Of course Mr Caution would probably think Avrom Sutzkever was an honest man also - despite seeming to go out of his way to imply there was a gas chamber at Ponary when testifying at Nuremberg.
Taking note that Sutzkever testified at Nuremberg (it must be acknowledged, since Sutzkever never was sent to Ponar, based on what he had only heard, from survivors and others, and on what he remembered after the war) that victims from Vilna were "herded . . . into certain buildings near the village of Ponari, about 8 kilometers from Vilna. From there hardly one returned,” LGR makes a wild charge, even for him. For some reason LGR has tried to stretch this statement of Sutzkever’s into an implication about gas chambers, this claim made despite Sutzkever's having written elsewhere that the method of execution at Ponar was by shooting, despite that in his account of shootings Sutzkever reported details similar to details cited at the time of the killings and by others, and despite Sutzkever's not having mentioned gas chambers or elaborated on his remark in any manner during his Nuremberg testimony.
More likely than LGR's fanciful reading, which introduces into this simple reply, to a question about persecution, an unsubstantiated, even paranoid implication, is that Sutzkever misremembered what he'd heard or knew about Ponar.
And what might Sutzkever have known or heard about Ponar? I have already mentioned that Ponar had a train depot. (Victims were generally brought to the site by truck, sometimes by automobile, with Sakowicz recording some license plate numbers - but the "Kovno" transport, discussed upthread, was brought by train.) Also, according to Sakowicz's journal, Jews' stolen belongings were held there in "[t]he barn - the central clothing depot, from which the clothes are carried away at the end after they have been packed into sacks" (23 July 1941). Sakowicz himself lived in a small dwelling near the site, as did a number of other Poles and some Lithuanians, many of them peasants and some whose names are given in Sakowicz's journal. It was some of these peasants who rescued Schloss, Trojak, Katz, and other survivors, as both Kruk and Sakowicz reported. Sakowicz referred to the area near where the shootings occurred, in fact, as "the Ponary colony" and "Ponary - the settlement" (early August 1941). A map Sakowicz made of the area shows 5 structures between the RR tracks and a wooded area and next to a fenced-in section labeled "Base" (the murder site). One peasant, Kiejzik, was taken from his "apartment" "in Ponary" and shot along with Jewish victims for on 17 September 1941 for stealing victims' watches for personal use (it is not clear whether Kiejzik was killed or only wounded, albeit severely, in the face). There was also a "little chapel" near the killing site (25 October 1941; also shown on the far side of the wooded area on Sakowicz's map). Sakowicz wrote of a killing action on 25 October 1941 during which "the procession neared the [RR] crossing [at] exactly 8:52" and completed filing by at "9:17"; when shots began to be heard, "The condemned began to get nervous. One of them turned to Wysocki, who was standing next to the hut, and asked, 'What is this place?'" (Wysocki answered "Po-na-ry," confirming the worst fears of the victims, who began weeping and trying to find ways to escape.)
Why do I mention all this excruciating detail, some of it probably known to Sutzkever (the layout and buildings at Ponar), some not (details about the trucks, the killing process and how the site was used to kill and steal, specific incidents, and so on)? Because Sutzkever's reference, given his second-hand knowledge of the shootings and that he was testifying from memory, to Jews being taken to buildings at Ponar - and then not being heard from again - is an understandable bit of confusion, especially since even Sakowicz describes Jews being processed next to a hut. Other testimonies do not mention a hut - only dunes, hills, ditches, bushes, woods, fence, gates, barbed wire, etc. - and also that the victims were sometimes blindfolded - but Sakowicz was there, not just once, to be shot, but day after day, action after action, writing about what he saw. It is no stretch at all to conclude it likely that garbled word of shootings, hills, pits, huts, etc. made its way back to Vilna and listeners like Sutzkever. Note too that Sutzkever doesn't say that Jews were murdered in buildings at the site, as LGR tries to make out, only that the victims were, Sutzkever understood, herded into a building at some point in the process, after which they disappeared. How this understandable error - and I think it is an error, for I know of no description of the Ponar killings except Sutzkever's that has Jews rounded up into buildings at Ponar - transforms into Sutzkever's making up a story about gas chambers is something LGR will have to explain to us.
