Book: "No Road Leading Back: An Improbable Escape from the Nazis and the Tangled Way We Tell the Story of the Holocaust"
Moderator: Dr. Shelly Cline, Historian/Director of Education, Midwest Center for Holocaust Education

This event is part of the Acclaimed Author Series, presented by Jewish Experiences, A Collaboration of Jewish Federation and The J.

• "No Road Leading Back: An Improbable Escape from the Nazis and the Tangled Way We Tell the Story of the Holocaust" costs $40. Pre-order yours by March 3, 2025 and save 15%.
• Limited copies will be available at the event at full price.

Book Summary:

"No Road Lead­ing Back ..." is the remark­able sto­ry of a dozen pris­on­ers who escaped from the site where more than 70,000 Jews were shot in the Lithuan­ian for­est of Ponar after the Nazi inva­sion of East­ern Europe in 1941. Anx­ious to hide the incrim­i­nat­ing evi­dence of the mur­ders, the S.S. lat­er in the war enslaved a group of Jews to exhume every one of the bod­ies and incin­er­ate them all in a months-long labor — an episode whose specifics are stag­ger­ing and dis­turb­ing, even with­in the con­text of the Holo­caust. From with­in that dire cir­cum­stance emerges the improb­a­ble escape made by some of the men, who dug a tun­nel with bare hands and spoons while they were trapped and guard­ed day and night — an act not just of brav­ery and des­per­a­tion but of awe­some imag­i­na­tion.

Based on first-per­son accounts of the escapees and on each scrap of evi­dence that has been doc­u­ment­ed, repressed, or ampli­fied since, this book res­ur­rects their lives, while also pro­vid­ing a com­plex, urgent analy­sis of why their sto­ry has rarely been told, and nev­er accu­rate­ly. Heath explores the cul­tur­al use and mis­use of Holo­caust tes­ti­mo­ny and the need for us to face it — and all uncom­fort­able his­tor­i­cal truths — with hon­esty and accuracy.

Award-win­ning jour­nal­ist Chris Heath has writ­ten about a wide array of sub­jects for GQ, The Atlantic, Esquire and Van­i­ty Fair. His story "18 Tigers, 17 Lions, 8 Bears, 3 Cougars, 2 Wolves, 1 Baboon, 1 Macaque, and 1 Man Dead in Ohio" won the 2013 Nation­al Mag­a­zine Award for Report­ing; his sto­ry "The Mili­ti­a­men, the Gov­er­nor and the Kid­nap­ping That Wasn’t" was nom­i­nat­ed for the 2023 Nation­al Mag­a­zine Award for Fea­ture Writ­ing. Heath is cur­rent­ly based in Brook­lyn, New York.