by Jūratė Juškaitė
manoteises.lt

At the beginning of this century documentary film makers from Israel combed Ponar just outside Vilnius, looking for an answer to the question of why local residents did nothing when they saw columns of thousands being led to firing squads in the forest of Ponar. The filmmakers brought in Mordechai Zeidel. Unlike the locals, in 1943 Zeidel was among those condemned to death at Ponar. He was taken there by the Nazis to destroy evidence of their mass murder, and sometimes also to recognize corpses, including relatives. For more than two months Zeidel and another eighty prisoners hauled corpses out of the pits using cables and burned them. The remains of approximately 100,000 people were contained in those pits. The entire time, the prisoners used spoons and their hands to dig a tunnel thirty meters long, which brought Zeidel to freedom. Although only eleven of the forty escapees in total survived, the story has become the stuff of legend.

Full story in Lithuanian here.