Between 1941 and 1944, the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators murdered some 70,000 Jews in a clearing in the forest of Ponar (now Paneriai), not far from the Lithuanian city of Vilna. Using advanced technology to explore the mass graves, an ongoing project has discovered a tunnel, previously known only from the accounts of survivors, by which some Jewish prisoners managed to escape. Nicholas St. Fleur writes:
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 80 Jews to exhume the bodies, burn them, and bury the ashes. . . .
About half of the group spent 76 days digging a tunnel in their holding pit by hand and with spoons they found among the bodies. On April 15, 1944—the last night of Passover, when they knew the night would be darkest—[they] 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 80, twelve managed to escape; eleven of them survived the war and went on to tell their stories, according to the researchers.
The archaeologist Richard Freund and his team used the information from survivors’ accounts to search for the tunnel. Rather than excavate and disturb the remains, he and his team used two non-invasive tools—electrical-resistivity tomography and ground-penetrating radar.
Read more on New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/29/science/holocaust-ponar-tunnel-lithuania.html