No Road Leading Back review: ‘hell and real heroism’

Heath goes on to tell a second, even more complex story about Ponar and historical memory, especially in Lithuania. Much of what happened, he writes, “had often been forgotten, or cast aside, or ignored, or misunderstood, or garbled, or suppressed”.

Finally, Heath explores the fascinating ways in which film-makers, historians and writers, mainly from Lithuania, America and Israel, have tried to break the silence about Ponar and the Holocaust in Lithuania, often in the face of hostility from the Lithuanian authorities and local communities.

Heath has done an extraordinary job of discovering the stories of the Jews, some from the Vilnius ghetto, others Soviet POWs, who were taken to Ponar. Often they had to make extraordinary choices. Which path might lead to certain death? And which choice might allow them and their families to live for another day? Who could they trust? Often they came across kind people, who would offer them food and shelter. But more often they were betrayed and ended up being handed over to the Nazis. One Jew, Abraham Blazer, survived the shooting squads at Ponar and then later managed to escape a second time. Another discovered the bodies of members of his own family among the corpses. One lesson that emerges is that to survive it was best to be young, fit and male and, ideally, to have some practical skill, as an electrician, a manual labourer, or to have worked in a sawmill.

The most shocking pages are the description of their work at Ponar, digging up tens of thousands of decomposed bodies. “Around women’s throats, little children are holding on”, said one. The bodies near the top were “normal”, recognisably human. But the bodies in the lower layers simply “crumbled” and had to be “put together by parts”. They just came apart in the men’s hands. The conditions were terrible. They were regularly beaten, starved, and forced to live in a pit, from which they astonishingly managed to escape by building a tunnel.

Nearly all the men who escaped joined the partisans and survived the war. But there are few happy endings. The story of the extermination site at Ponar was neglected for decades or even not mentioned at all. It was in the wrong place, the wrong time, and the Shoah by Bullets was curiously unfashionable compared to the famous death camps. The antisemitic Soviet and Lithuanian regimes had their own motives for not looking into this history more carefully.

Heath’s book is one of the best books written about the Shoah by Bullets. Clearly written, superbly researched, it’s a fascinating reminder of an unjustly neglected story about the Holocaust. Never pious or sentimental, the book twists and turns, asking all the complicated questions a fine history book should.

No Road Leading Back, by Chris Heath

The Bridge Street Press, £30