Across Europe Awakens Ghosts of the Holocaust, Escape of the “Burning Brigade”

The controversy surrounding Lithuania’s plans to build a cultural center on the site of Vilna’s ancient Jewish cemetery, amid fierce protests from Jewish organizations and international figures, has opened a trapdoor into one of the most harrowing chapters of the Holocaust.

Beneath the headlines about transforming the historic beis hachaim into an entertainment center with restaurants and bars, lies the buried history of a Jewish community that was systematically annihilated under the Nazi occupation.

“Any attempt to continue desecrating this cemetery is a disgrace to the Lithuanian government and will be met with opposition,” U.S. Special Envoy Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun warned Lithuania’s culture minister in a recent letter. “The blood of an entire people demands nothing less.”

“‘Your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the earth,’” the letter continued, invoking a posuk from Bereishis. “Now, the blood of every Lithuanian Jew denied a proper burial during the Holocaust cries out to us as well.”

Lithuanian collaborators played a major role in the murder of approximately 100,000 Jews of Vilna and the surrounding region after the Nazis occupied the country. Some survivors testified that the vicious rifle units that carried out the slaughter in the death pits of Ponary were composed almost exclusively of Lithuanians.

The destruction did not end with the killings. In a macabre effort to erase the evidence, Jewish prisoners were forced to exhume the bodies of those who had been murdered and burn them.

But amid this nightmare of mass murder and the attempt to expunge the evidence, emerged an almost unbelievable story of survival.

A Story No One Believed

Members of the so-called Burning Brigade — Jewish prisoners forced to participate in the grisly task of destroying the evidence — knew they were doomed and desperately plotted an escape.

With their bare hands and improvised tools, they dug a tunnel beneath the cemetery, inching their way toward freedom while knowing that discovery meant certain death.

In contrast to the escape of hundreds of Jews from the Novaradok ghetto detailed in these pages last week, the majority of the Burning Brigade prisoners were tragically cut down in a hail of gunfire as they left the tunnel.

But fifteen men survived the hair-raising flight through the suffocating tunnel and the frantic race to the shelter of the forests, and lived to tell the tale. Their escape was so audacious and improbable that almost no one believed them.

Survivors recounted the miracle to their children, but the story was too fantastic to believe. Locals whispered about the death pits where the Jews were slaughtered, and an extraordinary tunnel that carried some of the victims to safety. But no one knew where it was. Or if indeed it existed.

A handful of Ponary survivors even shared their testimony in a series of interviews for a 1980s Holocaust documentary by filmmaker Claude Lanzmann. Yet, the tale of shackled and handcuffed prisoners stealthily digging a 110 ft. tunnel 9 feet underground, night after night, with their bare hands, and finally dashing for freedom under a hail of Nazi bullets, was so incredible it remained the stuff of legend.

For almost 70 years, the fabled tunnel in the heart of Lithuania lay in that misty region between rumor and reality.

Compounding the skepticism was the fact that no physical evidence of the tunnel entrance or exit could be found after the war. Returning many years after the Holocaust to the extermination site — now covered by bushes and dense foliage — various survivors were unable to locate the passageway through which they had cheated certain death.

“Of course I believed my father,” Chana Amir, the daughter of survivor Mottel Zeidel who escaped through the tunnel, told an interviewer many decades later. “But when I asked him, ‘How did it happen, Papa?’ he spoke in half-sentences, not able to give me more than a bare outline of how they did it. It wasn’t until the series of interviews with Claude Lanzmann that I finally heard the whole story.”

For many years, survivor accounts of tens of thousands of Jewish men, women, and children gunned down at close range and buried or burned in giant death pits in Ponary were also treated with skepticism.

How was it possible that over 100,000 people could have been butchered here without a trace left behind of these horrific crimes? Were the remains of tens of thousands of bodies truly lying beneath the serene surface of the Ponary forest?

Then, 65 years later, the grim truth finally surfaced as a team of Jewish archeologists, using the most advanced radar technology available, pierced the ground beneath the cemetery and revealed the legendary escape tunnel.

What had seemed too extraordinary to be true was there all along — a hidden monument to the courage and endurance of men who, in the face of an unstoppable killing machine that mowed down their families and community, carved a path from a Nazi death pit to freedom.

The Crown Jewel That Was Vilna

The handful of men who crawled through the tunnel survived the destruction of one of the greatest Jewish centers in Europe. Only by looking back at the world that existed in Vilna before it was demolished can one begin to grasp the enormity of what was lost.

At its peak, Vilna, the “Yerushalayim of Lita” as it was known, was a religious epicenter of Jewish scholarship, learning, and spiritual ferment. It was here that the revered Rav Chaim Ozer Grodzinski led his generation in the turbulent pre-war era until his death in 1940.

In the pre-war era, Vilna boasted a Jewish population of 80,000, over a hundred shuls, scores of rabbonim, dayonim, lamdonim, shochtim, and the world’s largest Jewish libraries.

The city’s tragic decline began in 1940, when the Soviet Union absorbed Lithuania, brutally shut down religious and cultural institutions, and enforced the teaching of communism and atheism in the schools.

After German armies attacked Russia in 1941, quickly conquering Lithuania, they turned their savagery on the Jews, eagerly assisted by the Lithuanians.

As documented by eyewitness testimony, photographs, and Nazi records, the Christian population in Lithuania welcomed the Germans as liberators [from Soviet occupation] in 1941. Almost immediately, Lithuanian citizens from all strata of society began persecuting and butchering their Jewish neighbors before German rule had even been firmly established.

Over the next three years, 96 percent of Lithuania’s 250,000 Jews were massacred — a near-complete extermination, greater than in almost any other part of Nazi-occupied Europe. The country has never recognized the magnitude of Lithuanian collaboration in these mass murders.

Lithuanian Rifle Brigades

At this early stage of the war, the Nazis had not yet developed the industrialized system of mass murder that would later be carried out through gas chambers and crematoria.

Instead, the Jews in cities and towns across Lithuania were dragged from their homes and marched on foot or driven in trucks to mass killing sites such as Ponary, the Seventh and Ninth Forts of Kovno, and other locations throughout Lithuania.

There they were methodically gunned down at close range.

Some historians view these massacres, later termed the “Holocaust by bullets,” as a crucial turning point: the staggering scale of the killings demonstrated to Hitler that the systematic annihilation of an entire population was possible. The lessons learned in Lithuania would help pave the way for the machinery of genocide that followed in the Final Solution.

At Ponary, the bodies were buried in huge pits originally excavated by the Soviets for the purpose of storing fuel tanks and ammunition. But the Nazis overran Lithuania before the tanks could be installed. They found the deep pits ideal as a mass execution site, where they could bury the victims’ bodies by the tens of thousands.

The barbaric killings continued methodically until late 1943. According to survivor accounts, a Lithuanian rifle brigade of 150 men murdered the majority of the prisoners — usually in groups of about 10 at a time. The massacres went on for full days at a time. The victims were first blindfolded and then forced to the edge of a pit where they were shot in the back and flung over the pit’s edge.

According to post-Holocaust research, one pit alone held 20,000 to 25,000 corpses.

The few victims who survived their execution wounds and managed to escape staggered back to the Vilna Ghetto, bringing with them horrifying accounts of what they had witnessed. Terror and despair gripped the surviving Jews.

Until then, many had clung to the belief that the roundups that had carried tens of thousands of Vilna Jews away in trucks and trains were intended to transport them to labor camps. For a time, even the Vilna Judenrat helped sustain that desperate illusion.

Even as people began suspecting they were being lied to, the truth was too horrific to absorb.

Eyewitness Account

Shlomo Gol was seventeen at the time of the Nazi occupation in Vilna and his forced labor in the Burning Brigade. His young son, Abe, learned about his father’s horrific ordeal by listening in on his conversation with fellow survivors during their annual reunion, which they always held on the last day of Pesach.

Later, as an adult, Abe translated his father’s Yiddish memoirs into English. An excerpt from that memoir cites the scope of the atrocities committed at Ponary by Nazi barbarians and their Lithuanian collaborators:

“We dug up altogether 68,000 corpses,” Gol wrote. “I know this because the Germans ordered two of the Jews in the pit with us to keep count of the bodies — that was their sole job. Among those that I dug up I found my own brother. I found his identification papers on him. He had been dead for two years when I found him, because I know that he was in a batch of 10,000 Jews from the Vilna ghetto who were shot in September 1941.”

Shlomo Gol’s group remained shackled above the legs and around their wrists as they worked, which greatly slowed them down. They were constantly beaten and threatened with execution. They realized they were living on borrowed time.

“Once the job was finished, they would kill us so no one could tell the world what they had done here. In desperation, we began to plan an escape. We had nothing to lose,” recalled Mottel Zeidel and Isaac Dugin in the Claude Lanzmann interviews.

Pesach Miracle

It was Dugin, an electrician, who first proposed tunneling out of the pit as the only possible means of escape. Shlomo Gol and a few others immediately offered their support; they took the lead in formulating a plan to build a tunnel from their cramped living quarters, which were about nine feet below ground.

About 25 of the 80 prisoners were eventually in on the tunnel scheme, including Yudi Farber, a trained civil engineer. Farber and Dugin mapped out the tunnel’s route. Dugin stealthily strung up a cable to the Nazi’s generator, wiring it to an electric bulb deep inside the tunnel so the prisoners could dig at night.

To bypass the barbed wire and the explosive mines the Nazis had planted around the execution site, the tunnel had to extend about 110 feet. After a full day of backbreaking work, shackled and handcuffed for the night, the “tunnelers” would feverishly claw and dig, using their bare hands, spoons, and whatever tools they could find to extend the tunnel’s path.

In a little less than three months, they had scooped out 32 tons of sand and dirt and had excavated past the barbed wire and mines to the forest outside the pits. By now, the entire Burning Brigade knew of the tunnel escape plan.

In his own interview with documentary maker Claude Lanzmann, Shlomo Gol spoke of a rabbi who had been with them in Ponary who advised them to coordinate the escape with the last day of Pesach. He said it would be totally dark then, with no moonlight to give them away.

The rabbi said he was unable to attempt the escape with them but encouraged the prisoners and blessed them fervently that they should merit Divine protection and success.

“…I hugged my father, I hugged my brothers-in-law,” recalled Dugin about the tension-fraught moment of departure. No one knew if anyone would survive.”

“We were still far from the end of our nightmare. As soon as we emerged from the tunnel, we’d still had to cover some distance to get to the fence and beyond. And we had to evade the SS machine guns and their dogs,” he added.

It was mid-April when they finally broke out of the tunnel. Tragically, the noise of dry leaves crackling underfoot alerted the guards. They shone lights on the prisoners as they raced through the forest and began firing at them with machine guns.

“Fire burst from everywhere,” recalled Zeidel. “From a group of fifteen to twenty people around me, suddenly there were no more than five.”

In the end, only fifteen men managed to flee to safety. They spent several months hiding in the forest, living on berries and whatever small animals they could catch, trying to link up with the partisans.

In early July, the Red Army encircled Vilna in a new offensive against the Germans. Zeidel joined with other partisans to fight alongside the Soviets to liberate the city, and by mid-July the Germans were driven out.

New Life In Israel

With the war over, Zeidel, the sole survivor of his family, smuggled himself into Palestine-Israel and fought in the War of Independence. In 1948, he married a fellow survivor of the Vilna Ghetto. At the time of the Claude Lanzmann interview, Seidel and his wife had two married children, an adult son and a granddaughter.

Once a year, on the last day of Pesach, the anniversary of the escape, Zeidel would meet with Isaac Dogin and David Kantorovich, another member of the Burning Brigade. Over l’chaims, his daughter Chana Amir recounts, they would catch up with each other’s lives and reminisce about their experiences, the horrors, the grief and the miracles.

“The Jews are the strongest people on earth,” Amir recalled her father saying again and again. “Look at what they tried to do to us! And still, with G-d’s help, we survived.”

“My father made several pilgrimages back to Ponary,” Chana Amir reminisced. “He was determined to locate the passageway that carried him to freedom. But he never found it. He’d come back looking defeated.”

In his final trip to Ponary, in 2002, Zeidel traveled with his daughter Chana, son Shraga, and three of his grandchildren. The family clustered together near a burial pit. Cursing in Yiddish, Zeidel shook his fist at invisible demons of the past.

“Can you see me, filthy barbarians?” Zeidel cried out to the ghosts of the Nazi degenerates who had been his captors at Ponary. “I am here with my children, and my children have children of their own, and they are here, too! Can you see us from the pits of Gehinnom? Burn forever, scum of the earth!”

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Legend Becomes Fact

Over the years, Lithuanian archaeologists had repeatedly investigated reports of an escape tunnel at Ponary, but their searches yielded nothing. Then, in 2014, Jon Seligman, a leading researcher with the Israel Antiquities Authority, began collaborating on the Ponary investigation with Dr. Richard Freund of the University of Hartford.

Their goal was to determine whether an underground passage really existed beneath the Nazi execution pits at Ponary.

Freund brought extensive experience to the search. He had previously directed archaeological investigations at the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland, as well as at ancient sites in Israel. Both researchers traced their ancestry to Jews of Vilna, which gave the project a deeply personal dimension.

Seligman and Freund ruled out using the traditional method of digging into an archaeological site with spades and machines, as that would desecrate the site, “victimizing the dead a second time,” Freund told JTA.

Instead, the teams used noninvasive techniques such as Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR), which uses radar pulses to record images of objects found beneath the earth’s surface. They also used Electrical Resistivity Tomography (ETR), with which scientists investigate subsurface materials through their electrical properties, similar to MRI imaging of the human body.

In addition, the two archeologists met in Israel with the children of the survivors and used their shared recollections of their fathers’ accounts of the tunnel to guide the researchers in their explorations. Their probes spanned two years.

A little more than ten years ago, the team finally located the extraordinary Ponary escape tunnel.

The story, a profound tribute to astonishing human courage, ingenuity, and the clinging to life under monstrous conditions, created an international sensation.

At the time the discovery was made, the escapees were no longer alive. Zeidel, the last living member of the Burning Brigade, had died in 2007. One day, his daughter Chana returned home to find her phone ringing. “Everyone wanted to know if I’d heard about the amazing news,” she recalled.

Quickly booting up her computer, she found a rash of headlines about the tunnel’s discovery. “I started to tremble; tears came to my eyes,” she told a correspondent. “If only Papa were here with me right now!” I wept. “It would have made him so happy!”