Moonlight at Ponary
Lithuania can name Ponary’s killers. On the eve of its 2026 national commemoration, the Ministry of Culture still writes “local helpers.”
On September 18, Lithuania’s Ministry of Culture published its invitation to the official September 23 ceremony at the Paneriai Memorial. It says that Nazi occupation structures and their vietiniai talkininkai participated in the mass killings.
The Lithuanian phrase is vietiniai talkininkai. The Center for Jewish Art translates the same wording on the Paneriai entrance monument as “local helpers.” As of September 20, three days before the national ceremony, that is still the category the Ministry chose.
The notice is more revealing when read sentence by sentence. It first says, “Šį gyvenimą brutaliai nutraukė okupacijos”: occupations, plural, brutally cut “this life” short. “This life” is the Jewish communal life the previous paragraph had just described. The next sentence does identify Nazi Germany. It then says the killings involved Nazi occupation structures and their “local helpers.” Later, after describing the destruction of Lithuanian Jewry, it says that by 1944 more than 200,000 “people” had been murdered. Its final sentence speaks of the “loss” (netektis) of hundreds of thousands of “our fellow citizens” and says that loss obliges Lithuania to preserve historical truth.
The notice knows these victims were Jews. Its title says so. The problem is what happens to specificity when the sentence reaches the local perpetrators. Ponary does not suffer from a shortage of nouns.
The girl in the moonlight
Her name was Tzerna Morgenstern. Abraham Sutzkever’s account gives her age as eighteen.
Two accounts, each traced to a woman who escaped Ponary, preserve her last minutes. One was printed soon after the war; the other was given under oath at the Eichmann trial in 1961. They differ, and the differences should stay visible.
Sutzkever’s version, based on Zelda Einhorn’s testimony, identifies the man as Martin Weiss. Tzerna had been marched to Ponary with her mother and younger brother. By the time Weiss pulled her away from the killing ditch, her family had already been shot. The moon was rising. Sutzkever has Weiss speaking about the beauty of the moonlight before taking out his revolver and shooting Tzerna in the head.
Abba Kovner’s testimony at Session 27 on May 4, 1961, gives a second account. His source was Sara Menkes, who had escaped the killing pit and told him the story weeks later. Kovner placed the killing in October 1941. He had known Tzerna as a pupil and remembered a tall, upstanding girl with long plaits and wonderful eyes.
Kovner’s version places a line of Einsatzgruppen men facing the women. It then refers to an officer who orders Tzerna forward, tells her to walk down a path without looking back, and shoots her in the back. Kovner does not name that man, and neither account identifies the other shooters. The memorial’s own history page says Jews taken from Lukiškės were shot at Paneriai by members of the German Security Police and SD Special Squad.
Sutzkever names Weiss and has the shot to the head. Kovner names no one, dates the killing to October 1941, and has the shot to the back. The accounts converge on the cruelty of the act, not on every detail. Historical memory is easier to attack when disagreement is forced into certainty.
Ponary had names
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum states that German Einsatzgruppen and Lithuanian auxiliaries murdered thousands of Jewish residents of Vilna at Ponary, and that by July 1944 perhaps as many as 75,000 people had been killed there, the vast majority Jews.
Kazimierz Sakowicz lived beside the killing ground. From his attic he watched, counted, listened and wrote. His Ponary Diary, 1941–1943 survived because pages were hidden in bottles and buried.
Rachel Margolis, who recovered and reconstructed the diary, wrote in the English edition’s foreword that she encountered distorted transcriptions in which Sakowicz’s expressions “Lithuanian killers” and “Ponary riflemen” had been replaced by “Lithuanian police,” apparently to diminish the role of Lithuanian nationalists in the extermination of the Jews. Margolis does not identify who made those transcriptions or when. She identifies what the substitutions did.
Margolis also wrote that historians had been denied access to the diary for years, possibly because it documented atrocities committed by Lithuanians as well as Germans. After independence, she says, the Jewish State Museum repeatedly sought access to the second part. In the 1990s it applied to the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture and received access for only two days. The institution Margolis names there is the same Ministry of Culture that issued the September 18 invitation.
Sakowicz did not describe an atmospheric tragedy. He described men who guarded, stripped, robbed and shot people at the pits, and he recorded the economy that grew around the victims’ possessions. Yitzhak Arad’s preface calls the diary a record of genocide perpetrated by Germans and their Lithuanian collaborators.
Lithuania’s own Paneriai Memorial history page is more specific still. It says prisoners taken from Lukiškės were shot at Paneriai by members of the German Security Police and SD Special Squad. It identifies the Vilnius Special Squad (Ypatingasis būrys), says most of its members were Lithuanians, names early organizers Jakubka and Butkus, commander Juozas Šidlauskas, successor Balys Norvaiša and deputy Balys Lukošius, and says the SS noncommissioned officer Martin Weiss supervised the squad for the longest period.
This is the memorial’s own public history, not hidden scholarship. Grant Gochin’s September 20 article, Lithuania’s Archives Name the Killers. Its Rescue Narrative Does Not., extends the naming record beyond Ponary. My September 10 article documented this contradiction; my September 8 article showed that Lithuanian institutions have published eighty-four biographies connected to the Special Squad.
The Lithuanian phrase was added after independence
The entrance monument makes the problem harder to dismiss as inherited Soviet Lithuanian wording. The Center for Jewish Art documents a 1985 Lithuanian inscription saying that “Hitlerites” shot more than 100,000 Soviet people. A central stone added around 1989 already identified 70,000 Jewish victims and used the local-helper formula in Yiddish and Hebrew. In 2004 the Lithuanian and Russian inscriptions on the lateral blocks were covered by marble plaques with revised wording. The revised Lithuanian text removed “Soviet,” added “Hitlerite occupiers and their local helpers,” and retained the figure of 100,000 people.
The 2004 revision therefore made the Lithuanian-language inscription more explicit about local participation than the Soviet wording it covered. It still stopped at a generic category, even as independent Lithuania’s own historical work identified the unit and its members.
The number on the same monument now creates a second contradiction. The memorial’s current history page says that a Soviet Extraordinary State Commission working at Paneriai in August 1944 concluded that more than 100,000 people had been murdered there, and that this became the official figure. The same page says the newest data put the total number murdered at 50,000 to 70,000. USHMM gives a possible total of as many as 75,000.
So the phrase “local helpers” cannot be defended by saying the monument is simply an old Soviet artifact. The Lithuanian local-helper wording was introduced in 2004. Nor can the full inscription be treated as a presently accurate summary merely because part of it is engraved in stone. The custodian’s own history page now rejects the old 100,000 total as the best current estimate while supplying names and institutional identity that the inscription withholds.
The Ministry has repeated the pattern
The September 18 wording is not isolated. Grant Gochin’s September 10 examination of the Culture Ministry’s Pivonija commemoration documented a Ministry release that restored Jewish victims to memory while omitting local perpetrators already named in the Ministry’s own museum system. His September 20 review of Foreign Ministry language traces the same shift between explicit Lithuanian identity for rescuers and increasingly generic language for perpetrators.
The September 23 test
The official program schedules Lithuania’s national ceremony for September 23 at 12:30 p.m. at the Paneriai Memorial. The Ministry of Culture co-organizes it with the Department of National Minorities under the Government and the Lithuanian Jewish (Litvak) Community.
Lithuania can say “local helpers” again. Or it can say what its own memorial already says: the Vilnius Special Squad, most of whose members were Lithuanian; named organizers and commanders; German Security Police command; and the specific institutional machinery that delivered Jews from prison to the pits.
Naming documented perpetrators does not impose collective guilt on Lithuanians as a people. It restores historical agency. The Ministry’s own memorial can name the unit and its leaders; the Ministry’s invitation reduces the local perpetrators to a category.
This reaches beyond Lithuania. Genocide is enabled by propaganda, dehumanization, institutional permission, participation and the destruction of factual boundaries. When later institutions teach the dead more precisely than they teach the machinery that killed them, memory loses part of its protective function.
Tzerna Morgenstern stood under the moon. The moonlight did not kill her. Sutzkever’s account names Martin Weiss. Lithuania’s own memorial names the Special Squad and its Lithuanian leadership. Nearly eighty-five years later, “local helpers” is not the limit of the record. It is the limit of the Ministry’s sentence.
Source note
The two Tzerna Morgenstern accounts are not merged here. The Holocaust Survivors project identifies its Sutzkever passage as Shep Zitler’s translation; the same project identifies Tzerna as Zitler’s niece. Sutzkever’s Yiddish Vilner geto 1941–1944 appeared in 1946. Kovner testified in Session 27 of the Eichmann trial on May 4, 1961. The transcript renders her first name “Tsherna.” The head/back divergence and the difference over the killer’s identity are retained rather than harmonized.
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Filmmaker’s note
I co-directed and produced Baltic Truth, on the destruction of Baltic Jewry and local participation. I am now directing and producing Ashes of Identity, on October 7, resurgent antisemitism, and the ways misinformation, propaganda and historical revisionism normalize hatred.
These are not separate subjects. When societies let documented perpetrators disappear into euphemism and make factual history negotiable, mechanisms that enabled genocidal violence remain available for reuse. Unless confronted, that danger extends beyond Jewish memory: future genocides also require lies, dehumanization and people willing not to name what they can see.
Independent documentaries require independent supporters. Contributions to Ashes of Identity help complete production, international filming, archival licensing and distribution through festivals, education, streaming, television and universities. US donations are tax-deductible through the film’s 501(c)(3) fiscal sponsor, the Israeli-American Civic Education Institute.
