In 1941, before the Nazis started gassing Jews at concentration camps, they began their practice of extermination in the Lithuanian town of Vilna. The Germans, aided by Lithuanian collaborators, trucked 70,000 Jews from this once-bustling city into the nearby forest of Ponar. There the people were gunned down and left in pits, their bodies covered only by the next layer and then the next. (Soviet POWs and others were killed there too, in far smaller numbers.)
When the tide of the war turned and the Nazis knew the Soviet Union might soon recapture this territory, they determined to cover up the evidence of their slaughter. They brought a group of about 80 Jews and Russian prisoners to live in a pit and do the dirty work: building pyres, digging up the decaying corpses (frequently of family and friends), burning them and then spreading the ashes.
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Some in this group, knowing they’d soon meet the same fate, determined to save themselves and spill the Nazis’ secrets to the world. They spent months digging a tunnel after days of gruesome, exhausting work and frequent beatings. In April of 1944, they finally emerged beyond the nearest barbed wire fence, although only a dozen ultimately reached freedom.
Those who made it out told their story, yet it was forgotten, or at least, overlooked, in part because the killings happened early in the war, were not as large scale as places like Auschwitz and happened in territory that ended up behind the Iron Curtain after the war.
But in 2016, a team of archeologists uncovered where the tunnel had been, making international news. This inspired National Magazine Award winner Chris Heath, who immersed himself for nearly eight years researching and writing, “No Road Leading Back: An Improbable Escape from the Nazis and the Tangled Way We Tell the Story of the Holocaust.”
This meticulously detailed and unblinking book tells the story of what happened at Ponar, how the men escaped, what happened to them afterwards, how their story has or has not been told, where the discrepancies are and why it all matters.
“I’m aware I couldn’t tell their story perfectly and there’s always more to tell,” Heath says, adding that if people with more information reach out once the book is published, he’ll add anything new to future editions. “But I’d like to think that I’ve rescued this story from remaining untold.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. The miraculous escape is a small part of the book, overshadowed by the mass murder of Jews, the horrible work and treatment the escapees endured and the aftermath of what happened to them and their story.
People are drawn to this escape story because of the idea that there’s something redemptive and fantastic. And I don’t want to put people off – that is there and what these people did is an incredible act of imagination and hope. But while there’s something wonderful about that, it was in the context of something so terrible, so much larger than that.
Q. You write extensively about how the stench of death lingered on the bodies of these men, long after they escaped. Is it important for us to grasp this to understand how deeply embedded this suffering was in them?
We all have our right in our day-to-day lives not to think about things like this. But when we choose to and feel able to, obviously it’s really important that we do. The stench sounds like a metaphor, the idea that they couldn’t rid themselves of the smell. But it was not a metaphor. It was literal absolute truth. And there’s something so disturbing about that.
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Q. What impact did the research and writing have on you?
You go through periods where you’re working so hard you almost can’t think about it all. But it’s like suffering a loss in your life where it just hits you at times sometimes when you’re not expecting it. There’s a moment where I got this extra document, and it was very short but it was chilling and horrifying and that was one of those moments when the ground went out from under me.
Q. You spell out so much of that awfulness and you challenge the reader not to skim but to slow down and take it all in. Can we really understand it? And must we do that or is it OK for readers to absorb whatever they can?
I thought hard about how much to tell. Parts were deeply disturbing to write and even though people will understand this is a book about the Holocaust, it’s still difficult to read. What most terrified me was any thought that there could be something almost exploitative about telling too much. It would have been easy to tell less, to make the story smoother and cleaner.
But what guided me in the end was that in the accounts from the escapees they all told these details. If they’re telling this then they want people to know so I thought it would be a failure of courage and an insult to them not to write it.
Q. What about the reader’s responsibility?
If anybody reading thinks, “I see what’s happening here and I need to move on to the next part,” I totally respect that. It’s understandable.
Q. I felt bad that amidst all this death on a grand scale I was hit hard emotionally by the two escapees who died so soon after regaining their freedom.
There are countless stories that would have ironies and cruelties beyond belief from the people who died in the Holocaust if we knew them. It’s awful but helpful to know about a story like those – to die so randomly so soon after this escape is a reminder of that larger awfulness.
Q. The story was long overlooked but also repurposed for political reasons by the Soviets and many writers and filmmakers embellish or make significant mistakes, including one as renowned as Claude Lanzman of “Shoah.” Yet your book strives to counter Holocaust deniers even as it embraces the conflicting details in the stories people told and re-told. How should we approach the stories we hear or read?
I’m definitely not encouraging people to be skeptical.
The last two-thirds of the book is littered with examples of stories being mistold or misused. Yes, the Soviets had an ideological motive, but it was often accidental. I didn’t go looking for those things, but I kept finding them and it made me think about how things go wrong, but it doesn’t make me lose faith in storytelling. It just makes me more committed to the fact that we must be so careful about telling stories well and carefully and accurately.
