Photo courtesy PBS

by Geoff Vasil

Owen Palmquist’s documentary on two sites in Jewish Vilna aired last week on the US public television network PBS’s NOVA program. According to the director, there are rumblings of a broadcast in Lithuania, but so far there are no concrete plans to show it here.

The documentary is called Holocaust Escape Tunnel and focuses on two sites in and near Vilnius: the former Great Synagogue, which was damaged in World War II and torn down by the Soviets in the early 1950s, and the Ponar mass murder site outside Vilnius, where more than 70,000 people were murdered during the Holocaust.

Obviously Ponar got top billing. Last summer as director Owen Palmquist was shooting the footage with his crew, he said they hadn’t settled on any definite title and hadn’t decided what to feature yet, but he had the idea he wanted to talk about the rich Litvak Jewish culture of Vilnius. Focusing on the Holocaust actually makes more sense within the American context, since Lithuania is generally seen as one of the more enthusiastic societies to take up arms and murder Jews during World War II. It’s an easier sell to media managers. Litvak history is complicated and spans centuries; the Holocaust is immediate and “in your face.”

The documentary attempts to establish exactly where the scientific action is to take place. Nova purports to be a science-documentary show and has been airing since the late 70s. It slightly–but only slightly–predates Bob Guccione’s foray into popular science with the magazine OMNI, which was originally slated to be called NOVA, but ran into trouble with the name because of the documentary from PBS station WGBH’s production of the same name. Palmquist’s production introduces Ponar, the problem of the burner teams escape from their prison there, but then inexplicably says to discover the answer, we must travel to a country few have ever heard of: Lithuania. Of course anyone who knows of Ponar likely knows it’s in Lithuania, but chalk this one up to promo-exuberance and ignore the illogic for now.

The film then presents the two archaeological sites–Ponar and the Great Synagogue–where a vague international team of archaeologists are preparing to uncover the secrets of Jewish Vilna. We meet Jon Seligman, a South African Litvak who works for the Israeli Antiquities Authority, and Richard Freund of the University of Hartford in Connecticut, the leaders of the project. Somewhere along the way we also meet Harry Jol, professor of geography at University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire originally from Canada, and chief Lithuanian archaeologist at the site Mantas Daubaras. The action, such as it is, shifts from site to site. In Ponar they are looking for the escape tunnel through which some Jewish prisoners escaped, but the tunnel is introduced before we understand who they are or where they are imprisoned. Then we shift to the children of escapees now living in Israel. The film attempts to make the existence of the tunnel purely anecdotal, and to present the discovery of the actual tunnel as some sort of vindication of Holocaust history, but in fact no one involved in the issue in Lithuania has ever expressed any doubt over the reality of the escape or how it was effected.

Back at the Great Synagogue, Richard Freund gushes about locating what he thinks is one of the columns around the bimah. Actually it was found back in 2014 by initial digs by Lithuanians at the site, which is now a kindergarten built of white bricks. The problem here is that if Jewish street (Žydų gatvė) is anywhere near now where it was in 1940 when it was called ulica Żydowska, the bimah cannot be anywhere near where the Lithuanian dig was, it has to be under or behind the kindergarten. The yard of the kindergarten facing Jewish street must have been the Strashun library in front of the Great Synagogue as one of the elements of the Shulhoyf.

Palmquist and NOVA do an excellent job of presenting just how ground-penetrating radar was used at Ponar and electric resistance tomography at the former Great Synagogue site. In Ponar we really see the tunnel revealed, while findings back at the Shulhoyf are more ambiguous. What wasn’t really reported in the NOVA special was the discovery of masses of animal bones along with what appeared to be bath tiles from behind the kindergarten. The find was anomalous, but argues against the idea presented in the film that they were digging up the former mikvah, or ritual bath. They also dug up a toy lead soldier there from the right period. Richard Freund again jumps to conclusions after they send a miniature camera into a small hole in a subterranean brick-work arch, exclaiming what looks all the world for a post-WWII Soviet-era concrete box for containing electric and heating pipes a “metal heater” for the mikvah supposedly located there.

All this scientific discovery is repeatedly punctuated by children of survivors of the burning crew in Israel talking about what their fathers told them. A Mr. Gol makes an interesting statement that the Nazis formed the team to burn corpses at Ponar because the Lithuanians were planning to blame the Germans for the mass murder there after the war, and the Germans wanted to destroy the evidence. The blurb for the show on the NOVA website also claims the Nazis destroyed the centuries-old cradle of Litvak civilization, without mentioning Lithuanian complicity. The real history of the Holocaust in Lithuania isn’t elaborated as NOVA focuses on the science and Seligman and Palmquist focus on third-person testimonies from the children of survivors. We are also treated to a short interview with the author Ellen Cassedy, who isn’t known for making Lithuanians uncomfortable about Holocaust issues. Actual Jews from Vilnius are only allowed one sentence apiece: Markas Zingeris, director of the Vilna Gaon Museum, offers a soundbyte clearly taken out of context, and Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky is allowed one or two sentences as well, but isn’t identified as the leader of the Lithuanian Jewish Community. What actually happened in the Vilnius ghetto, which for a short time included the shulhoyf, and what really happened in Ponar or even with just the corpse-burners there isn’t part of the program. Instead we get some sort of millennial-generation enthusiasm over apparently misidentified parts of sites and drone shots above Ponar.

Still, Palmquist’s production does a fair job of introducing Vilna to outsiders. Dr. Freund doesn’t get everything wrong, either. At Ponar he indicates what he thinks is an unknown killing pit (although it looks suspiciously like the pit everyone interested in the subject believes is where the Soviet POWs were murdered) and says there might be more. There are. In recent months new pits have been discovered. The real problem is that Ponar has been so neglected so many years. Freund’s team has done the first real archaeological work in many years there. The documentary also gets another thing right, saying very few Lithuanians even know about Ponar. Whether that ignorance is by design is truly beyond the scope of a one-hour science documentary. Jon Seligman also has a real feel for his subject, perhaps because he comes from a South African Litvak community which he has briefly documented here.

For more on last summer’s work at the Great Synagogue, see here.