Exactly Her Size
The Lithuanian Gunman Who Offered to Choose a Jewish Woman for Her Clothes
At Ponary, Lithuanian riflemen divided and sold the possessions of murdered Jews. One offered to select a living Jewish woman to fit a customer’s wife. Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry still names only the Nazis.
On Friday, November 21, 1941, market day, a Lithuanian rifleman left the base at Ponary with his rifle and an armload of women’s clothing. He set out topcoats, dresses and galoshes beside the road. Kazimierz Sakowicz, a Polish journalist who lived beside the killing ground, watched him and wrote it down.
The women who had worn those clothes had been shot in the forest behind him.
He sold the last pair of coats, one navy blue and one brown, for 120 rubles. He threw in a pair of galoshes as a “bonus.”
Then Waclaw Tankun, a villager from Stary Miedzyrzecz, asked whether there would be something for his wife. The coats were gone. The rifleman, a Shaulist from the Lithuanian firing squads, told him: “Let them wait.” He would “choose” a Jewish woman exactly her size.
Tankun’s wife had a size. Somewhere in the Vilna ghetto, a Jewish woman had the same one. She was alive when the rifleman spoke. In plain terms, he offered to find her, send her to Ponary, have her stripped, have her shot, and bring her clothes back to the road. He did not offer to search the barn where the dead women’s clothing was stored. He offered to search among the living.
Her body had been measured against a stranger’s wife, beside a public road, by a member of the squad that shot the women whose coats he had just sold. She did not know it. Nobody asked her name. Only her size was of interest.
Nothing in the scene was hidden. He walked out with his rifle, on market day, on a public road, in front of villagers. He set a price, added a bonus and promised more stock. The Jewish women of Vilnius had become his inventory: the dead as goods on hand, the living as goods on order.
Sakowicz does not record Tankun’s answer. The offer had already been made aloud, by a man with a rifle, to a customer who wanted a coat.
The trucks came back full
The roadside sale was the last link in a supply line Sakowicz had watched for months. On October 25, 1941, eighty-five years ago this month, trucks NN4003 and 4005 carried Jewish women and children from Lukiškės prison (Łukiszki) to Ponary (Paneriai), starting at seven in the morning. He heard the volleys in the forest. When the trucks came back, the Lithuanian soldiers sitting inside were “already dividing the possessions among themselves.”
Sakowicz did not write the word “Jewish” in that entry. The killers’ own paperwork did. SS-Standartenführer Karl Jäger’s report of December 1, 1941 lists, for the city of Vilnius on October 25: 1,766 Jewish women and 812 Jewish children, 2,578 in all. It lists no men.
Every one of those 1,766 women went to Ponary dressed. The soldiers on the returning trucks were sharing out what the women had carried, worn and packed. Jäger’s count is not a passenger list for two trucks, and Sakowicz does not say which coat belonged to which woman. The ledger does say who was shot that day: Jewish women, and Jewish children taken with them.
Stripping was the routine. On July 23, Sakowicz recorded victims stripped to their underwear and their clothing hauled to a barn, packed into sacks and sold. One buyer paid 100 rubles for garments and found 500 rubles sewn inside. Someone had sewn that money into a seam in order to survive. The money left Ponary. Its owner did not. On September 24, 1943, Sakowicz recorded the same procedure with children: “The children undressed, and the Lithuanians used sticks to calm those who were crying.”
The coat sold by the road in November came off a Jewish woman in that forest.
The squad had names
The rifleman on the road and the soldiers in the trucks were not anonymous at the time. They were made anonymous later. Lithuania’s own state museum knows the formation. The Vilna Gaon Museum’s Paneriai Memorial history describes the Special Squad, the Ypatingasis būrys, as subordinate to the German Security Police and SD, and states: “The majority of members were Lithuanians.” It names Juozas Šidlauskas as commander from July 23, 1941. In November 1941, the month of the roadside sale, command passed to Lieutenant Balys Norvaiša, with Lieutenant Balys Lukošius as his assistant. SS-Hauptscharführer Martin Weiß supervised the squad longest. The museum records, citing Jäger, at least 21,000 Jews killed by the end of 1941.
The same squad at Nemenčinė
Two months before the roadside sale, on September 20, 1941, Jäger recorded at Nemenčinė, northeast of Vilnius, 128 Jewish men, 176 Jewish women and 99 Jewish children: 403. Yad Vashem’s account of the killing site states that “the Lithuanian police assembled the Jews of Niemenczyn in the building of the beth midrash,” and that they were shot by “the Lithuanian Special Squad (Ypatingasis Būrys), which had come over from Vilnius for this purpose.” Survivors interviewed by Leyb Koniuchowsky after the war described Lithuanian police and partisans guarding the Jews and firing on those who ran. Their testimony is set out in Nemenčinė, September 20, 1941: The Accomplices Had Names.
Lithuania’s public texts tell a different story. The National Library’s encyclopedia, VLE, says the 403 Jews of Nemenčinė were murdered by order of the Nazi German occupation authority. The district tourism portal says “the Nazis with local helpers” killed them. The memorial inscription names “Hitlerites and their helpers”; its English version turns “murdered” into “executed.” The same portal says six million Jews “lost their lives.” Vilnius District Municipality’s history page mentions “local police” and does not say who fired. Every one of these texts counts the Jews. None says that Lithuanian police assembled them or that a Lithuanian squad shot them.
Today I submitted four signed requests. NEM-001 asks the National Library to add the Lithuanian police and the Special Squad to the VLE entry. NEM-002 asks the Vilnius and Trakai district municipalities to correct their pages. NEM-003 asks the Ministry of Culture and the Department of Cultural Heritage for an additional bilingual board at the killing site naming the Lithuanian police, the Special Squad and the local auxiliary police, leaving the existing stone untouched. NEM-005 asks the Lithuanian Special Archives for the criminal case files Yad Vashem relies on, K-1-58-29422-3 and K-1-58-11487-3.
The Ministry names only the Nazis
Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry speaks for the state at Paneriai. Its September 2025 release says that “the Nazi occupation authorities liquidated the Vilna Ghetto and murdered most of the Jews imprisoned in the Ghetto in the Paneriai forest.” It does not name the Special Squad that the state’s own museum names.
On September 18, 2026, I asked the Ministry to name both German command and documented Lithuanian participation. It registered my request on September 21 as No. 2-15926. On September 23, it published another Paneriai commemoration that attributed the killing to the Nazi occupation authorities and named no Lithuanian shooter. The museum’s history was public. My request was on the Ministry’s register. The Ministry kept the Nazis and left out the Lithuanians.
Jewish property as national wealth
Lithuanian political leaders also treated Jewish property as available. A circular of the Association of Fighters for the Freedom of Lithuania protested German resettlement on Jewish farms: “What right have the Germans to seize the property of Jews and aliens?” Its answer was that the property belonged to the wealth of the Lithuanian nation and state.
On November 1, 1942, Kazys Grinius, Jonas Aleksa and Mykolas Krupavičius signed a memorandum stating that the Lithuanian people “cannot approve the measures taken against the Lithuanian Jews.” In the same document, they proposed compensating dispossessed Lithuanians “by the holdings of Polish activists, Russians and Jews.” By then most Lithuanian Jews were dead. The memorandum called what had been done to them “measures” and listed their property as a resource. We Will Not Mention Here examines both texts; The Holocaust’s False Profit follows the property further.
She had a size
Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry should name the Lithuanian Special Squad beside its German commanders. Every state body that writes about Paneriai and Nemenčinė should do the same.
The record leaves the state no excuse. A Lithuanian squad shot Jews at Ponary under German command. Lithuanian soldiers divided their possessions on the trucks back. And on a Friday in November 1941, a Lithuanian rifleman sold a murdered woman’s coat for 120 rubles and offered to choose a living Jewish woman exactly the size of a stranger’s wife.
The state mourns her as a victim of the Nazis. The man who offered to choose her by her size was Lithuanian.
Documentary sources
Kazimierz Sakowicz, Ponary Diary, 1941–1943: A Bystander’s Account of a Mass Murder, ed. Yitzhak Arad (Yale University Press, 2005), entries for July 23, October 25 and November 21, 1941, and September 24, 1943 (pp. 118–119); the 1941 entries are reproduced by Echoes & Reflections.
Karl Jäger, Einsatzkommando 3 report of December 1, 1941: October 25, 1941 entry for Vilnius (1,766 Jewish women, 812 Jewish children, 2,578); September 20, 1941 entry for Nemenčinė (128 Jewish men, 176 Jewish women, 99 Jewish children, 403).
Vilna Gaon Museum of Jewish History, Paneriai Memorial history. Yad Vashem killing-site description of Nemenčinė, as quoted in NEM-001.
Thomas Remeikis, ed., Lithuania under German Occupation 1941–1945: Despatches from US Legation in Stockholm (2005): Despatch No. 1244, December 19, 1942, pp. 186, 189–191 (circular quotation p. 190); Despatch No. 1462, February 25, 1943, pp. 281–288 (memorandum language p. 287; signatories p. 288).
