More than 16,000 Jews were massacred by the Nazis in a three-day pogrom which took place in Poniewiesch, Nazi-occupied Lithuania, according to a report brought here by a Russian military commander who succeeded in escaping from the Germans.
The Russian commander also brought photos which he found in the pocket of a dead German officer showing the mass-execution of Jews in the large Schanzer garage in Kaunas. In the city of Shavli, Lithuania, the entire Jewish population was exterminated, he said.
Tales of Jewish mothers covering their children with their bodies in order to protect them from being machine-gunned by low-flying Nazi airplanes swooping down upon roads filled with evacuated Jewish families were told today by the well-known Russian writer Vladimir Lidin, giving an eye-witness account of the evacuation of Jews from Nazi-threatened Russian towns.
Thousands of Jewish dead are buried on roads and in fields in Russia as a result of Nazi machine-gunning of streams of Jewish refugees bound for the interior, Mr. Lidin writes in an article in “Einikeit,” organ of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. “I shall never forget the horrible scenes which I witnessed when German fliers returned three times to machine-gun innocent Jewish women, children and old men who were moving from their home towns to safety in the East,” he says.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
