arts&life

film

“To be able to show the children and
grandchildren of the Ponar survivors that
tunnel and how the escape happened
has been one of the great experiences of
my life.” — Richard Freund

The Great Escape

SUZANNE CHESSLER CONTRIBUTING WRITER

A new NOVA

documentary follows

an archaeologist

and his team as they

unearth a tunnel dug

by Jewish prisoners

in the Holocaust.

Schlomo Gol, one of the 11
survivors, was a member of
the Partisans, a resistance
movement. He was caught
and forced to be part of
the Burning Brigade, then
helped lead the digging of
the tunnel. His son, Abe, tells
Schlomo’s story in NOVA.

36

April 13 • 2017

jn

R

ichard Freund, a field
archaeologist with 15
television documenta-
ries to his credit, has concen-
trated on sites associated with
the beginnings of Judaism and
Christianity — until now.
His latest project, filmed by
the PBS series NOVA, goes back
to the much more recent time
of the Holocaust and explores
the locale where a small group
of courageous and hopeful
Lithuanian Jews outsmarted
the Nazis.
In June 1941, 10 days after
the Nazi invasion of the Soviet
Union and before gas chambers
were found to be a quicker way
of killing, Nazis brought the
first groups of Jews from Vilna,
once a thriving epicenter of
Jewish learning and culture, to
the nearby Ponar Forest. There,
with the help of a Lithuanian
rifle unit, they systematically
shot to death 100,000 people,
mostly Jews, who were buried
along mass graves.
In 1944, as the Soviets moved
toward retaking Lithuania, the
Germans ordered a so-called
“Burning Brigade” of 80 Jewish
prisoners — 76 men and 4
women — to exhume and

incinerate the corpses to hide
evidence of the Nazi’s mass
murders.
What happened next, and the
discovery of it, is the subject of
NOVA: Holocaust Escape Tunnel,
which airs April 19. Using their
bare hands, spoons and impro-
vised tools over 76 nights, the
shackled team of prisoners dug
an escape tunnel that started
with a single hole, in an attempt
to evade the fate of the previous
100,000 and to tell the story of
the Jews of Vilna.
Finally, on April 15, 1944,
the last night of Passover, the
shackled prisoners attempted
an escape through the narrow,
100-foot-long tunnel, right
below the feet of their Nazi cap-
tors. Twelve made it out, and 11
survived the war.
The beginnings of Freund’s
Vilna project started three
years ago, when the archae-
ologist was approached by Jon
Seligman of the Antiquities
Authority of Israel. The idea
was to see if they could find
the Great Synagogue of Vilna,
a complex dating back to the
16th century. Seligman’s par-
ents, grandparents and great-
grandparents had all lived in

Vilna.
The two, who went to Vilna
in 2015 and mapped the sub-
surface around the site, later
heard the story of the cave
survivors and located the place
after only a few days in the field
as the filming crew document-
ed their exploration in 2016.
“I knew NOVA liked to have
good science projects and made
a contact,” recalls Freund, direc-
tor of the Maurice Greenberg
Center for Judaic Studies at the
University of Hartford.
After NOVA agreed, Freund
arranged for an entire team
of geophysicists and offered
the use of their equipment
to archaeological groups in
Lithuania. The Vilna Gaon
Jewish State Museum, which
administers the Ponar Burial
Pits, asked to use the equip-
ment to find additional pits so
people would not develop any
buildings on those sites.
When museum representa-
tives told the stories about the
escape tunnel, the team used
their equipment and located it
after only a few days in the field
during 2016.
NOVA: Holocaust Escape
Tunnel uses sophisticated tech-

nology to show underground
spaces in what currently
appears as a peaceful forest.
The documentary moves on to
interview Israeli and American
descendants of the 11 survivors.
The program also shows
excavation of the Great
Synagogue of Vilna, which had
been destroyed by the Germans
and leveled by the Soviets, lead-
ing to information about the
tunnel. In a larger context, the
NOVA episode interviews survi-
vors from the area near Ponar
and includes remembrances of
artist Samuel Bak, who lived in
Vilna.
“I’ve been working in the
field for 35 years, and most
of the discoveries have been
made by a person in the middle
of nowhere and sometimes
without even a camera,” says
Freund. “In this case, hav-
ing filmmakers there at the
moment when the tunnel was
discovered and having them
chronicle this whole discovery
and synagogue excavation
turned into an amazing experi-
ence.”
Freund, who has worked on a
site where the Dead Sea Scrolls
were discovered and in caves

