Holocaust for the day

The New York Times has an article by Nicholas St. Fleur about some previously-unknown history:

A team of archaeologists and mapmakers say they have uncovered a forgotten tunnel that eighty Jews dug, largely by hand, as they tried to escape from a Nazi extermination site in Lithuania about seventy years ago.
The Lithuanian site, Ponar, holds mass burial pits and graves where up to a hundred thousand people were killed and their bodies dumped or burned during the Holocaust.
Using radar and radio waves to scan beneath the ground, the researchers found the tunnel, a hundred-foot passageway between five and nine feet below the surface, the team announced recently.
A previous attempt made by a different team in 2004 to find the underground structure had only located its mouth, which was subsequently left unmarked. The new finding traces the tunnel from entrance to exit and provides evidence to support survivor accounts of the harrowing effort to escape the holding pit.
“What we were able to do was not only solve one of the greatest mysteries and escape stories of the Holocaust,” said Richard Freund, an archaeologist from the University of Hartford in Connecticut and one of the team leaders. “We were also able to unravel one of the biggest problems they have with a site like this: how many burial pits are there?”
Dr. Freund and his colleagues, working with the PBS science series NOVA for a documentary that will be broadcast next year, also uncovered another burial pit containing the ashes of perhaps seven thousand people. That would be the twelfth burial pit identified in Ponar; known officially today as Paneriai.
From 1941 until 1944, tens of thousands of Jews from the nearby city of Vilnius, known as the Jerusalem of Lithuania, were brought to Ponar and shot at close range. Their bodies were dumped into the pits and buried.
“I call Ponar ground zero for the Holocaust,” Dr. Freund said. “For the first time we have systematic murder being done by the Nazis and their assistants.” According to Dr. Freund, the events at the site took place about six months before the Nazis started using gas chambers elsewhere for their extermination plans.
An estimated hundred thousand people, including seventy thousand Jews, died at Ponar. Over four years, about 150 Lithuanian collaborators killed the prisoners, usually in groups of about ten. In 1943, when it became clear the Soviets were going to take over Lithuania, the Nazis began to cover up the evidence of the mass killings. They forced a group of eighty Jews to exhume the bodies, burn them and bury the ashes. At the time they were called the Leichenkommando, or “corpse unit” but, in the years that followed, they were known as the Burning Brigade.
For months, the Jewish prisoners dug up and burned bodies. One account tells of a man who identified his wife and two sisters among the corpses. The group knew that once their job was finished, they, too, would be executed, so they developed an escape plan.
About half of the group spent eighty days digging a tunnel in their holding pit by hand and with spoons they found among the bodies. On 15 April 1944, the last night of Passover, when they knew the night would be darkest, the brigade crawled through the two-foot-square tunnel entrance and through to the forest.
The noise alerted the guards, who pursued the prisoners with guns and dogs. Of the eighty, twelve managed to escape; eleven of them survived the war and went on to tell their stories, according to the researchers.
Dr. Freund and his team used the information from survivors’ accounts to search for the tunnel. Rather then excavate and disturb the remains, he and his team used two noninvasive tools: electrical resistivity tomography and ground penetrating radar.
Electrical resistivity tomography is like an MRI for the ground; it provides a clear picture of the subsurface. It uses electricity to identify stones, metal and clay as well as soil disturbances like those made by digging.
“We used the tool to pinpoint the locations where people most likely tunneled through,” said Paul Bauman, a geophysicist with WorleyParsons, an Australian engineering company, who handled the tomography tool. “We’re highly confident we’ve identified exactly where the tunnel is.” With the tool, they also found a previously unknown pit which they think is the largest ever discovered in the area. They estimate that it might have contained as many as ten thousand bodies.
The other tool, the ground penetrating radar, uses FM radio waves to scan about ten feet under the surface. “What we are doing is using those FM radio waves that people listen to in their car and we’re putting them into the ground,” said Harry Jol, professor of geology and anthropology at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire. “We’re getting reflections off the archaeological features or landscapes in the subsurface so we can image what’s happening.”
The team also used the ground penetrating radar to search for the Great Synagogue of Vilnius, which was destroyed by the Nazis. “The Holocaust is so overwhelming that we only really look at the end of the story, and that isn’t the whole story,” said Jon Seligman, an archaeologist with the Israel Antiquities Authority, who also led the team. “The whole story is the history of Jews who lived in this area for many, many centuries.”
Before World War Two, Vilnius was a bustling Jewish center of more than a hundred thousand people. When the Soviets took over Lithuania, they erected an elementary school over the rubble of the city’s Great Synagogue. Using the radar, the team uncovered artifacts from the synagogue, including its ritual bath house. “If we had never discovered the tunnel, people would have thought in another twenty years it was a myth, and they would have said: what do we really know happened?” said Dr. Freund. “This is a great story about the way that people overcame the worst possible condition, and still had this hope that they could get out.”

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