Award-winning journalist Chris Heath will discuss his groundbreaking book “No Road Leading Back: An Improbable Escape from the Nazis and the Tangled Way We Tell the Story of the Holocaust” at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City. The event is scheduled for 7 p.m. on March 4.
The book reveals the extraordinary story of twelve prisoners who escaped from a site where more than 70,000 Jews were murdered in the Lithuanian forest of Ponar. As documented in Holocaust education programs, the S.S. later enslaved a group of Jews to exhume and incinerate all the bodies in a months-long labor, an episode whose specifics are staggering and disturbing, even within the context of the Holocaust.
In a remarkable feat of human resilience, the prisoners dug a tunnel using only their bare hands and spoons while trapped and guarded day and night, demonstrating not just bravery and desperation but extraordinary 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 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 was nominated for the 2023 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing.
The book can be purchased at a discounted price of $34 if preordered by February 24. Limited copies will be available at the event at full price. For more information or to register, visit thejkc.org.
–Dwight Widaman