This is a strange but grimly memorable book. What makes No Road Leading Back strange is that Chris Heath, an experienced English journalist, became gripped by a drive to find and check every detail of a single Lithuanian episode in the Holocaust. That drive—he calls it “relentless”—forced him on through months and years of journeying, questioning, and research. He needed to discover what happened to the survivors of that episode, at the time and in their postwar lives. What makes the book memorable and gives it such importance is that Heath finds himself not just telling a story but telling how he pursued the story. As historians have long recognized, what “actually happened” in the past is no more significant than what different people at different times believe to have happened. Why do they evolve—or invent—new versions of the past, and how are these alternative narratives created and marketed to the public? Are historical witnesses to be believed simply because they were “there”?
The background to No Road Leading Back is the fate of Lithuania’s Jews under the German occupation between June 1941 and August 1944. The murder of almost the entire Jewish population—some 210,000 in 1941—began immediately after the Nazi invasion and was largely completed within a few months (before the Nazis had begun gassing Jews at Auschwitz and other extermination camps). The Lithuanian genocide was exceptional, even by the standards of the Holocaust, for two reasons. The first was its appalling efficiency. Between 90 and 96 percent of the resplendent community that had long made the capital, Vilnius, a center of Judaic wisdom and civilization perished—the highest proportion of any Nazi-occupied country with a significant Jewish population. The second exceptional feature was the widespread, sometimes enthusiastic collaboration of Lithuanians in rounding up and shooting Jews. Even in other occupied Eastern European countries where antisemitism was ingrained, the Nazis did not find such a high level of voluntary support.
The largest killing site was Ponary, a forest area a few miles southwest of Vilnius. The firing squads were usually Lithuanian, many of them teenagers recruited from a variety of patriotic militias. It’s estimated that they killed over 70,000 Jewish men, women, and children at Ponary, mostly from Vilnius. Some 30,000 Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, and others also died there. They were shot into large stone-lined pits constructed during a previous Soviet occupation to hold fuel tanks. Layer upon layer of bodies accumulated in the pits, each layer covered with a scattering of sand. Later, following their usual practice, the Nazis began a concealment operation. A team of some eighty men, mostly Jews but also a few Soviet prisoners, was ordered to exhume the dead and cremate them on huge timber pyres. The ashes were then mingled with the forest sand. The team members were housed in one special pit, accessible only by ladder, and well fed for their task. It was understood that they too would be shot when their work was completed.
But a group of them, initially about a dozen, formed an escape plan. With no tools but their fingers and a few small spoons, they sank a shaft through the pit floor and then dug a deep lateral tunnel some thirty meters long, hoping to reach the surface in a place that would be unobserved. The digging started in early February 1944; the breakout, according to most accounts, took place on the night of April 15. Almost all the eighty prisoners in the pit lined up to enter the tunnel, but only the front few—the diggers—made it to safety. Alarms and floodlights were triggered, and guards opened fire. The rest of the escapees died, killed in the open or trapped inside the tunnel. All but one of the survivors joined Soviet partisan units in the forest until Vilnius was liberated by the Red Army four months later.
Some of them soon told their stories, in Yiddish, Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, and Hebrew. But the horror of what had been done at Ponary, and even the heroic tale of the tunnel, seem to have made little impression in Allied countries. The war in Europe was still going on in August 1944. Auschwitz had not yet been liberated, British troops had not entered Bergen-Belsen, and American soldiers did not come across the camp at Buchenwald until almost exactly a year after the Ponary escape. More broadly, the realization that the Third Reich had been engaged in a gigantic plan for the extermination of European Jewry was only beginning to dawn.
Seventy-two years later, in June 2016, Heath read an intriguing story in The New York Times. At a place in Lithuania called Ponary (he prefers the Yiddish name, Ponar), archaeologists had discovered the tunnel dug by Jewish prisoners for their escape. The report seized Heath’s imagination:
I remember being astonished not just by the story but by the fact that I’d never heard of the place where it all happened…. I wanted to understand more. I wanted to understand better what had happened here and, increasingly, I also wanted to understand how and why what had happened here could have managed to slip the world by.
Within a few months he had visited Richard Freund, the archaeologist who appeared in the New York Times report, and had made his way to Ponary. His life became consumed by his research. He wanted “the truth” about the escape and the escapees, and about the three-year slaughter at Ponary. But he also grew fascinated by the changing ways the site had been commemorated, interpreted, landscaped, or simply neglected, first by Soviet Lithuania under Stalinism, then by the post-Stalinist USSR, and finally by the independent Lithuania that left the Soviet Union in 1990.
Soon, though, Heath was stumbling among contradictions. He faced contrasting and irreconcilable memories of events, vanished documents, and personalities who were either martyrs of Jewish self-defense or despicable collaborators with the Gestapo—or perhaps both. Simple facts split into divergent tendrils. Who first suggested a tunnel? Who crawled out of it first? Even the handful of survivors whose widows and descendants Heath was able to meet (mostly in Israel) had left narratives that often didn’t fit together. Their very names were hard to pin down. One stout-hearted old escapee known to Heath as Motke Zeidel had nineteen different versions of his name.
The slow acceptance that history can be dismayingly plural, that contradictory and even apparently untrue accounts all have a certain validity, is the most impressive element in this long book. “We must trust that [the tunnelers] all spoke their own truth,” Heath writes. He goes on to explain why he resisted the temptation to rely on only one voice in recounting the heroic episode of the Ponary tunnel:
We want to bind our empathy to one or more of these people whose actions will transcend adversity…. But to that end…I would have silenced the dissonant voices of those who were actually there whenever those voices proved inconvenient for the narrative.
About what was done at Ponary, however, there was less ambiguity. The first part of No Road Leading Back is, to put it mildly, a difficult read. It recounts in unsparing detail how, between July 1941 and August 1944, the population of the Vilnius ghetto and other settlements was murdered there. At first the Jews were marched several miles to the site; later they were brought by rail or road. On arrival they were stripped to their underwear, sometimes blindfolded, and then herded to the edges of the forest pits. There they were shot, each group falling onto the layer of fresh corpses in front of them. Nearby villagers patronized a lively market selling the heaps of clothing, shoes, and valuables the victims had left behind. Payment went either to the young Lithuanian executioners or to a Polish wholesaler.
It was not until the winter of 1943 that the SS launched its routine cleanup operation, although executions were still taking place. Weighed down with leg chains, savagely beaten, and urged to work faster, the exhumation squad was sent into action. Layer by layer, they dug up some 68,000 bodies rotting in the pits, extracted gold teeth or jewelry, then dragged them to the towering pyres that blazed and smoked day and night. Several of the men came across the bodies of their own families, although at the bottom of the pits the corpses were flattened beyond recognition. The overpowering stench penetrated the men’s clothing and skin. Months after their tunnel flight, Soviet partisans could not bear to stand near a Ponary escapee for long.
Immediately following the liberation of Lithuania by the Red Army in 1944, many eyewitness accounts emerged, though not yet in English. A Soviet special commission arrived almost as the last German fled and produced a full, shattering report about Ponary, complete with forensic examination of corpses found in pits as yet unopened. There were lists of clothing recovered (“French gray plaid knitted blouse, crepe de chine dress”). A few years later, as Stalin’s antisemitic paranoia reached its peak, it became the rule to call the victims “Soviet citizens,” suppressing the fact that most of them were Jewish.
After these first revelations, interest in Ponary went quiet for decades. The atrocities were nevertheless on record in the West as well as in the Soviet Union. The special commission’s report had been followed by several publications, among them a book in Yiddish by the poet Abraham Sutzkever and the report Ponary: Baza (Ponary: Base of Operations) by the Polish writer Józef Mackiewicz. By chance Mackiewicz had been cycling past Ponary when a trainload of Jews was massacred as they tried to escape. Heath comments, “Between them, the bold and assertive writings of Sutzkever…and Mackiewicz about Ponar constituted a stirring, detailed, and authoritative first draft of this history.” And yet “those first voices turned out to be, for a long time to come, pretty much the only voices.”
For the world’s indifference, he offers a string of acid explanations. These were “the wrong kind of deaths” (i.e., not in the gas chambers the public came to know about). They happened “at the wrong time,” in the first months of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, before the world knew of the Holocaust. They were “in the wrong place,” in obscure lands liberated by the Soviets rather than by the publicity-conscious Americans, British, or French. Heath could have added another factor: the cold war. In the West, stories from authorities behind the Iron Curtain were soon discounted as Communist propaganda. And for the few who understood anything about Lithuania, there was embarrassment. How could sympathy for a small nation imprisoned and brutalized within the USSR be reconciled with evidence of its widespread participation in Nazi crimes? By then many of the Lithuanian perpetrators had reinvented themselves as refugees from “Red tyranny” and settled in West Germany, Canada, or the United States.
Ponary was designated as a memorial. At times it was almost abandoned; at others it was radically “restored” in ways that bore little resemblance to the original ground plan. Meanwhile the myth of the “double genocide” took root in the country. Immediately after the war, the vengeful Soviet Union had deported to the gulag about 130,000 Lithuanians, the majority of them women and children—about 5 percent of the population. Nearly 30,000 of them died. This crime was held to “balance out” the murder of Lithuania’s Jews. (I remember vividly the bewilderment of Jonathan Miller, the opera and theater director, when he returned to London after visiting the land of his Jewish ancestors. In Vilnius he had gone to the museums, only to find that it was the sufferings of Lithuanians under Soviet rule that dominated displays of “genocide,” rather than the fate of the Jews under the Nazis.)
But by the 1980s, and especially after the restoration of Lithuania’s independence in 1990, new generations were becoming aware of the real history of their country during the Soviet and Nazi occupations, and some of them were determined to confront it. Honor had been paid, starting in Soviet times, to Lithuanians who had risked their own and their families’ lives by hiding Jews. But free Lithuania now also honored heroes of anti-Soviet resistance, some of whom, it was suggested by a few bold voices, had also supported the Nazis in their onslaught on “Jew-Bolsheviks.” Heath tells the story of the well-known writer Rūta Vanagaitė, who in 2016 published Mūsiškiai (Our People), an exposure of Lithuanians’ antisemitism and participation in the atrocities, which to her astonishment sold out in a day. Times had changed: now everyone wanted to read and argue about the book, even if they hated its content. But the next year, when she dared to hint (without much proof) that a certain anti-Soviet “hero” had another past, her books were pulled from stores.
Well before independence, Lithuanian academics had begun working diligently to draw up precise records of Ponary and other mass-murder sites—research that remained obscure to the media and most of the public. But the outside world, especially historians of the Jewish experience, was regaining interest in wartime Lithuania. In 2015 the ebullient Richard Freund, an ex-rabbi and professor of Jewish history at the University of Hartford in Connecticut (known to local newspapers as “a real-life Indiana Jones”), became involved in excavating the ruins of the Great Synagogue in Vilnius. While there, he visited Ponary and became excited by the thought that the famous escape tunnel might still exist underground.
Freund assembled a team that included a retired expert on prison escape tunnels and several geophysicists with sophisticated equipment; Heath devotes many pages to explaining the ground-penetrating technology known as electrical resistance tomography (ERT) that they used. A film unit from NOVA, a scientific documentary series, recorded proceedings. World media, including Fox News and The New York Times, were alerted to stand by for the big story when the tunnel was found.
In the end the results didn’t match the publicity. The ERT indicated plausible though not quite conclusive routes for the tunnel, but an excavation to reveal it was ruled out as impractical. American media proclaimed the “discovery” of a “forgotten” tunnel. In fact it had never been forgotten and had been “discovered” twelve years earlier. In 2004 the Lithuanian archaeologist Vytautas Urbanavičius had thoroughly excavated the vertical shaft and the first yards of the horizontal tunnel beyond it. (He also found a bucket in the entrance containing seven antitank grenades primed to be detonated by wire—one of the remaining mysteries of the story.)
The twelve men who escaped through the tunnel and what became of them are at the center of Heath’s book. After the war almost all of the handful of Jews still alive in Lithuania made their way to Palestine, and some later moved to America. (The small Jewish community in Lithuania today is, apparently, mainly composed of postwar immigrants from Russia.) Most of them had already given their testimony about Ponary: Shlomo Gol, for example, had been a witness at the Nuremberg tribunal, where he described how he had found his brother among the corpses. Some fought in the 1948 war that established the State of Israel. Others arrived there and faced startling hostility. Motke Zeidel was asked by a panel of Tel Aviv historians, “How did you go like sheep to the slaughter?” Heath writes, “The way he told it afterward, first he slammed his fist down on the table, then shouted ‘shame on you!’ at the historians as he walked out.” Heath notes that the accusers were using words from a famous speech by Abba Kovner, a leader of Jewish resistance in the Vilnius ghetto.
Kovner’s name, in turn, opens into the story of Jacob Gens, head of the Vilnius Jewish council. In an excruciating tragedy repeated in other Nazi-organized ghettos, Gens had to choose between sending a regular quota of Jews to their doom at Ponary or facing the immediate murder of the entire population under his charge. In the end the Germans shot him, too. He left behind a speech: “In order to save even a small part of the Jewish people, I alone had to lead others to their deaths. And in order to ensure that you go with clean consciences I have to forget mine and wallow in filth.”
In late 2016 Gens’s formidable ninety-year-old daughter Ada and his granddaughter Irene agreed with Freund to search the area of a Vilnius prison for relics of him, using ground-penetrating radar. Nothing identifiable was found. But another agonizing dilemma of wartime collaboration surfaced when Irene denounced Kovner for organizing resistance and thereby provoking the liquidation of the ghetto. All over occupied Europe, and not only in ghettos, resistance movements were blamed for causing German retaliation: the killing of hostages or the burning and massacre of entire communities.
The Ponary tunnelers were at least clear of these moral pitfalls. Heath was fairly quickly able to identify eight of the twelve escapees and to speak with the relatives of all of them except one, Konstantin Potanin, a Russian soldier captured by the Germans (and wrongly designated as Jewish) who gave a Lithuanian newspaper an outstandingly eloquent interview about Ponary within weeks of the liberation. He was killed in a traffic accident a few months later. Heath was able to track seven others to Israel. They had since died, but with tact and patience he persuaded their families to repeat once more what they had been told, often unwillingly, about Ponary and the escape.
Heath learned that a few of the escapees had formed the custom of meeting on April 15, the date of their breakout in 1944. Their children remembered the reunions as occasions not of mourning but of cheerful memory-swapping at which drinking went on far into the night. It was cognac, one relative recalled. No, it was vodka, said another. But they agreed about the old men’s laughter. In old age, Motke Zeidel returned to Ponary with a film crew and entered the pit that had once held the escapees and those who didn’t escape. He ordered vodka, cured herring, and cucumber to be brought down to him, and in that place he ate and drank. That was his triumph and his revenge on those who had tried to kill him, and on death itself.
In their last years the survivors were constantly sought out for their memories. But their experience with Claude Lanzmann, the director of the towering, nine-and-a-half-hour Shoah (1985), was not happy. Two tunnelers, Yitzhak Dogin and Motke Zeidel, featured prominently in it. But they soon came to realize that Lanzmann was interested in them only insofar as their recollections fit into his immense project, a film about the Holocaust “with no archival footage at all, just artfully juxtaposed testimony from those who were there.” Lanzmann wrote afterward, in his imperious, dramatic style, “It’s not a film about survival and survivors. It’s a film about death.” Shoah included terrible memories of the killing at Ponary, the exhumations, and the pyres, but nothing about the tunnel. When they saw it, Zeidel and Dogin felt hurt and manipulated. Angry on their behalf, Heath lists gross errors of fact in reviews of Shoah and in the published scripts.
At least one of the escapees, Shlomo Gol, later moved to the United States. Heath spent much time—typical of his lust for verifiably accurate data—trying to reconcile Gol’s various dates of birth. With the same energy he dug through Yad Vashem and Lithuanian ghetto archives to establish whether David Kantorovich had an earlier family lost in the Ponary killings. Four of the twelve escapees seemed to have vanished altogether, but Heath, through incredible persistence, managed to unearth at least traces of all of them in Europe or America. The last to be glimpsed was Lejzer Owsiejczyk, once a butcher. Heath pursued his shadow through ships’ passenger lists and newspaper clippings until he stood at last before the gravestone of “Louis Offsay,” who had drowned in Lake Erie sixty-three years earlier. Beside the English inscription were three words in Hebrew: “Leyzer, son of Abraham.”
Heath’s almost obsessive drive to chase down and record details in long narrative sequences and footnotes would be dismaying if he were not such a gifted and imaginative writer, self-critical and alert to intelligent discussion of his doubts and methods:
There’s always more, if you keep looking. Even after this book was more or less completed, I kept trawling—whenever I landed on some remote museum website to check a fact, I’d invariably stay for a while, reflexively peppering its database with search terms, just in case.
But earlier in his book, Heath reflects memorably on what he failed to find out:
I think there’s also value in being confronted, over and over, with just how little is knowable. Every barren search felt like a useful rebuke…. The truth has holes in it, and the more we cover them up, the less real the world becomes.
English (US) · 