20. 5. 2016 The tunnel the Jews dug with spoons

In 2016, archaeologists discovered a legendary tunnel dug by Jews during the Holocaust in the hope of escaping the Nazis. It is located in the forests near the Lithuanian capital Vilnius.

The tunnel was searched for by a team of archaeologists, geophysicists and historians from Israel, the United States, Canada and Lithuania. They used a special technique commonly used to search for oil and rocks. They had to map the 34-metre-long tunnel very carefully so as not to destroy the mass graves that are in the area.

The story of the tunnel began towards the end of the war when the Nazis were destroying evidence. Prisoners from the Stutthof concentration camp were taken to the Ponar Forest. They were both Jews and Soviet prisoners. The Nazis made them dig mass graves and burn the corpses.

"The Germans wanted to remove all the evidence, so they organized this burning brigade. They brought eighty people to the site to dig the corpses out of the ground," said Paul Bauman, who was part of the research team.

But then the prisoners themselves got scared that the Nazis would murder them. Some even dug the bodies of their relatives out of the ground. Isaac Dogim recognised his wife in the pile of corpses. And that was from the locket he gave her at her wedding. He also recognized other relatives. Other prisoners even found their children among the dead. Terrified, Dogim began to organize a rescue operation.

When the guards herded the prisoners into one of the execution pits at night, the prisoners began digging a tunnel with spoons. All this was done in secret, of course, otherwise the Germans would have shot them immediately. On the night of April 15, 1944, four dozen prisoners managed to take off their chains and escape through the narrow tunnel.

But the guards quickly discovered them and shot most of them. Eleven people managed to escape. They escaped into the forest, where they joined the partisans and survived the war. "The tunnel was dug by the prisoners for 76 days. It was crazy. At any moment it could have broken through. They escaped on April 15, 1944, the last day of Pesach. The guards discovered them because they heard something suspicious," Bauman recalled.

The guards immediately opened fire on the prisoners, even using mortars. Although the prisoners managed to cut through the barbed wire fence, there was another one and a minefield behind it. They ran for five kilometres to the river, still being chased by dogs. After the war, the survivors talked about their experiences...

Sources: www.pri.org, www.abc.net.au, www.lidovky.cz