Let's write about evil Holocaust denial and how quickly some people are blinded to it
This excerpt is transcribed from "No Road Leading Back", by Chris Heath. An improbable Escape from the Nazi and the Tangled Way We Tell the story about the Holocaust" .
Thank you Ms. Heath.
A WASHINGTON POST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD FINALIST • CHAUTAUQUA PRIZE FINALIST • This by turns shattering and hope-giving account of prisoners who dug their way to freedom from the Nazis is both a stunning escape narrative and an object lesson in the ways we remember and continually forget the particulars of the Holocaust.
No Road Leading Back is the remarkable story of a dozen prisoners who escaped from the site where more than 70,000 Jews were shot in the Lithuanian forest of Ponar after the Nazi invasion of Eastern Europe in 1941. Anxious to hide the incriminating evidence of the murders, the S.S. later in the war enslaved a group of Jews to exhume every one of the bodies and incinerate them all in a months-long labor—an episode whose specifics are staggering and disturbing, even within the context of the Holocaust.
From within that dire circumstance emerges the improbable escape made by some of the men, who dug a tunnel with bare hands and spoons while they were trapped and guarded day and night—an act not just of bravery and desperation but of awesome imagination. Based on first-person accounts of the escapees and on each scrap of evidence that has been documented, repressed, or amplified since, this book resurrects their lives, while also providing a complex, urgent analysis of why their story has rarely
August 2017 - Ponar (the Nazi killing field in Lithuania) and its story remain half hidden in all kinds of ways, not least literally. Though this place is only a few miles from Lithuania’s capital Vilnius, and though its designated twenty or so acres are currently maintained as a Holocaust memorial, it is fiendishly difficult to find. Occasional signposts do feign to indicate where the site is, but they do not link up in any connected sequence that might actually lead you there. When you do finally arrive, unless you have decided to make arrangement in advance, the small on-site museum will most likely be closed. You may see another car or two in the expansive parking lot, but just as likely you will have the place to yourself.
Today, I am not traveling there alone. In the care with me is Abe Gol, a Florida resident who has retired from his job in the fire industry, shuttling between the United States and Japan.
This is his first visit to Lithuania. The last couple of miles take us along winding roads in which the surrounding forest is broken by industrial buildings and then by the old apartment blocks and houses on Paneriai- an indistinct settlement radiating from the railway junction that doesn’t feel appropriate to describe either as a village or as a small town.
As we drive, Abe mutters quietly to himself, “I pictured this totally differently,”
Getting out of the car, he looks around. Where are the pits?”, he asks.
We are the first of a larger party, who are expected here today, and the museum is open. Abe Gol looks af the list of escapees I had written down on my first visit, the twelve whose stories I am trying to recover.
These are the names:
Josef Gielic
Abraham Blazer
Yitzhak Dogin
Yuli Farber
Shlomo Giol
David Kantorovich
Zulman Matzkin
Leizer Owsiejczyk
Konstantin Potanin
Matke Seidel
Adam Zinger
Peter Zinin* (The names are written as they will be generally used in writing their stories. This list is actually printed in the museum as the names in Lithuanian.)
The fifth name on this list is the reason Abe is here. Shlomo Gol was his father.
We are the first to arrive, but the others- among them Richard Freund and some of the team who found the tunnel, now back in Lithuania to work on other projects- eventually gather.
Freund speaks to Mantas Siksnianas, the guide who works for the museum. “I want the official story,” Freund requests. Mantas begins, “Paneriai is the biggest mass killing space in Lithuania, but Lithuania is just filled with similar places like this one….
Officially in Paneriai they killed about a hundred thousand people, but now historians say it was probably about fifty or seventy thousand, of course we are not sure.”
After a while, Siksnianas leades us over to a pit. Present-day visitors to Ponar can visit a number of these circular pits, all the others are identified as murder sites, but the pit we now approach is different. It has vertical, stone-clad walls and looks like (a picture) – my intrepetation, a flattened labyrinth. Abe stands on the pit edge, taking photographs on his iPad as the guide explains that about eighty Jews, including Abe’s father, lived inside this pit and then dug an escape tunnel. It can be confusing being here, hearing this story, because- as I’ll come to explain- almost nothing in this photo is exactly what it appears to be. Almost nothing helps a visitor to understand what once happened here. Even with all the research I had done, the first time I cam ehere, much of what I thought I understood as I looked into the pit I would later come to realize I had not understood at all.
After Aber and the rest of the party leave the pit area, we walk down a shallow slope and gather next to an imposing memorial. First Richard Freund, then two of the geophysicists who found the tunnel, Paul Bauman and Alastair McClymont, speak. Freund asks Abe Gol whether he would like to share some words.
Abe would. He explains that when he was growing up, his father Shlomo was reluctant to tell him about what had happened here. “But, bit by bit,” Abe says. “I did learn.” Once his father did explain, he continues, it was had for a son to understand how anyone could have gone through that horror, yet come out the other side and appear to be living a normal life. Abe will finish his words this afternoon by saying, “I really appreciate the opportunity to be here. And physically seeing what they had gone through.” And then, he will pause, his voice breaking before continuing. “From my point of view, there is a lot of ache, a lot of emotion…..and maybe closure.”
Before that, though, he refers to a particularly poignant moment in his, and by extension his father’s life. It happened when Abe was a teenager in Florida in the early 1960s. It is a moment that might stand as a stark preview, just off one way that the story about this place might go adrift and tumble through the gaps of history.
Abe Gol attended Andrew Jackson High School in Jacksonville, Florida. The year after the Gol family arrived in the United States, when Abe was fifteen the teacher of the English class, Mr. Kelly, assigned the students to write a story in their own words. That gave Abe an idea. He explained to Mr. Kelly about a document of his father’s written in Hebrew in which his father had detailed his wartime experience. Could Abe translate that for this assignment? Would that be okay? Mr. Kelly said that should be fine.
When Abe told his father, Shlomo neither encouraged nor discouraged him. On the allotted day, Abe read out his translation in front of the class, telling his father’s story in his father’s own words.
“We were tasked now to construct living quarters for our own use, and those quarters were to be constructed in one of the bunkers that was not yet used as a mass grave.”
One Abe finished laying out the whole awful truth, Mr. Kelly had a question for the rest of the class.”Does Abe’s story sound believable to you?”. Then he called for a vote. Those who believed the story should raise their hands.
Abe looked around his class mates awaiting their validation for what he had just shared. For what his father, Shlomo Gol, had by proxy also just shared.
Just four hands were raised.
Naturally, Abe protested. “I said this is a true story, a story that had been corroborated by the courts in Nuremberg when the people responsible were put on trial. Do you still not believe me?”
The vote remained the same.
“They thought,” Abe will tell me, “there was no one in the world who could do something like that.”
That evening, Abe will tell his father what had happened at school that day. Shlomo wasn’t surprised. “Not many people believe what happened,” he told his son.
One time- Abe isn’t sure whether it was that evening or another day- his father’s frustration did bubble over, just for a moment. To have lived through such torment only to find that your specific kind of suffering doesn’t match contemporary expectations! To have survived as experience so intense and brutal only to realize that you’d escaped into a world in which your story somehow didn’t seem to fit!
“I guess they would have believed you if you’d brought me to school and I’d shown off the number on my arm,” Shlomo told his son. “I guess I should have gone to ✡️😥Auschwitz or something like that. Maybe then, they would have believed it.”
A WASHINGTON POST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD FINALIST • CHAUTAUQUA PRIZE FINALIST • This by turns shattering and hope-giving account of prisoners who dug their way to freedom from the Nazis is both a stunning escape narrative and an object lesson in the ways we remember and continually forget the particulars of the Holocaust.
No Road Leading Back is the remarkable story of a dozen prisoners who escaped from the site where more than 70,000 Jews were shot in the Lithuanian forest of Ponar after the Nazi invasion of Eastern Europe in 1941. Anxious to hide the incriminating evidence of the murders, the S.S. later in the war enslaved a group of Jews to exhume every one of the bodies and incinerate them all in a months-long labor—an episode whose specifics are staggering and disturbing, even within the context of the Holocaust.
From within that dire circumstance emerges the improbable escape made by some of the men, who dug a tunnel with bare hands and spoons while they were trapped and guarded day and night—an act not just of bravery and desperation but of awesome imagination. Based on first-person accounts of the escapees and on each scrap of evidence that has been documented, repressed, or amplified since, this book resurrects their lives, while also providing a complex, urgent analysis of why their story has rarely
August 2017 - Ponar (the Nazi killing field in Lithuania) and its story remain half hidden in all kinds of ways, not least literally. Though this place is only a few miles from Lithuania’s capital Vilnius, and though its designated twenty or so acres are currently maintained as a Holocaust memorial, it is fiendishly difficult to find. Occasional signposts do feign to indicate where the site is, but they do not link up in any connected sequence that might actually lead you there. When you do finally arrive, unless you have decided to make arrangement in advance, the small on-site museum will most likely be closed. You may see another car or two in the expansive parking lot, but just as likely you will have the place to yourself.
Today, I am not traveling there alone. In the care with me is Abe Gol, a Florida resident who has retired from his job in the fire industry, shuttling between the United States and Japan.
This is his first visit to Lithuania. The last couple of miles take us along winding roads in which the surrounding forest is broken by industrial buildings and then by the old apartment blocks and houses on Paneriai- an indistinct settlement radiating from the railway junction that doesn’t feel appropriate to describe either as a village or as a small town.
As we drive, Abe mutters quietly to himself, “I pictured this totally differently,”
Getting out of the car, he looks around. Where are the pits?”, he asks.
We are the first of a larger party, who are expected here today, and the museum is open. Abe Gol looks af the list of escapees I had written down on my first visit, the twelve whose stories I am trying to recover.
These are the names:
Josef Gielic
Abraham Blazer
Yitzhak Dogin
Yuli Farber
Shlomo Giol
David Kantorovich
Zulman Matzkin
Leizer Owsiejczyk
Konstantin Potanin
Matke Seidel
Adam Zinger
Peter Zinin* (The names are written as they will be generally used in writing their stories. This list is actually printed in the museum as the names in Lithuanian.)
The fifth name on this list is the reason Abe is here. Shlomo Gol was his father.
We are the first to arrive, but the others- among them Richard Freund and some of the team who found the tunnel, now back in Lithuania to work on other projects- eventually gather.
Freund speaks to Mantas Siksnianas, the guide who works for the museum. “I want the official story,” Freund requests. Mantas begins, “Paneriai is the biggest mass killing space in Lithuania, but Lithuania is just filled with similar places like this one….
Officially in Paneriai they killed about a hundred thousand people, but now historians say it was probably about fifty or seventy thousand, of course we are not sure.”
After a while, Siksnianas leades us over to a pit. Present-day visitors to Ponar can visit a number of these circular pits, all the others are identified as murder sites, but the pit we now approach is different. It has vertical, stone-clad walls and looks like (a picture) – my intrepetation, a flattened labyrinth. Abe stands on the pit edge, taking photographs on his iPad as the guide explains that about eighty Jews, including Abe’s father, lived inside this pit and then dug an escape tunnel. It can be confusing being here, hearing this story, because- as I’ll come to explain- almost nothing in this photo is exactly what it appears to be. Almost nothing helps a visitor to understand what once happened here. Even with all the research I had done, the first time I cam ehere, much of what I thought I understood as I looked into the pit I would later come to realize I had not understood at all.
After Aber and the rest of the party leave the pit area, we walk down a shallow slope and gather next to an imposing memorial. First Richard Freund, then two of the geophysicists who found the tunnel, Paul Bauman and Alastair McClymont, speak. Freund asks Abe Gol whether he would like to share some words.
Abe would. He explains that when he was growing up, his father Shlomo was reluctant to tell him about what had happened here. “But, bit by bit,” Abe says. “I did learn.” Once his father did explain, he continues, it was had for a son to understand how anyone could have gone through that horror, yet come out the other side and appear to be living a normal life. Abe will finish his words this afternoon by saying, “I really appreciate the opportunity to be here. And physically seeing what they had gone through.” And then, he will pause, his voice breaking before continuing. “From my point of view, there is a lot of ache, a lot of emotion…..and maybe closure.”
Before that, though, he refers to a particularly poignant moment in his, and by extension his father’s life. It happened when Abe was a teenager in Florida in the early 1960s. It is a moment that might stand as a stark preview, just off one way that the story about this place might go adrift and tumble through the gaps of history.
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| Why Did It Take Three Days For X To Remove Holocaust Denial Post? |
Abe Gol attended Andrew Jackson High School in Jacksonville, Florida. The year after the Gol family arrived in the United States, when Abe was fifteen the teacher of the English class, Mr. Kelly, assigned the students to write a story in their own words. That gave Abe an idea. He explained to Mr. Kelly about a document of his father’s written in Hebrew in which his father had detailed his wartime experience. Could Abe translate that for this assignment? Would that be okay? Mr. Kelly said that should be fine.
When Abe told his father, Shlomo neither encouraged nor discouraged him. On the allotted day, Abe read out his translation in front of the class, telling his father’s story in his father’s own words.
“We were tasked now to construct living quarters for our own use, and those quarters were to be constructed in one of the bunkers that was not yet used as a mass grave.”
One Abe finished laying out the whole awful truth, Mr. Kelly had a question for the rest of the class.”Does Abe’s story sound believable to you?”. Then he called for a vote. Those who believed the story should raise their hands.
Abe looked around his class mates awaiting their validation for what he had just shared. For what his father, Shlomo Gol, had by proxy also just shared.
Just four hands were raised.
Naturally, Abe protested. “I said this is a true story, a story that had been corroborated by the courts in Nuremberg when the people responsible were put on trial. Do you still not believe me?”
The vote remained the same.
“They thought,” Abe will tell me, “there was no one in the world who could do something like that.”
That evening, Abe will tell his father what had happened at school that day. Shlomo wasn’t surprised. “Not many people believe what happened,” he told his son.
One time- Abe isn’t sure whether it was that evening or another day- his father’s frustration did bubble over, just for a moment. To have lived through such torment only to find that your specific kind of suffering doesn’t match contemporary expectations! To have survived as experience so intense and brutal only to realize that you’d escaped into a world in which your story somehow didn’t seem to fit!
“I guess they would have believed you if you’d brought me to school and I’d shown off the number on my arm,” Shlomo told his son. “I guess I should have gone to ✡️😥Auschwitz or something like that. Maybe then, they would have believed it.”
Labels: Chris Heath, Lituania, Nazi
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