THE PONARY CRIME 19411944, MONIKA TOMKIEWICZ

In the dark Ponary forests, outside Wilno, today's Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, occurred one of World War II's more horrendous but under-told crimes: the systemic murder by the Germans and their Lithuanian allies of an estimated 80,000 persons. This calculated and elaborately planned operation of genocide took place over three years, between 1941 and 1944, and destroyed the lives of an estimated 70,000 Jews, 5,000 Soviet POWs, at least 2,000 Poles, 781 Soviet communists, and about 40 Romani. The Ponary killings completely eradicated the once vibrant Jewish community of Wilno and contributed (along with Soviet terror before and after the German occupation) to the decimation of the local Polish elite of the Wilno region that up until WWII was in the bounds of the Polish state. A Polish historian, Professor Monika Tomkiewicz, of the Institute of National Remembrance in Warsaw, Poland, has devoted a good part of her life to exposing this atrocity. The Ponary Crime 1941-1944 is the first English version of her painstakingly documented research and fills a void in the academic literature of twentieth-century history, making her work an important contribution to Holocaust studies. The accessible style enables the persons portrayed - both survivors and perpetrators - "to speak directly to the readers." Indeed, the testimonies and accounts, presented in solid factual context, cannot but at times leave the reader shaken.