Lithuania can name Ponary’s killers. On the eve of its 2026 national commemoration, the Ministry of Culture still writes “local helpers.”

On September 18, Lithuania’s Ministry of Culture published its invitation to the official September 23 ceremony at the Paneriai Memorial. It says that Nazi occupation structures and their vietiniai talkininkai participated in the mass killings.

The Lithuanian phrase is vietiniai talkininkai. The Center for Jewish Art translates the same wording on the Paneriai entrance monument as “local helpers.” As of September 20, three days before the national ceremony, that is still the category the Ministry chose.

The notice is more revealing when read sentence by sentence. It first says, “Šį gyvenimą brutaliai nutraukė okupacijos”: occupations, plural, brutally cut “this life” short. “This life” is the Jewish communal life the previous paragraph had just described. The next sentence does identify Nazi Germany. It then says the killings involved Nazi occupation structures and their “local helpers.” Later, after describing the destruction of Lithuanian Jewry, it says that by 1944 more than 200,000 “people” had been murdered. Its final sentence speaks of the “loss” (netektis) of hundreds of thousands of “our fellow citizens” and says that loss obliges Lithuania to preserve historical truth.

The notice knows these victims were Jews. Its title says so. The problem is what happens to specificity when the sentence reaches the local perpetrators. Ponary does not suffer from a shortage of nouns.

The girl in the moonlight

Her name was Tzerna Morgenstern. Abraham Sutzkever’s account gives her age as eighteen.

Two accounts, each traced to a woman who escaped Ponary, preserve her last minutes. One was printed soon after the war; the other was given under oath at the Eichmann trial in 1961. They differ, and the differences should stay visible.

Sutzkever’s version, based on Zelda Einhorn’s testimony, identifies the man as Martin Weiss. Tzerna had been marched to Ponary with her mother and younger brother. By the time Weiss pulled her away from the killing ditch, her family had already been shot. The moon was rising. Sutzkever has Weiss speaking about the beauty of the moonlight before taking out his revolver and shooting Tzerna in the head.

Abba Kovner’s testimony at Session 27 on May 4, 1961, gives a second account. His source was Sara Menkes, who had escaped the killing pit and told him the story weeks later. Kovner placed the killing in October 1941. He had known Tzerna as a pupil and remembered a tall, upstanding girl with long plaits and wonderful eyes.

Kovner’s version places a line of Einsatzgruppen men facing the women. It then refers to an officer who orders Tzerna forward, tells her to walk down a path without looking back, and shoots her in the........

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