Tunnel dug with spoons by Nazi prisoners found in Lithuania

In a Lithuanian forest, an international research team has pinpointed the location of a legendary tunnel that Jewish prisoners secretly dug out with spoons to try to escape their Nazi captors during World War II, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced Wednesday.
The tunnel, located in the Ponar forest, known today as Paneriai, outside of the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, is the site where some 100,000 people, including 70,000 Jews, were killed and thrown into pits during Nazi occupation.
In the quest to find the tunnel, the team of archaeologists, geophysicists and Jewish historians from Israel, the US, Canada and Lithuania did not want to disturb any human remains in the mass burial pits at the site.
So the researchers used scanning technology called electrical resistivity tomography — the same kind used in mineral and oil exploration — to map out the path of the 34-meter-long tunnel.
“To find a little glimmer of hope within the dark hole of Ponar is very important as humans,” said Jon Seligman, an archaeologist with Israel’s antiquities authority, who participated in the expedition.
“The tunnel shows that even when the time was so dark, there was yearning for life within that,” he added.
Toward the end of the war, the Nazis sought to erase the evidence of their mass killings. Jewish and Soviet prisoners were brought to the Ponar forest from Stutthof concentration camp. With their legs chained, they were forced to dig up the mass graves, collect bodies and burn them.
The prisoners were dubbed the Burning Brigade and they lived in fear that once their task was complete, they too would be killed.
According to accounts, one prisoner, Isaac Dogim, was piling decomposed corpses when he recognized members of his own family, including his wife. He identified her by the medallion he had given her for their wedding.
He is credited with organizing the escape. At night, the prisoners were held in one of the pits used in the killings. For three months, some of the prisoners secretly dug an underground tunnel to escape.
Then on April 15, 1944, in the middle of the night, 40 prisoners filed off their chains and fled through the narrow tunnel. Guards quickly discovered them and many were shot, but 11 prisoners managed to escape to the forest, reach partisan forces and survive the war.

Source: Arab News