What happened at the Battle of Paneriai?
On 19 June 1831, during the November Uprising against Russian rule, about 13,000 Polish soldiers and Lithuanian insurgents under General Antoni Giełgud attacked the Russian forces holding the hills of Paneriai outside Vilnius, hoping to take the city. Their attacks were poorly coordinated, and after about four hours of fighting Giełgud ordered a retreat. The defeat left Vilnius in Russian hands for the rest of the uprising.1
The November Uprising broke out in Warsaw at the end of 1830, and by the spring of 1831 insurgents were also fighting the Russians in Lithuania. The Polish commander in chief ordered troops to march there to help them. After the defeat at Ostrołęka on 26 May, General Antoni Giełgud, a native of Samogitia who had served under Napoleon, was given the task of marching into Lithuania.2
Background: a rising spreads east
The uprising began at the end of November 1830, when cadets of the infantry school rose in Warsaw. Britannica describes the leaders who took over as moderates who hoped to negotiate with Nicholas I; they deposed him as king of Poland in January 1831, and in February a Russian army invaded the Kingdom. The Polish army fought it to a standstill at Grochów on 25 February.3 › Olszynka Grochowska, 1831
In the spring the revolt spread to the lands of the old Grand Duchy of Lithuania, then provinces of the Russian Empire, where insurgent bands rose in the countryside. The Polish command was slow to support them. Britannica writes that the commanders hesitated, and that after the Russian victory at Ostrołęka the uprisings in the western provinces were crushed; it was in the weeks after that battle that Giełgud's corps set out for Lithuania.4
Giełgud was no novice. Born in 1792 into a noble family of Samogitia, he had fought in the Napoleonic wars. In 1812, both biographies note, he raised an infantry regiment at his own expense for Napoleon's war against Russia, and he was made a brigadier general in 1818. In the uprising, according to the generals' reports edition, he fought at Wawer, Białołęka and Olszynka Grochowska before Skrzynecki gave him command of a division. In Lithuania he would also form a provisional Polish government for the province at his headquarters and restore insurgent authority in its counties.5
On 29 May Giełgud beat a Russian force at Rajgród, opening the road north. In Lithuania he joined forces with the troops sent there earlier, among them the small corps of General Dezydery Chłapowski, and he was made commander in chief of the insurgents in Lithuania. The editors of the generals' reports note that his pursuit after Rajgród was slow and that he lost touch with the insurgents, so the Russians were not cut off from Grodno.6 › Battle of Rajgród, 1831
Armies and commanders
Giełgud's force joined three generals. Besides Giełgud himself, the Lithuanian Encyclopedia names Chłapowski and Henryk Dembiński, whom Giełgud sent ahead toward Vilnius; the generals' reports edition records Dembiński already at Giełgud's side at Rajgród. Dembiński was the better-known soldier: Britannica calls him the hero of Ostrołęka.7
Facing them stood the Russian garrison of Vilnius. The Lithuanian Encyclopedia names General Dmitry Osten-Sacken, whose force of about 8,000 men and 30 guns barred the roads, and the Guards and other troops of Generals Dmitry Kuruta and Stepan Khilkov behind him. The insurgent army counted 12,600 men with 28 guns in the encyclopedia's count; the Polish Press Agency gives almost 13,000. The Russian total is given as about 26,000 with 87 guns by the encyclopedia and the Polish Press Agency, and as 20,000 by 15min.lt.8
The battle in phases
The march on Vilnius. Vilnius was the prize. In the Lithuanian Encyclopedia's account, on 11 June Giełgud ordered Chłapowski and Dembiński to march on the city, expecting the Russian army to leave it without a fight. It did not. The insurgents came from the direction of Rykantai and Trakai, and where the roads from Kaunas, Trakai and Grodno met, Osten-Sacken's force barred the way, with Kuruta and Khilkov's troops at the foot of the Paneriai hills.9
Four hours on the hills. The fighting on 19 June went badly for the attackers. On their left the insurgents broke into the Russian trenches, but their attempt to push along the valley of the Neris into the enemy's rear was beaten back. The units fought separately, the Lithuanian Encyclopedia writes, without a common command; the Polish Army Museum in Warsaw calls the attack badly coordinated. After about four hours Giełgud ordered a retreat.10
Turning point: the retreat from Vilnius
The Lithuanian Encyclopedia counts about 600 insurgents killed and another 600 taken prisoner, against 364 Russian dead and wounded. The Polish Press Agency's account sums it up the same way: the Russians kept the insurgents out of Vilnius and inflicted far heavier losses than they suffered. Poland's ambassador, speaking at the 190th anniversary, described the insurgents as fighting a Russian army twice their size.11
It was probably the largest battle ever fought for the Lithuanian capital, and it was lost in four hours.
Aftermath: the end of the rising in Lithuania
Paneriai decided the campaign. Vilnius stayed in Russian hands to the end of the uprising. Giełgud tried to hold a line between the Neris and the Šventoji and to raise new regiments in Samogitia, but on 8 July his army failed to take Šiauliai. With the road back to Poland closed, the corps retreated to the Prussian border. On 13 July 1831, in the confusion of the crossing, Giełgud was shot dead by one of his own officers, Captain Stefan Skulski, and the insurgents were disarmed in Prussia.12
The uprising as a whole outlived its Lithuanian campaign by less than three months. The Russians attacked Warsaw on 6 September, Britannica records, and on 5 October the last Polish army crossed into Prussia and surrendered. In Lithuania, 15min.lt notes, the leaders of the rising were sentenced to death and its most active participants sent as recruits to the Caucasus and Siberia.13 › Battle of Ostrołęka, 1831
Legacy and memory
In 2001 a monument to the insurgents who fell in the battle was unveiled near the Paneriai cemetery, the work of the sculptor Konstantinas Bogdanas. It bears the date of the battle and the insurgents' motto, For our freedom and yours, in Lithuanian and Polish. The historian Norbertas Černiauskas, quoted at its 190th anniversary, called Paneriai probably the largest battle ever fought for the Lithuanian capital.14
The battle is remembered jointly. At the 190th anniversary in 2021, the Polish Press Agency and 15min.lt both report, Lithuanian officials, the mayor of Vilnius and Poland's ambassador gathered at the monument, and the mayor recalled the insurgents' motto as a call that still held.15
The name of Paneriai also carries a far heavier memory. During the German occupation of Vilnius, from the summer of 1941 to July 1944, German Einsatzgruppen and Lithuanian auxiliaries carried out mass shootings in the Paneriai forest, in pits the Soviet authorities had begun to dig for a fuel depot. The Paneriai Memorial calls it the largest site of mass murder in Lithuania. Yad Vashem counts more than 75,000 people murdered there, most of them Jews, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum gives a similar estimate, the vast majority Jews; Poland's Institute of National Remembrance gives about 100,000 victims, mostly Jews of the Vilnius region, but also Poles, Belarusians, Roma, Tatars, Lithuanians accused of anti-German activity and Soviet prisoners of war.16
The shootings began in July 1941; a Polish journalist living nearby, Kazimierz Sakowicz, recorded the first day of executions in his diary, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum writes that by the end of that year about 40,000 Jews had been killed at Ponary. From the autumn of 1943 the Germans tried to erase the crime: a unit of prisoners, many of them Jews kept in chains in one of the pits, was forced to dig up and burn the bodies. The Institute of National Remembrance writes that nearly 70,000 bodies were burned between December 1943 and 15 April 1944, which is why the exact number of victims can no longer be established; on the night of 15 April, Yad Vashem records, prisoners of that unit escaped through a tunnel they had dug, and about forty got away.17
Visiting today
Paneriai is now a district of Vilnius. The 1831 monument, a broad-armed cross on a sloping pedestal with plaques in Lithuanian and Polish, stands at the foot of the Paneriai hill near the cemetery chapel. In the forest nearby, the Paneriai Memorial, laid out to a design of 1961 and completed in 1985, and its museum, where documents and belongings found in the pits are kept, mark the killing site of 1941 to 1944, with a path past the pits and memorials to the different groups of victims.18
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