No Road Leading Back is an accounting of the atrocities that occurred at Ponar during the Holocaust. This book is brutal, heartbreaking and graphic. This book was incredibly thought provoking and a moving read.

Read my full review at Washington Independent Review of Books: https://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/bookreview/no-road-leading-back-an-improbable-escape-from-the-nazis-and-the-tangled-way-we-tell-the-story-of-the-holocaust

In mid-1941, the German army was advancing into eastern Europe at will. Lithuania fell easily to them, and they dug in. They found, in the small town of Ponar/Ponary/Paneriai, a near-perfect site for implementing (along with local collaborators) what history calls the Holocaust By Bullets, this being before the Germans implemented their death camp system, which conducted murder mostly by mass gassing and then incinerating the corpses in large-scale crematoria. The Ponar site had been in the process of being developed by the Soviets before they retreated, and had several large and deep pits. The large site was fairly secluded and fenced, but still easily accessible. An estimated 70,000 local Jews were rounded up and shot to death in the pits.

Three years later, the Soviets were advancing and the Germans didn’t want their genocidal work discovered. They ordered about 80 other Jewish prisoners to the site, kept them in an as-yet unused pit by night, in rudimentary shelters with the top of the pit half-covered, while by day they exhumed the corpses of the long-dead victims and put them into huge pyres for burning with the aid of oil. It’s astonishing that such appalling actions took place, but what’s more astonishing is that 12 of the Jews who were part of the exhumation team managed, over the course of more than three months, to surreptitiously hand-dig a tunnel from their pit and, late one night, they escaped and survived the war.

Author Chris Heath tells the story of the Ponar murders and escapes, with the personal stories of the escapees, but also what came after. You would think the escape story would be well-known and celebrated, but it isn’t. I’ve read a lot of books about the Holocaust and even knew about Ponar, but I never read about the escapes. Most disheartening is that though good evidence existed to substantiate the escape, the escapees found that most people didn’t want to hear the story and didn’t believe it happened. In 2004, Lithuanian scientists found the opening of the tunnel at the pit end, but it wasn’t until 2016 that a multinational team located the tunnel as a whole. A good deal of publicity accompanied the 2016 discovery, and only then, after the escapees had died, did the escape story become widely publicized. How grotesque that the escapees had to spend their whole postwar lives trying to recover from their horrific wartime experiences, and also come to terms with the fact that the world didn’t want to know or believe their story.

Chris Heath also thoughtfully addresses the general Lithuanian denial of responsibility for their role in the Holocaust. I will not get into that here, because you almost would have to write a book to do the topic justice.

Some of the latter chapters of the book, which discuss the archeological excavation work at Ponar, are more lengthy and detailed than I would prefer, but in other respects I found this an informative book about not just the historical facts, but about the states of mind of the Jews and non-Jewish Lithuanians, both during the 20th century and the present day. It is also deeply thoughtful about the mental and emotional conflict that these escapees went through as they exhumed the corpses of friends, neighbors, and even family, and still fought to survive and seek some kind of a “normal” life in a world they couldn’t possibly trust any more.

No Road Leading Back provides an absolutely wrenching expose on the grit, determination, and beauty of the human spirit. The unimaginable terrors that these human beings went through at the hands of other human beings for the crime of no crime at all will forever be a part of history never comprehended.