Between 1941 and 1944, the Ponar forest in Litaly It became a mass extermination site, where between 70.000 and 100.000 Jews fell victim to Nazi extermination.
In 1944, after months of digging an escape tunnel with spoons beneath their barracks, 40 prisoners managed to escape from the forest south of Vilnius.
Previously, between 1940 and 1941, the Soviet government dug large trenches at Ponar to house fuel tanks, but they had to evacuate the site before completing the project.
During the German occupation, these ditches were used for the mass murder of prisoners, who were shot dead by SS guards, German police and Lithuanian collaborators.
Two years after the initial massacre, a group of 80 prisoners were forced to dig up and cremate the bodies, living in inhumane conditions and chained underground.
In his book “No Road Leading Back: An Improbable Escape from the Nazis and the Tangled Way We Tell the Story of the Holocaust!”, journalist Chris Heath explores in depth Ponar’s confusing role in the Holocaust.
Heath explained that he “wanted desperately 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 willing to sacrifice anything or sanitize anything.”