[10,000 Lithuanian Jews] were taken in batches of 100 [to Ninesfort fortress] & pushed into a deep pit & machine gunned. Eliminated in batches of 100. It took the whole day to push them in. They started covering them with soil. Anybody who was still alive, still moving, they were still shooting. That was witnessed by Lithuanian people who lived not far from this fortification. The soil they say was heaving for a night & a day from the people who were still alive.

One boy aged 14 or 15 managed to crawl out at night. He managed to move the dead bodies & hid until daylight. Then he marched into the ghetto, covered with lime. He told the ghetto council what was happening, was sworn to secrecy. They told him not to tell anybody what happened, because there might be a panic in the ghetto & people might refuse to work. They said that would be the end of the ghetto, they would kill everybody, so he kept silent.

Now, our biggest shock was the loss of our loved ones & families but what also compounded our horror was the fact that our killers, the people who pulled the trigger, were our own Lithuanian neighbours, thousands of young men who had volunteered to help the Nazis. 80% of the killing machine was non German. There were Ukrainians, there were Hungarians, Rumanians, Croats, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians. It would have been of some comfort to us if we could have identified our killers as sadists, as misfits, if we could have removed them from the human race, but they were part of the human race, they were like you & me. They were not much different & yet they could be brainwashed to murder innocent people. This shook, this shattered my belief in a progressive & benevolent humanity. Our concept of evil was wrong, we realised the line separating good from evil was a lot thinner than we imagined.