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Kazimierz Sakowicz (1894–1944) was a Polish journalist. A witness to the prolonged Ponary massacre, he chronicled much of it in his diary, published in English as Ponary Diary, which became one of the best known testaments to that atrocity of the Second World War, in which about 100 000 Jews, Poles and Russians were murdered by Germans and Lithuanian collaborators.
Biography
Sakowicz was the son of Elias and Sofia, born in Vilna (Wilno, later Vilnius) in 1894, then in the Russian Partition of Poland. He studied law in Moscow. After his studies he returned to Wilno, where he begun his journalistic career; Poland regained independence around that time in the Aftermath of World War I. He also got married; his wife name was Maria. Later he became a newspaper publisher, operating a printing press in Wilno. He was an owner, editor and journalist of Przegląd Gospodarczy (Economic Review) journal. He was also an officer of the pre-war Polish army.
During the war he became a member of the Polish resistance (Armia Krajowa). Due to economic troubles during the German occupation, Sakowicz had to close his print shop and move to the outlying Ponary district . There he chronicled events of the Ponary massacre from July 11, 1941, to October 25, 1943, in his journal, which he buried in his garden. He observed the massacres from his attic window, approximately 100 meters from the execution site. In addition to observing the events, he interviewed other witnesses and even some of the Lithuanian perpetrators.
On 5 July 1944, during the increasing unrest in the area (Operation Tempest), he was shot and seriously wounded, probably by Lithuanian collaborators. He was found in the evening by his neighbors in a ditch, near his bicycle, and brought to St. Jacob Hospital in Wilno where he died ten days later. His grave is located in the Rossa Cemetery in Vilnius, among graves of the fallen soldiers of the Polish Armia Krajowa underground .
Works
He is best known for his Ponary Diary, 1941-1943: A Bystander's Account of a Mass Murder (Dziennik pisany w Ponarach od 11 lipca 1941 r. do 6 listopada 1943 r.). It was published in Poland in 1999 (ISBN 838786501X) and translated to several languages: Hebrew in 2000, German in 2003 (ISBN 3980663663), English in 2005 (ISBN 0-300-10853-2); Lithuanian in 2012.
This work is reconstructed from his writings buried in empty soda lemonade bottles in his garden. Some of his writings were illegible. Some are considered lost as Sakowicz’s record ends on November 6, 1943, but according to his family, he kept recording and writing his observation right up to the day of his death in early July, 1944. After the war, the bottles with his writings were dug up by his neighbors, who passed them on to a short-lived Jewish museum in post-war Vilnius; later, the documents made their way to other museums as well as the Lithuanian Central State Archives [lt].
The documents were eventually recovered by Lithuanian Jewish historian Rachel Margolis, who was at that time a director of the historical division of the Jewish State Museum of Lithuania. In the Foreword to the English edition noted that it "is one of the most shocking documents of its time", describing the murder of tens of thousands. She also speculated that "historians were denied access to the diary for many years, possibly because it provides evidence of the atrocities committed by the Lithuanians", and noted that some early transcriptions of the diary fragments were imprecisely translated "apparently in order to diminish the role played by Lithuanian nationalists in the extermination of the Jews.".
Yitzhak Arad writing in the Preface to the English edition that he was an editor of noted that "Sakowicz’s diary is unique. No similar documentation has survived from any of the other mass murder sites at which Jews were shot That Sakowicz’s diary offers “objective” testimony from a bystander rather than from a victim, devoid of any emotional agenda that might call its credibility into question, places it among the most important of the Holocaust testimonies.".
See also
- Yitskhok Rudashevski, one of the Jewish victims of the massacre, author of a diary about his life in the Vilna Ghetto
References
- ^ Margolis, Rachel (2005). "Foreword". In Arad, Yitzhak (ed.). Ponary Diary, 1941-1943: A Bystander's Account of a Mass Murder. Yale University Press. pp. vii–xi. ISBN 978-0-300-10853-8.
- ^ Tadeusz Piotrowski (1998). Poland's Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, Collaboration with Occupying Forces and Genocide in the Second Republic, 1918-1947. McFarland. p. 171. ISBN 978-0-7864-0371-4.
- ^ Sterlingow, Marek (18-09-2009). "Wilno. Sześć razy z rąk do rąk". wyborcza.pl. Retrieved 2024-09-25.
{{cite web}}: Check date values in:|date=(help) - ^ Bajor, Alwida A. (2004). "Błędów i potknięć nieprzebrane mnóstwo w przewodniku „Wilno" P. Włodka". Magazyn Wileński (in Polish). Retrieved 2024-09-25.
- "Szczegółowy opis | Prosto do informacji - katalog zbiorów polskich bibliotek naukowych". katalog.nukat.edu.pl. Retrieved 2024-09-25.
- "היומן שהוסתר בארכיון הליטאי וחושף את שיתוף הפעולה של המקומיים והנאצים בפונאר" [The diary that was hidden in the Lithuanian archive and reveals the cooperation of the locals and the Nazis in Ponary]. www.maariv.co.il (in Hebrew). 2019-05-02. Retrieved 2024-09-25.
- Yitzhak, Arad (2005). "Preface". In Arad, Yitzhak (ed.). Ponary Diary, 1941-1943: A Bystander's Account of a Mass Murder. Yale University Press. pp. xiii–xvi. ISBN 978-0-300-10853-8.
Further reading
- Blurb of Ponary Diary, 1941-1943: A Bystander's Account of a Mass Murder By Kazimierz Sakowicz, Yitzhak Arad. Yale University Press, 2005
- Reading Kazimierz Sakowicz, by Kathryn Cramer