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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Marie Arendt
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Fiction: narrative themes

NO ROAD LEADING BACK

Chris Heath

An Improbable Escape from the Nazis and the Tangled Way We Tell the Story of the Holocaust

This by turns shattering and hope-giving account of prisoners who dug their way out of torture and bondage by the Nazis is both a stunning escape narrative and an object lesson in how we remember and continually forget the particulars of the Holocaust.

No Road Leading Back is the remarkable story of a dozen men who escaped from the pits where they were imprisoned in the Ponar forest of Lithuania, the site of the infamous massacre of 70,000 Jews during WW2. These men were forced participants in the equally horrific aftermath: anxious to hide the incriminating evidence of the murders, the S.S. enslaved a group of Jews to exhume every one of the bodies and incinerate them. This "burning brigade" dug a tunnel with bare hands and spoons while they were trapped and guarded, day and nightan act not just of incredible bravery and desperation but also 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 these men's lives and their acts of witness, as well as providing a complex, urgent analysis of why their story has rarely been told, and never accurately. 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. He has also written about popular culture, including the books Pet Shop Boys, Literally and the 2004 UK bestseller Feel, about British pop star Robbie Williams. Based in Brooklyn, Heath grew up outside Birmingham in the UK.

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Book Published 2024-09-03 by Schocken Books

Comments

This chillingly meticulous chronicle of a dozen escapees from a Nazi extermination camp underscores the mechanics of heroism and the fallibility of memory. . . . 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 redemptiona must-read in Holocaust studies.

Chris Heath has finally given the horror of Ponar the sustained and concentrated attention it deserves. He has left no stone unturned in his effort to understand what happened in this terrible place, and to reinscribe its survivors' stories back into historical memory. I was stunned by this book's scope, rigor, and compassion. A monumental work of reportage and commemoration.

Chris Heath has chronicled one the bleakest, most disturbing events of the Holocaust. Previously little known, it's the story of a dozen Jews who were among those ordered to exhume the mass graves at Ponar, where most of the Jewish population of Lithuania's capitol, Vilna'the Jerusalem of the North'had been lined up and shot by drunken units of Einsatzgruppen. Exhume and burn the bodies: that was the order. Because the criminals were hiding the evidence. 'All roads lead to Ponar,' poet and partisan Abba Kovner had said. 'And Ponar means death.' These prisoners, intensely alive in Heath's crystalline prose, were sent to a hell deeper than the lowest circle of Dante, where they set about losing their minds and planning their escape. The stories of these men will unsettle and change you. Anyone who cares about human nature and the question of good and evil owes this author their admiration and gratitude.

This is one of the best books written about the Shoah by Bullets. Clearly written, superbly researched, it's a fascinating reminder of an unjustly neglected story about the Holocaust.

In 1944, 80 mennearly all Jewishwere 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. . . . 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 monumental act of reconstruction, this book helps restore historical specificity to an unfathomable reality.