Koniuchy massacre

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The Kaniūkai (Koniuchy) massacre was a massacre carried out by Jewish and Soviet partisans during the Second World War in the village of Kaniūkai (in Jašiūnai Municipality, Eišiškės County of Lithuania, Reichskommissariat Ostland; currently the village is in the Šalčininkai district municipality of Lithuania). Koniuchy is the Polish name for that village.

On January 29, 1944, Kaniūkai was attacked by Soviet partisan units under the command of the Central Partisan Command in Moscow. The raid was carried out by 100-120 partisans from various units, which included 50 Jewish partisans from the Kaunas Ghetto, and the Wilna Ghetto, under the command of Jacob Penner and Shmuel Kaplinsky. Previously the partisans had often commandeered by force, various supplies including food, clothes and cattle from the village. Due to these earlier raids and thefts, a small self defence unit was created in the village.

The village was not fortified, and the villagers were armed with only a few rifles. The village had about 60 households and about 300 inhabitants. A total of about 38 men (as reported by IPN, although earlier reports gave higher numbers of deaths), women and children were massacred indiscriminately and most of households destroyed.

Notified about assault, 253 batallion of Lithuanian Police soon arrived to Kaniūkai but did not find any Soviet partisans [link].

According to current findings of the IPN (investigation still in progress), at least 38 people were killed, and a dozen or so injured, at least one of them died later. The attack was carried out by Soviet partisan units "Death to the fascists" and "Margirio" of Vilna Brigade of Lithuanian Partisan Staff and "Death to invaders" of Kovno Brigade.

Following the attack, a message was sent from Genrikas Zimanas (Henoch Ziman), head of the South Partisan Brigade to the Communist Antanas Sniečkus, Head of the Lithuanian Headquarters of the Partisan Movement: "on January 29th, the joint group of Vilnius partisans, "Śmierć Okupantowi" and "Margiris" groups, and the special group of General Headquarters burned down the most ardent and self-defensive village of the Eišiškės County, Kaniūkai"

There are controversies about the interpretation of the significance of the Koniuchy massacre. The events at Koniuchy have been described by Chaim Lazar in Destruction and Resistance in 1985, where he claimed 300 people had been murdered. This number has been questioned by some historians who reduced the number of victims. Many Russian sources try to undermine the significance of the crime indicating that during World War II, thousands of villages in Russia and other Eastern European countries were burned to the ground and their inhabitants slaughtered, so there is no reason to pay a particular attention to this particular crime. In Poland and Lithuania, the Koniuchy massacre is treated as one of the many examples of communist crimes against humanity.

The Institute of National Remembrance initiated a formal investigation into the incident on March 3, 2001. The institute examined a number of archival documents including police reports, encoded messages, military diaries and personal files of Soviet partisans. Requests for legal assistance were then sent to prosecutor offices in Belarus, Lithuania, the Russian Federation and Israel.

In May 2004 there was a monument raised in Kaniūkai, with the names of 34 victims.

Few months after destruction of Kaniūkai, on 12 April 1944, similarly Bakaloriškės village was destroyed by Soviet partisans.

References

[Report from IPN on Poland]
[Operations Diary] Operations Diary of a Jewish Partisan Unit in Rudniki Forest.
Lazar, Chaim. Destruction and Resistance. Shengold Publishers, New York, 1985.
[Information on the Investigation in the Case of Crime Committed in Koniuchy by IPN]
[The investigation of the Koniuchy massacre by the "Center of Investigations of Resistance and Genocide of Lithuania's Inhabitants"; article by Rimantas Zizas]
[Rimantas Zizas. Bakaloriškių sunaikinimas (Destruction of Bakaloriškės), 23 October 2002]

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