Kazimierz Sakowicz

Kazimierz Sakowicz (* 1894 - July 15, 1944 in Panėriai ) was a Polish journalist who witnessed the shooting of Lithuanian Jews by German task forces and Lithuanian helpers at the Paneriai mass execution site and who recorded his observations in the form of diary-like notes.

Sakowicz worked as a journalist for a Polish-language weekly newspaper in Vilnius and was a member of the Polish Home Army during the German occupation . In July 1944 he was shot dead by unknown Lithuanians. The exact circumstances of his death are not known.

His notes stretch over the period from July 11, 1941 to November 6, 1943. In them Sakowicz describes - initially distantly, later visibly shaken - the massacre at the murder site, where tens of thousands of Jews were killed between 1941 and 1944 . His eyewitness account shows how public the killing by Germans and Lithuanians took place.

For fear of discovery, Sakowicz buried the notes. After they were found again, they were stored in the Lithuanian Central Archives until 1998. They were finally published in Poland in 1999 and in Germany in 2003 . Publication in Lithuanian is still pending.

literature

• Rachel Margolis , Jim G. Tobias (ed.): The secret notes of K. Sakowicz. Documents on the extermination of the Jews in Ponary. Antogo-Verlag, Nuremberg 2003, ISBN 3-9806636-6-3 .
• Yitzhak Arad (ed.), Kazimierz Sakowicz: Ponary Diary, 1941–1943: A Bystander's Account of a Mass Murder. Yale University Press, 2006, ISBN 0-300-10853-2 .