Facing certain death, the inmates took the only tools they had — spoons, plates, screwdrivers, their bare hands — and started digging. Could they possibly fashion a tunnel that would lead to freedom from the Nazis?
Did the desperate members of the Burning Brigade really elude their Nazi tormentors by crawling to freedom on that last night of Pesach in April 1944? In 2016 an international team of archeologists came to Ponar to find out. Armed with up-to-date alphabet-soup-sounding equipment such as GPR and ERT they began the laborious process of testing the soil searching for telltale inconsistencies that might signal the tunnel’s presence below the earth. Suddenly a ghostly figure appeared amidst the trees an elderly woman who seemed to know exactly what these archeologists were looking for. (Photos: Lior Mizrachi Ezra Wolfinger for NOVA)
For decades the escape tunnel at Ponar Lithuania had largely been the stuff of legend.
In the thick of the Second World War Jewish members of a forced-labor brigade had supposedly dug the tunnel using spoons screwdrivers and even their bare hands. They were members of the so-called Burning Brigade dozens of Jews assigned to the cruel and grisly task of exhuming and burning the bodies of more than 70 000 Jews who had been executed at Ponar outside Vilna by the Nazis.
But did the tunnel really exist? Did the desperate members of the Burning Brigade really elude their Nazi tormentors by crawling to freedom on that last night of Pesach in April 1944?
Create a free account to keep reading.
