An Improbable Escape from the Nazis 

In 2016, the University of Hartford’s Professor of Jewish History Richard Freund was digging at an archeological site in Lithuania. The professor, who studied the Holocaust, and his team made a shocking discovery: There was a 100-foot-long underground tunnel that 80 Jews dug by hand to try to escape the massacre site, in Ponar, where an estimated 70,000 people had been murdered.

After the murders, the Nazis wanted to hide their crimes, so they enslaved a group of Jews to exhume the bodies and incinerate them. The S.S. guarded the Jews day and night during this months-long nightmare.

At the same time, 80 Jews were hatching an escape plan. For 76 nights, these heroic Jews dug the tunnel with their hands, crude handmade objects, and spoons. Only 12 of them survived the ordeal.

Pit used to burn corpses that were exhumed to destroy evidence of mass murders. (Photograph by Gregor Jamroski, Wikipedia)

While the media extensively covered the story when it broke, the full scope of what happened wasn’t available – until now. Award-winning journalist Chris Heath has written a new book, “No Road Leading Back,” which is based on firsthand accounts of the struggle to escape and the bravery of those who survived, and perished, along the way.

Deciding to Write the Book

Heath, who isn’t Jewish but has Jewish family members, is a prolific journalist who wrote for GQ, The Atlantic, Esquire, and Vanity Fair. In the summer of 2016, when he read about the Jews who tried to escape, he said he, “imagined a book combining whatever could be told of this escape with the story of the archeological and geophysical work leading to this new discovery. But, as I tried to write that book, a wider, far more expansive story compelled me – about what had happened at Ponar, yes, but also about what had happened to these men afterwards, and about all the ways the story of Ponar had been told or mistold or ignored in the years since, and about what that tells us not just about what happened but about how such history is treated.”

Typically, stories about the Holocaust show Jews being victimized: forced to work in labor camps, unable to escape, experimented on, and murdered in cold blood. But “No Road Leading Back” is different. It shows the resistance and bravery of the Jews instead.

In the book, Motke Zeidel, the youngest of the Ponar escapees, arrives in Israel in the late 1940s, and meets with three historians at Tel Aviv University to talk about his experience.

“As he would later tell it, pretty much their first question was ‘How did you go like sheep to the slaughter?’” Heath said. “At this insult, he slammed his fist down on the table, shouted ‘Shame on you!’ and walked out. After that, it would be decades before he would consent to tell his story. Thankfully, that error of perception – confusing the often-impossible predicaments that were faced during the Holocaust with a kind of widespread passivity – has been rigorously debunked many, many times in the years since. No one reading this book could come away believing anything of the sort.”

From the Collection of Documents on Vilna Ghetto, the National Library of Israel | No Road Leading Back

Even though the story of the escapees of Ponar is inspiring after the fact, in the moment when facing certain death, it’s not clear which way to go.

“I’m not sure that when the real world turns upside down, the available options are always quite so obviously straightforward,” said Heath. “There’s a different kind of inspiration to be taken from the kind of bravery and ingenuity required in far more complicated and often seemingly intractable situations.”

Stories of the Survivors

Heath’s book tells the stories of the survivors, including what came before, during, and after their daring escape. None of them were alive when he started writing “No Road Leading Back,” so he did extensive research to find out about them.

Zeidel, for instance, was 13 when World War II began and attended school in Švenčionys, a town with just over 5,000 people that was 50 miles northeast of Vilna. When the Nazis started capturing Jews, they took Zeidel’s older brother and two uncles. He ended up in a camp and lost all his family members.

The Ponar forest, photo by Chris Heath

After getting together with the other prisoners at Ponar and digging his way out, he escaped to the forest. He joined the underground resistance, and after the war, he worked as part of the police unit in the Soviet NKVD. He then went to Israel, where he fought in the War of Independence and, in 2005, lit one of the six torches at the State Opening Ceremony of Holocaust Remembrance Day at Yad Vashem.

Yitzhak Dogin, another one of the escapees, was born in Vilnar to a mother and father who ran a successful bar. He was a member of a Zionist secular youth movement, Hashomer Hatzair, and became a printer. He was 25 when the Germans came to Vilna, and he and his family hid in an attic to avoid being sent to the ghetto there. Eventually, he was found, and Nazis argued in front of him whether he should be shot. Somehow, he survived, and was forced to work in Ponar, exhuming the bodies of his fellow Jews. He learned that several of his family members had been murdered, including his mother, his wife, how two daughters, and his sister. After his escape and the end of the war, he joined with Russian partisans and told his remarkable story to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Motke Zeidel and Yitzhak Dogin

During their time in Ponar, both men – along with the other escapees – had to count the number of bodies in the graves. One grave alone contained 24,000 people. The work was devastating and incomprehensible, so Dogin and a few others led the plan to dig a tunnel underneath a bunker and escape to the forest. It was the only way they could think of to escape, since the Nazis guarded the other ways of getting out.

The men entered the tunnel four at a time to dig and started with their hands at first; they had to stop because their hands began to bleed. They salvaged spoons from the bodies of the victims and used those, as well as other crude objects, instead. The men could only work in the tunnel for one hour at a time since it was so difficult to breathe. They’d switch out with another group, and so on.

After several weeks of digging, Dogin got out first, on the first night of Passover. He escaped into the Ponar forest, along with the others who survived. The Germans’ dogs ran up to Dogin, but because he smelled like the dead, the dog must have thought he was also dead and didn’t alert his masters. At some point, an alarm went off and the Germans started shooting, so the men scattered – 15 or so managed to get out, but only a dozen survived and lived to tell what happened at Ponar.

The Correlation with October 7

“No Road Leading Back” was a remarkable story when it came out – but it hits differently in a post-Oct. 7 world. On that tragic day, there were many stories of heroism and resistance. The Jews in Israel fought back, valiantly shielded others from Hamas, and did what they could to stay alive. Still, their efforts have been distorted, just like the Holocaust has faced misrepresentation as well.

Heath said that when telling this story, he wanted to make sure people get a correct view of history and understand what came before the present day. As a journalist, it’s his duty to tell the truth.

“It’s an important human imperative to understand what has happened before now. And it is important to tell these stores accurately, and to always be looking for what has not been seen, or what might have been misperceived or forgotten: to always make sure that we are telling truth, not repeating myth,” he said. “Remembering history, and learning from it, is ever important, but what gives me pause is how many of those in the present day who proclaim the loudest that we should learn from history actually seem to be doing something quite different: cherry-picking from history whatever seems to best bolster opinions or positions that they already have. Even when I agree with the opinions, I worry about the wisdom of invoking history in that way.”

With “No Road Leading Back,” Heath hopes that others see value in uncovering what really happened and telling a deeply profound story with many valuable lessons.

He said, “I hope that, by example, the book shows the worth of examining a difficult story as deeply and thoroughly as possible, never shirking any of its confusions or complications, and how compelling such a search for truth can be.”