No Road Leading Back: How 12 Men Escaped the Nazis at Ponarand the Tangled Way We Tell the Story of the Holocaust

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This shattering and inspiring account of prisoners who dug their way out of torture and imprisonment by the Nazis is both a stunning escape narrative and an object lesson in how 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 pits where more than 70,000 Jews were shot in the Lithuanian forest after the Nazi invasion of Eastern Europe in 1941. Anxious to hide the incriminating evidence of the murders, the S.S. enslaved a group of Jews to exhume every one of the bodies and incinerate them all in a months-long labour - an episode whose specifics are staggering and disturbing, even within the context of the Holocaust.

Trapped in almost unimaginable horror, some of the men who were part of this 'burning brigade' put together an audacious escape plan. They dug a tunnel with their bare hands and spoons despite being guarded day and night - an act not just of great bravery and desperation but of extraordinary imagination.

Based on first-person accounts of the escapees and on every scrap of evidence that has been documented, repressed, or amplified since, this book resurrects the lives of these men and their acts of witness, as well as providing a complex, urgent analysis of why their story has rarely been told, and never accurately. Heath explores the cultural use and misuse of Holocaust testimony and the need for us to face it - and all uncomfortable historical truths - with honesty and accuracy.

Author Bio

Chris Heath has been a contributing editor at GQ since 2003. He was previously contributing editor at Details Magazine and Rolling Stone. He has won the 2013 National Magazine Award for Reporting for the story '18 Tigers, 17 Lions, 8 Bears, 3 Cougars, 2 Wolves, 1 Baboon, 1 Macaque, and 1 Man Dead in Ohio'. His books include Pet Shop Boys, Literally and the 2004 number one UK bestseller Feel, about British pop star Robbie Williams. In recent years he has written about the aftermaths of the 2011 Japanese tsunami and of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans; Iraqi refugees in Syria; and a Colorado man traveling on repeated solo missions to kill Osama Bin Laden, among many other subjects. Currently based in London and New York, Chris grew up south of Birmingham in the United Kingdom.