VILNIUS, LITHUANIA—Researchers from Israel, Lithuania, the United States, and Canada used electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) to map the location of the 115-foot-long escape tunnel dug in the Ponar forest by Jewish prisoners of the Nazis. The prisoners, known as the “burning brigade,” were moved from the Stutthof concentration camp in 1943 to the Ponar forest execution site, where they were forced to open mass graves of Lithuanian and Polish Jews and burn the bodies in order to hide evidence from the Allies. At night, the prisoners, who were kept in an execution pit, dug the tunnel with their hands and spoons. According to a report in Live Science, on April 15, 1944, the last night of Passover that year, about 40 of the prisoners attempted to escape through the tunnel. Only 11 of them survived World War II. “The exposure of the tunnel enables us to present, not only the horrors of the Holocaust, but also the yearning for life,” said archaeologist Jon Seligman of the Israel Antiquities Authority. For more, go to "World War II Tunnels Reopened in Dover."
