Last week we had a progress meeting at the Tolerance Center of the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum, chaired by Jasa Markas Zingeris, the Director of the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum. The Assistant Director, Zigmas Vitkas, who has been overseeing our work at Poneriai and the Great Synagogue site, Kirk Wolfinger who is the executive director for the NOVA documentary being filmed, the director of the movie Owen Palmquist, Richard Freund from the University of Hartford, Jon Seligman from the Israel Antiquities Authority, Leslie Gotfrit, and of course Alastair McClymont and myself were there.
The museum is beautiful and well done, the conference room overlooks the City, and good coffee was served as always here in Lithuania. The gallery adjoining the conference room is introduced by a very moving Samuel Bak painting of the Vilna Ghetto. Bak, who was born in 1933 and only 9 when the Ghetto was closed off, survived the war and emigrated in 1948. Also in the gallery are the doors of the Holy Ark that held the Torah scrolls in the Vilnius Synagogue until its destruction in the war. The doors were recovered and hidden by Jews returning to Vilnius in 1944 or 1945.
The meeting progressed as one would expect. Our results were quickly summarized, and then the discussions ensued on what to excavate and who and how and when, how to display, how to preserve, and of course about the NOVA documentary, which will likely premier in 2017. It is very likely that archaeological excavations will follow up our geophysics, with the work to be led by the cultural ministry and supported by Israeli and American archaeologists and historians.
A small excavation is likely to occur this week at the Great Synagogue in the center of Vilnius, beneath one of our geophysical surveys. Leslie and I are hoping to sneak a peak after returning to Vilnius on Friday after a week of traveling in Lithuania and Latvia, and maybe get a few more bird's eye views of Vilnius from the drone.

As we are approaching the last few days of our project here in Lithuania, we have been cutting back a bit on the late night processing and archiving of data, and spending a bit more of the extra long hours of the dusk wandering the streets of this very beautiful city. We even managed to visit a small bar that we have been passing every day on our way to Ponary, but had never had the time to peak inside. We have been regularly sampling the local beers in Vilnius, which are superb, but this was our first chance to try a favorite Lithuanian herbal liquer, Devynia 999, and it was quite good.
We saw neither Putin nor Trump, but apparently they did collaborate on a mural, and even left a graffiti message on the wall..."Make everything great again."

More than 6 months before Adolf Eichmann, Reinhard Heydrich, and other SS and Nazi government officials met in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee on January 20, 1942, to formulate the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question," the Polish journalist Sakowicz was already witnessing and secretly documenting the extermination of the Jews of Lithuania in the forest of Ponary. Besides likely being the largest of the killing pits, Soviet Plan Pit 1 (as we call it) was also the first pit, it is believed, to be used as a mass murder site at Ponary. On Sunday and Monday, June 12 and 13, Alastair and I felt we had mapped in Pit 1 to a sufficient extent where the archaeologists could be confident of its size and location, and so the the Poneriai Memorial could properly protect the area.
Excavations in any of the killing pits, even for forensic studies, will not happen. Yet, one goal of the historians and archaeologists working at Ponary, and at other Holocaust sites, is to give identities and even names to the victims. At Pit 1, the Nazis expanded the trenches originally built by the Russians to route fuel oil from the tanks. In their experiments to efficiently handle and execute as many people as fast as possible, the Nazis first used these trenches to funnel the victims into these killing pits. On Tuesday and Wednesday, we used topographic mapping from drones, a 1942 hand drawn German map of Pit 1, a German air photo shot by German intelligence over Poneriai during the 1944 Battle of Vilnius, visual observation,and more geophysics to pinpoint the axes of the trenches, specifically, the trench leading to Pit 1. We were hoping to identify bits of metal in the trenches that could direct the archaeologists to dig where, as the victims approached the gun shots that they could surely hear (but not see, as they were marched shirtless into the pits with their tops wrapped around their heads) in front of them, they disposed of their last and most treasured personal possessions of watches, jewelry, house keys, personal momentos, etc.... and along with these, perhaps identity cards, photographs, letters, and other records of the moment.
We do have targets along the trench leading to Pit 1, and at the proper depth that would place these bits of metal on the floor of the trench. What exactly these objects are, and what other artifacts may they be associated with, will have to wait until some future archaeological excavation work.

Now that I am a bit more familiar with the streets of this beautiful city of Vilnius, I realize that the fire very near our hotel, behind the All Saints' Church, was on the street, and within a few meters of the main gate to the Vilna Ghetto. In September 1941, when the Jews of Vilna (Vilnius) were confined by the Nazis to a small area in what had previously been the Jewish Quarter, Jews accounted for an estimated 40% of the population of the City. In fact, the Polish and Yiddish speaking population of Vilnius was the majority, and Lithuanian speakers were a small minority in 1941. The Jewish population was confined to the Ghetto for 2 years, from September 1941 to September 1943.
The Ghetto population peaked at about 40,000, with most of the inhabitants being sent to their deaths in Poneray where they were shot 10 at a time, or machine gunned if the executioners were in a hurry, or blown up with a grenade if there were not enough executioners for the task. When the Ghetto was liquidated in 1943, there were no surviving Jews in the Ghetto. A few hundred had escaped to join the partisans. Of course, part of the notion of placing the Jewish population in the ghetto was to cut off any knowledge of what was happening outside the Ghetto walls, including at Poneray, and to prevent mass resistance...hence, part of the source of the controversy surrounding the Jewish Ghetto leader Jacob Gens.
Despite the size of the fire on Tuesday, only one building was destroyed. The All Saints' Church appeared undamaged, and a typically relaxed street scene at the Church corner carried on the next evening.

We spent Thursday morning, June 9, continuing our search for the escape tunnel. Everyone familiar with Paneriai (Poneray) has a different notion in which direction the Burners' Brigade built the tunnel. Ken Bensimon (with beard on left), an architect who designed prisons so as to prevent tunnel escapes, did the background research to direct us to the proper quadrant, or so he thought. Jurijus Greismanas (with hat on right), one of the two curators of Paneriai, believes Ken is at least 90 degrees off. Every tour guide that comes through, of course, has a different idea, or states that no one knows. One person that did know was another Jurijus, Jurijus Farber (soldier in uniform on left), a Russian engineer whose idea it was to escape through a tunnel. For such a demanding infrastructure project in a low budget environment, Farber reportedly had a skill far more useful than being an engineer...he was a thief. Farber died in 1983 at the age of 75.
The picture below shows Pit 6 in 1942. The Burners' Brigade lived in the pit beginning in the second half of 1943. Not only was the pit surrounded by two barbed wire fences and a mine field, but it was guarded day and night by 80 soldiers.
If the tunnel location was known, Dr. Alastair McClymont and I would not be looking for the escape route. Our approach is simple. We slice up the site with geophysical surveys, map the anomalies with GPS and drones, and hope that the dots connect in a line leading back to Pit 6. The main technique we are using is electrical resistivity tomography. If the tunnel is open and air filled, we would expect the tunnel to appear very electrically resistive. If the tunnel were acting like a drain, collecting and trapping infiltrating water, the tunnel would appear more electrically conductive than the surrounding sands. Of course, this may be easier said than done as the tunnel is now likely filled with sand, and a sand filled tunnel in a sand filled glacial outwash plain is never an easy target. And the tunnel was very small, and may be 9 m in depth or greater. But we do know a bit more now, on day 3 than we did on day 1.

Saturday, June 11, we carried on with our tunnel "detection," or at least tunnel hunting, as I still cannot say too much about this effort until the official press release. The weather on Saturday fit well with the history of the site, very cold and raining. The film crew, Alastair, and I were alone at the site. It is inconceivable how even 12 of the Burning Brigade (11 joined the partisans and survived until the end of the war) escaped as the forest is dense, the escapees were malnourished, the night was black, and the surrounding population was unsympathetic and even hostile to the victims and the shackled Brigade. Even language would have been a challenge as more than 90% of the population of Vilnius then spoke Polish or Yiddish, with less than 5% of the people in the City speaking Lithuanian as spoken in the nearby village.
Unique to Poneray amongst all the extermination sites in Europe, we have a dispassionate, day-by-day diary of observations from 1941 to 1943, from a Polish journalist, Kazimierz Sakowicz. The Ponary Diary. Sakowicz was a journalist and print shop owner in Vilnius until 1939. As a result of the Soviet occupation, he closed his print shop, and moved to a small cottage in the Ponary forest, commuting by bicyle to Vilnius to find any small jobs he could to support his family. On July 11, 1941, the first day of the executions, he heard gunfire in the woods. From then until his being shot in 1944, he observed and recorded the daily details of mass murder - who were the victims, who were the perpetrators, when, how, etc.-all in a scientific, unemotional, and even non-judgemental manner. His notes were hidden in lemonade bottles, and then buried, with the finding and publishing of the Diary first in Polish in 1999, and later in English in 2005, being a drama of its own.
But even with the Diary, the Soviet investigations immediately following the war, testimonies form escapees, Germans, LIthuanian villagers, previous geophysical surveys, remote sensing, ground based LiDAR surveys, and more, there is still much uncertainty as to how many victims perished in Poneray, in how many pits are they buried, and where are the pits. On Sunday and Monday, Alastair and I carried out surveys trying to locate and pinpoint what is probably the largest of the pits, what we call Soviet Plan Pit 1, referring to the designation on the original Soviet design for fuel or oil storage tanks.
Hunting for such a big pit, likely 30 or so meters across, in a relatively small area, would seem simple. We started with the 1944 German air photo, but it is not georeferenced and it shows a much larger clearing than the pit itself. Available LiDAR - laser scanning - data that show the microrelief and can see through the canopy was very useful, but the soil piles and berms directed us only to the general area of the pit. LiDAR cannot pinpoint the location as the LiDAR provides no subsurface information. Alastair did a scout with our ground penetrating radar system, covering a few kilometers of line distance. We did a 120 m tomography survey and sliced across a portion of the pit on Saturday. Sunday we did a few more slices over the Pit, and we now believe we have definitively mapped it.

Carrying out surveys in the Rasu Prison was unique, and in the forest of Poneriai was and is (we are not yet done) moving, but carrying out surveys in the very center of this vibrant and historic City is, well, a culinary challenge, as there are so many fine restaurants and coffee shops within a few hundred meters to distract us from our duties.
The Jewish community and its synagogues in Vilnius date back perhaps to the 1490s, but certainly to the latter 1500s. Though there were more than 100 synagogues at the beginning of World War II, the epicenter of Jewish spiritual life in Vilnius was the Great Synagogue. It was largely destroyed by the Nazis in World War II, and with no surviving Jewish community in Vilnius, what was left of the Great Synagogue deteriorated after the War, with the Soviets demolishing the remaining structures - or so they thought - and building a school and playground on site.
Because the Synagogue could not be built taller than the Vilnius churches, as the Synagogue expanded in the 19th and early 20th Century, it was built downward, supposedly down three floors. Now, a joint endeavor of American, Israeli, and Lithuanian archaeologists want to excavate, preserve, and memorialize the Synagogue as a project to commemorate the history of the Jewish community in Vilinius. Alastair and I are trying to use geophysical surveys to assist in guiding the initial phase of excavations.
I have not had time to form my own opinion of this very sensitive project, and we certainly will not have time to investigate more than a few small portions of the site. But by flying a drone directly over the Great Synagogue, looking directly down at the school and playground sitting on the Synagogue footprint, and photographing the old world architecture of Vilnius with the Synagogue clearly sitting in the center, one immediately appreciates that the Great Synagogue, even without the iconic structure, remains present as the geographic heart of Vilnius.

There are few, if any stories of greater human desperation or human courage and resilience...certainly not in fiction, nor even in the nightmarish death camps of Sobibor, Treblinka, and Belzec. As one drives 10 km or so southwest of Vilnius, if one does not blink, you might see a white road sign with black lettering pointing to Panerai (Poneray). Follow the sign and a heavily damaged road past a Lithuanian village and along a rail siding. Eventually one comes to a beautiful but haunted forest, and a small house that is the museum for this mass extermination site. The museum is one small room that narrates the extermination of Lithuanian Jewry in the pits at Poneray.
In 1939, the Russian Army constructed 10 or so massive pits, up to 42 m across and 6 m or more deep, for installing large jet fuel storage tanks. In 1941, the Nazis attacked Russia, quickly pushed the Russians out of Lithuania, and began to use these giant tank foundations in there experiments on how to most efficiently exterminate an entire population. From 1941 to 1944, approximately 100,000 people, including 70,000 Jews (45%) of the entire population of Vilnius, and 30,000 Polish partisans, Russian officers, Catholic priests, and others, were executed by a bullet to the back of the head for adults, and an even more violent death for children. The bodies were disposed of in the tank foundations, with one pit alone containing 25,000 bodies.
By 1943, it was clear the war was turning against the Nazis. As in Sobibor and elsewhere, the senior Nazi command ordered the evidence to be erased. In 1944, the SS established a "Burning Brigade" to exhume the 100,000 bodies and burn them to ash. In the museum (and below) is a photograph of a ladder the brigade used to stack bodies and wood into a pyramid. A smaller replica of this ladder sits in Pit 6 where the burning brigade, between 80 and 100 Jews, lived.
The stone wall of Pit 6 was 4 m high. The workers were shackled at the ankles, intensively guarded, lived under the constant threat of death, and labored all day at the most grisly of tasks. And they knew, once their task was completed, they too would be killed. As such, against any possible chance of success, a small group of workers decided to tunnel out to freedom. Behind a false storage closet, for 76 nights, after working all day hauling and burning decomposing corpses, this small group of workers tunneled under the stone wall that was deeply incised to prevent any escape, they built supports to keep the dry sand from collapsing onto their 60 cm X 70 cm culvert, they detoured their tunnel away from other pits of corpses, they wired in a light bulb when their single candle would burn what little oxygen they had, and meanwhile roof collapses of the soft sand did occur. On April 13th they punched through the ground surface 32 m away from their starting point. On April 15th, at 9:30, all 100 or so workers made their break. It was Passover, the Jewish holiday of freedom.
They had hidden various tools they had found among the corpses to aid their break. Files were used to break the ankle shackles, pliers to cut the barbed wire fence. A compass for travel out of the dense woods. The cut shackles and breaking branches made a noise. Gun fire broke out. There was not one barbed wire fence, but two! And then a minefield that none of the workers knew of. Dogs. Machine gun fire. Trucks with more soldiers. Many were shot or blown up in the minefield. Some made it to the river where they could float downstream and evade the dogs. 11 survived to fight with the partisans, and live until the end of the war. The last of the survivors died 3 years ago.
Tuesday and Wednesday, June 8 and 9, Alastair and I, guided by Dr. Richard Freund from the University of Hartford, and Ken Ben Simon, have been using geophysics to locate other unexcavated pits, and most importantly, to find the tunnel. NOVA, the acclaimed documentary film maker, has been documenting our progress...and we have had great progress! We have been using ground penetrating radar and electrical resistivity tomography to "see" under the ground. We have been flying a drone over our various areas (but under the tree canopy!) to create photographic basemaps to overlay our geophysical results. Eric Johnson, back in Calgary, has stitched together our hundreds of drone photographs, and created micro-relief maps that we hope will show subtle changes in relief due to, for instance, settlement in a pit or collapse along a tunnel path.
We have some results...but we have been asked to keep things a bit quiet until an official announcement. You will be second to hear it all here.

In 1940, about 100,000 Jews lived in Vilnius, and there were more than 100 synagogues. 70,000 were killed in the pits in Ponary. Today, there are about 5,000 Jews in Vilnius, with only a single working synagogue, and a second being restored. This evening there was a conflagration behind our hotel on Gelius Street, on the edge of what was the Jewish Quarter and is today's old town. The fire broke out in a courtyard between a bar and a church and a police station, and is still raging at this time. Alastair and I were not alone watching the flames, though the local citizens, police, and firemen seemed remarkably calm given the scale and location of the fire.

June 7, 2016, Rasu Prison in Vilnius. We sent 87 drone photographs to Calgary on Monday night, or 7 AM Calgary time. By the time Alastair and I were ready for brown bread and herring for breakfast on Tuesday, Eric Johnson had stitched the photos together, and used photogrametric mapping software to create a relief map of the prison with 1 cm resolution. Instead of using this map to plan our escape, we used the subtle relief features to focus our geophysical exploration for the grave of Jacob Gens, the Jewish Chief of Police and Head of the Judenrat, the Jewish administration, of the Vilnius Ghetto between 1941 and 1943. Subtle depressions, for instance, could be indicative of a burial. The abandoned church beyond the prison walls was used for Nazi administration in the war. Tomorrow we will carry out surveys in Ponary, trying to improve the mapping of the mass burials of the 100,000 citizens of Vilnius executed in the forest, and trying to locate the escape tunnel of the "Burning Brigade.

Monday, June 6, 2016. Today we accomplished a daring air photo reconnaissance, flying a drone from inside the walls, and over a prison in the beautiful city of Vilnius, Lithuania. Alistair McClymont and I are in Lithuania from June 4 through June 18. We are carrying out geophysical surveys in and around Vilnius at various sites connected to the Holocaust and the liquidation of the estimated 70,000 Jews in the Vilnius Ghetto. Today, we carried out geophysical and aerial photographic surveys in an attempt to locate the grave of the controversial Jewish chief of police of the Jewish police force of the Vilnius Ghetto, Jacob Gens. Of greater historical interest than the burial itself is the account of a cigar box full of personal documents buried alongside Gens. As few of the 70,000 inhabitants of the Ghetto survived the Gestapo ordered liquidation of September 23, 1943, contemporary documentation from the Ghetto administrators are valuable historic resources.

NOVA`s Lithuanian sound man, Vitus, is part of a film crew that is documenting our work in Vilnius, and in the outskirts of nearby Ponary where 100,000 people were murdered and buried in massive pits. Having been in Vilnius less than 24 hours, and knowing very few words of Lithuanian, I am still struggling to distinguish between graffiti and the abundant, creative street art that is everywhere in the City.