New research uncovers how Lithuania’s largest Holocaust massacre was mostly forgotten
Chris Heath’s ‘No Road Leading Back’ pieces together the Ponar massacre in detective-like fashion, including a daring escape of 40 prisoners through a secret tunnel in 1944
Reporter at The Times of Israel
In 1944, after months of using spoons to dig an escape tunnel beneath their barracks, 40 prisoners managed to crawl through the passage and flee the largest Nazi killing site in Lithuania.
In the Ponar forest south of Vilnius, 70,000 Jews were shot over massive pits. The massacres — which began in July 1941 — were among the first aktions of the so-called “Holocaust by Bullets” perpetrated by Nazi Germany and collaborators.
Over two years after the initial massacre, a group of 80 prisoners was tasked with exhuming and cremating the corpses. The men lived on-site, underground, and they were chained for security.
In “No Road Leading Back: An Improbable Escape from the Nazis and the Tangled Way We Tell the Story of the Holocaust,” acclaimed journalist Chris Heath pierces through the confusion surrounding Ponar’s role in the Holocaust. Although some of the escapees relayed accounts after the war, testimonies were often distorted, ignored, or misappropriated.
“I wanted to know exactly what could be known, or what somebody who was there had said — and if something couldn’t be known, or if the contradictions between different accounts or even different apparent facts were awkward, I wanted to show that, and embrace it, and see what we might learn from it,” Heath told The Times of Israel.
In 2016, archaeologists working at Ponar located the 112-foot-long escape tunnel. The tunnel’s discovery confirmed accounts of the escape which occurred despite German efforts to conceal everything that took place during executions and the destruction of corpses.
Vilnius Jews built a monument at Ponar in 1948. However, Soviet authorities replaced the edifice with the typical obelisk dedicated to “Victims of Fascism” without mention of Jews. A permanent monument to Ponar’s Jewish victims was not erected onsite until 1991.
“The book demonstrates how, whether the particular Holocaust story of Ponar is being told or ignored, it is usually being done so with some agenda,” said Heath. “Often, when we tell stories about the past, we are less concerned in relating some kind of objective history than in using the past to bolster some story we want to tell about the present,” said Heath.
Before World War II, Ponar was a forest recreation area where Lithuanians went to pick mushrooms and berries. In 1940, Soviet authorities dug six massive pits at Ponar to store emergency fuel. After the Nazis took over, the pits became mass graves for the Jews of Vilnius.
‘Almost unbearable to read’
The Ponar massacres began before the construction of Nazi death camps at Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor. Beginning in 1941, hundreds of open-air massacres took place in German-occupied Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.
“No Road Leading Back” is visceral, even by Holocaust standards. In more than 600 pages, Heath allows survivors and eyewitnesses to speak for themselves.
“I desperately wanted to write a compelling, propulsive narrative that people would want to read — I believed that what I was finding and trying to describe was special and important and deserved a real audience — but I also wasn’t prepared to sacrifice anything or sanitize anything,” said Heath.
The prisoners who excavated the escape tunnel were forced into a “Leichenkommando,” or corpse unit. Operating under the terror of SS officers, the men dug up corpses and piled them onto wood for cremation. To eliminate all traces of evidence, the prisoners blended the ashes with sand and buried the mixture.
In their barracks below ground-level, the prisoners spent three months digging the escape tunnel. Of the 40 men who fled on April 19, 1944, only 11 survived to witness Germany retreat from Lithuania. The remainder were hunted down and shot by the SS.
“There are parts of the book which, I feel it should be said, are almost unbearable to read,” said Heath. “Even if you think you know the worst, there may be moments here that challenge that. I thought hard about what it was to include these moments. But my strong feeling was those who escaped Ponar and told their story invariably chose to share such details,” he said.
An invaluable account of the Ponar massacre is the diary of Polish journalist Kazimierz Sakowicz. He recorded details of the daily shootings on scraps of paper, soda bottles, and a calendar, all within hearing range of the forced marches taken by Jews from the Vilnius ghetto to Ponar, where Sakowicz lived.
Sakowicz did not survive the war and his diary was not published until 1999.
‘Participants in the Holocaust’
An enduring controversy is the role played by Lithuanians in Nazi Germany’s Final Solution. Some massacres of Jews were not initiated by German SS units, but by mobs of Lithuanians.
As documented by Heath, there were more than 200 mass killing sites across Lithuania. They operated with no more than 1,000 German soldiers in Lithuania at any given time, he wrote.
“It may be appealing to imagine that there is a clear-cut distinction between participants in the Holocaust and everyone else, but to do so is to avoid thinking about what actually took place,” wrote Heath. “It avoids dealing with the killing that took place in communities immediately after the German invasion that appears to have had no guidance or oversight from the Germans at all,” he wrote.
In discussing the extent of Lithuanian collaboration, Heath uses the word participant to avoid oversimplification.
“Writing my book, I was all too aware how many narrative problems it would solve if I smoothed things over, plausibly filling in gaps between what is known, in a style which I believe is considered acceptable in certain types of popular narrative nonfiction,” said Heath. “For me, that never seemed an option,” he said.
Similar to the Babyn Yar killing site in Kyiv, Ukraine, German forces and their collaborators murdered people from several victim groups at Ponar. Along with 70,000 Jews from Vilnius, Ponar victims included 2,000 Poles deemed “intellectuals” and 8,000 Soviet prisoners of war.
Members of the “Vilnian Special Platoon” carried out much or most of the shooting at Ponar, depending on the period. Comprised mostly of Lithuanians, the volunteer unit of 80 men carried out executions of Jews and other groups during Germany’s occupation.
The massacres at Ponar are under investigation by the Gdańsk branch of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance. Within Lithuania, a state-funded Genocide and Resistance Research Center has been researching the Holocaust since 1992.
‘To emerge just a little further’
Heath’s research continued well past his book’s deadline.
In the epilogue, Heath documents a visit to Cleveland, where one of the Ponar escapees — Lejzer Owsiejczyk — died many years ago. Visiting Owsiejczyk’s tombstone, Heath encountered an image of the survivor’s face for the first time, etched onto an oval-shaped plaque.
“What is embedded within [the plaque] has weathered over the last sixty-three years, but it is something that I never imagined I might see,” wrote Heath. “Enough remains here, even now, to allow one more Ponar escapee to emerge just a little further from the darkness,” he wrote.
The text is paired with a photo Heath took of Owsiejczyk’s tombstone. In the image, the neatly groomed Owsiejczyk wears a jacket and tie.
The men who escaped from the Ponar killing pits attempted to tell the world what took place. Their accounts were marginalized and — for multiple reasons — Ponar became largely untethered from Holocaust memory. By meticulously pursuing new details for the record, Heath resisted the Nazis in his own way.
“[The Nazis] intended not just to murder, but to obliterate all traces — physical, yes, but in memory, too — of those they killed,” wrote Heath. “If a key Nazi goal in the implementation of the Holocaust was to make the visible invisible, then one crucial and enduring goal of those opposing them would be to do the reverse: to make the invisible visible,” wrote Heath.
