No road leading back An improbable escape from the Nazis and the tangled way we tell the story of the Holocaust

In 1944, 80 men--nearly all Jewish--were held captive at a Nazi death camp in Ponar, Lithuania. Tasked with the gruesome work of systemically excavating, counting, and burning the buried remains of tens of thousands of victims and knowing they would be killed once their work was complete, they spent weeks secretly digging a tunnel. In the chaos of their escape attempt, a dozen evaded pursuit and survived. In No Road Leading Back, National Magazine Award--winning journalist Heath traces the stories of these men back in time to their lives before the war, the circumstances that brought them to the site, and the diverging paths their lives took in the decades to follow. This approach takes the account far beyond Ponar, yet the specific horrors of that place haunt every page. Heath eschews simple narrative, letting each man's story develop fully, allowing inconsistencies and gaps in the record to remain. This chronicle about escape and survival is also about lives and stories lost and the fragility of both personal and collective memory. What starts as a recounting of a single, heroic incident becomes much more--a reckoning with the scope of the full horror of the Holocaust.

This chillingly meticulous chronicle of a dozen escapees from a Nazi extermination camp underscores the mechanics of heroism and the fallibility of memory. Journalist Heath, a National Magazine Award winner, ably narrates the disturbing story of the camp at Ponar, Lithuania ("never a work camp"), where 70,000 Jews were rounded up, shot, and dumped in pits, beginning in July 1941, only to be disinterred and burned to hide the evidence. Throughout, the author expertly highlights the grisly contradictions and trauma of the Holocaust. Although what happened at Ponar had been documented by the end of World War II, the story was relegated to a footnote for the next 30 years. The author masterfully resurrects the events, tracing accounts of the 12 men who miraculously escaped through a tunnel they dug at the killing pits on the night of April 15, 1944. As Heath recounts, they had been among 80 Jewish prisoners who were sent to the pit site to perform the grisly duties of digging up the decomposed corpses and burning them on towering pyres--so that, in the "magical thinking" of the Nazis, no trace of the crimes would be left as the Soviet troops advanced. However, not only did the 12 men escape and tell their stories--many not believed, though one testified at Nuremberg--but some of the inhabitants of the forest town also saw what was going on, including a journalist neighbor who documented the activity in a diary that was later found and published in 1999. Heath painstakingly sifts through the conflicting accounts over the decades, analyzing discrepancies, details, and contradictions. Ultimately, he learned, just like the survivors, "of how great the distance could be between speaking out and being heard." Utterly absorbing in its powerfully detailed horror and inspiring redemption--a must-read in Holocaust studies. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.