Kazimierz Sakowicz

Kazimierz Sakowicz (1894 – July 5, 1944) was a Polish journalist, soldier and member of the Polish resistance against Nazism. A witness to the prolonged Ponary massacre in German-occupied Vilnius, he chronicled much of it in his diary, before being murdered in 1944. His diary, which he buried in his garden and parts of which were recovered and reconstructed after the war, was published several decades after his death under the title Ponary Diary (first, in Polish in 1999, and translated into English in 2005). It is a detailed record of 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 born in Vilna in 1894, the son of Elias and Sofia Sakowicz, then in the Russian Empire. He was also an officer of the pre-war Polish army. The notes that survive begin on 11 July 1941, and end on 6 November 1943.

On 5 July 1944, during the increasing unrest in the area (Operation Tempest), he was shot and seriously wounded. While the exact circumstances of his shooting are not known, it is generally assumed that he was attacked by Lithuanian collaborators who discovered his interest in the massacre. He was found in the evening by his neighbours in a ditch, near his bicycle, and thereafter translated into several languages: Hebrew in 2000;

This diary is reconstructed from writings that Sakowicz had buried in empty lemonade whose family perished in the massacre, and who was at that time a director of the historical division of the Jewish State Museum of Lithuania. The foreword of 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 published in Lithuania were imprecisely translated "apparently in order to diminish the role played by Lithuanian nationalists in the extermination of the Jews". Waldemar Franciszek Wilczewski likewise suggested that the fact that the last part of Sakowicz diary is missing might be the result of its destruction by Lithuanian perpetrators and collaborators, whose names and identities by that time Sakowicz was aware of, and might have recorded in that part of his diary. François Guesnet reviewed the book for Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung in 2003. He noted that "Contrary to all customs, the earlier Polish edition is not mentioned anywhere [in the later Hebrew edition, which is nearly identical and clearly based on it], which can certainly be seen as a significant gesture in the shaping of historical memory".

Ponary Diary editions Polish: Hebrew: German: English: Lithuanian:

Italian: French: