The Paneriai Memorial

The Paneriai is a neighborhood of Vilnius, about 10 kilometers away from the city center. In this place, we can find the big Memorial about the people shot to death from 1941 to 1944.

When you arrive you can see different monuments about the history and you can walk to the surrounding of the site and see the monuments, pits, and the forest. Also, you can visit a museum that it explains the history. The museum opens from April to October, all the week from 9 to 17 hours, except Monday. The other months you can to ask for time to visit.

If you will go there, you can imagine the entire situation about this hard epoch.

The history of this place was the following before the Second World War, Paneriai was the beautiful place with the forest and people living here, it was nice and quiet. But when the Red Army arrived, they started to change the things. This site was used for the Red Army to set up the ammunitions. After 1941 when the Nazis took Vilnius and they find this place in Paneriai, it was used for extermination operations. 

The first year in 1941 there were killed around 21.000 Jews. In 1942 people were brought to Paneriai in smaller groups from the Vilnius ghetto. In 1943 few hundred prisoners and Jews were murdered in the pits of Paneriai. In 1944 the Jews in the labor camps and the Jews that they lived in the ghetto area were shot to death by the SS in there.

Before they withdrew from Lithuania, how they had to fear to be discovered, they exhumed the corpses and burned them.

About 100.000 people were murdered in Paneriai. 70.000 were Jews and other victims were: the soldiers of Lithuania, communists, priests, member of Polish resistance movement and Soviet POWs.

1: It’s the place where the clothes, footwear, and personal belongings were stored.

2: Pit where the soldiers and officers of the Red Army were shot to death.

3: It’s the pit where the corpses that were exhumed and after burned here by the Nazis.

4: Different victims that were unearthed when the railway was being constructed.

5: There murdered people of the ghetto: hospital patients, medical staff, old people and children from orphanages.

6: Earthed the prisoners from the burners were in this pit. In this area find the 30 m long underground passageway which was used by 12 prisoners to escape on 15 the April 1944. 11 managed to reach Soviet partisan units.

7: The site where the prisoners wait for their turn to die.

I took advantage this article to include two web link, the first web link explain the history of the extermination of the Lithuania people during of the Second World War and more information about the massacre in Paneriai. The second one web link that you can find it’s one video that explains how was this history, how attacked the Nazi Army and the Soviet attacks, the territories that they had been conquered, the people that they had been persecuting, the concentration camps and more. If you want to have more information you can search for this links.

 First: http://www.archyvai.lt/en/news/archive/vilnius-ghetto.html

Second:https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/es/media_nm.php?ModuleId=0&MediaId=8631