rumours, we learned that during the first days of the Feast of Tabernacles they had taken away all the elderly Jews from the smaller second ghetto and shot them. In our (the first) ghetto, all the elderly were registered.418 On Simchat Torah419 we learned that they had taken away 3,000 Jews from the smaller second ghetto that same day and shot them at Ponary.
[33] The rumours grew from minute to minute that two-thirds of the Jews from the first ghetto were going to be killed. Everyone was stricken with fear and dread. All who had money or valuables used them to bribe the Germans and the Lithuanians, and fled in German vehicles to Warsaw, Białystok, Lida, and Grodno.
I had no money but wanted to save myself and decided to try. There was nothing to lose, since everything was lost already. A girlfriend and I put kerchiefs on our heads like gentile girls. Carrying baskets, we slipped in betweenthe rows of a work group. By a stroke of luck we got past the guard. We had not taken papers with us.
Once outside the ghetto, we removed our “marks of shame”, which hadbeen concealed by our wrapped kerchiefs.
We left Vilna on 19 October 1941 and got to the cmentarz żydowski in Ponary.
[33a] It was a very rainy day. A car containing Germans and Lithuanianspulled up next to us. Taking us for Polish girls, they invited us to get in. Throughout the journey they went on about the Jews, saying they should allbe killed. We pretended not to understand and just spoke to each other in Polish. On several occasions the Germans tried to strike up a conversation with us, but we shrugged our shoulders and pretended not to understand a word of German.
A Lithuanian took a guess and joked that we were Jewish. We laughed at him so hard that he soon became convinced we were real Poles from generations of Polish stock.
We got out of the car after 20 kilometres, and at that very spot there wasa man in civilian clothes working on a car. The man called us over and toldus the car was his. It was a private car that had been repaired. He offered todrive us a distance of 5 kilometres.
