewish fellow citizens — but again supplies no Lithuanian perpetrator. Grant Arthur Gochin documented this grammar in “What Lithuania Means When It Says ‘Vanished,’ ‘Lost,’ or ‘Perished’”.
On August 4, 2025, Foreign Minister Kęstutis Budrys visited Paneriai with Israeli President Isaac Herzog. The ministry’s account said tens of thousands of lives “were ended” there and attributed the Holocaust to “the Nazis and their collaborators.” Gochin examined the same noun in “Nazis, Soviets, and Collaborators”; a September 8 Times of Israel article set “collaborators” beside Lithuania’s own published identification of the Special Squad and scores of its members.
In 2024, Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė said at Paneriai that thousands of innocent people “were murdered here” because of their origins and faith. No perpetrator appears in that sentence. In 2023, at the same site, she spoke of “the forces of hatred and intolerance” brutally taking thousands of lives, a phrase the U.S. State Department also recorded. At the same ceremony, Yad Vashem chairman Dani Dayan said Lithuanian Jews had been murdered “by the German Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators.” The guest named the Lithuanian role. The host government’s sentence did not.
At Paneriai in 2020, President Gitanas Nausėda said it had been hard to admit that Lithuanian citizens “žuvo ir nuo lietuvių rankų” — perished also at Lithuanian hands. Even there the verb was “perished.” The hands, for once, were named. In the same speech he recalled that in 1995 the first President of restored Lithuania had asked forgiveness in Israel “for those Lithuanians who participated in the Catastrophe.” Two heads of state used the noun “Lithuanians.” It has not appeared in the Paneriai sentences above since.
At the August 3, 2026 Roma genocide commemoration, the Department of National Minorities, which organized the ceremony, carried on its website a statement, also published by LRT, that Nazi Germany acted at Paneriai “together with local collaborators and auxiliary structures.” Department director Dainius Babilas told the gathering: “Neapykantos kalba virsta smurtu. O tylėjimas – bendrininkavimu” — hate speech turns into violence, and silence into complicity.
Lithuania had the highest Jewish murder rate in Europe. Its own memorial history, its presidents’ words and the historians it relies upon already supply specific Lithuanian agency.
The sentence for September 23
For this episode, the ceremony can say:
On September 15, 1941, about 2,000 Jews being transferred between the Vilna ghettos were diverted by Lithuanian guards to Lukiškės Prison. Two days later they were taken to Ponary and shot.
Arad said “Lithuanian guards.” The Paneriai Memorial says “Lithuanian auxiliary police” and names commanders. Nausėda said Lithuanian hands. If the 2026 ceremony returns only to “collaborators,” passive murder or national “loss,” the sources will not have forced that choice.
There is no shortage of accurate words.
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Source note: Yitzhak Arad, ed., Kazimierz Sakowicz, Ponary Diary, 1941–1943 (Yale University Press, 2005), p. 27 (September 15 diversion); Sakowicz entry, pp. 29–30, with correction at p. 42 n. 30. Yitzhak Arad, Ghetto in Flames (Yad Vashem/Ktav, 1980), pp. 133–134, citing Herman Kruk, Togbuch fun vilner Geto (New York: YIVO, 1961), pp. 76–77, and Lazar Epstein’s unpublished diary, p. 19; Arad’s bibliography identifies the Epstein diary as YVA JM/2822. Arad’s footnote 24 on p. 27 of Ponary Diary attaches to the September 17 Jäger figures, not separately to the “Lithuanian guards” wording. Gitanas Nausėda, speech at the Paneriai Memorial, September 23, 2020, Office of the President of the Republic of Lithuania (lrp.lt).
