By Richard Freund

In June 2016, an international team of researchers led by the University of Hartford’s Dr. Richard Freund uncovered a 100-foot long tunnel that was hand-dug during the Holocaust by 80 Jewish prisoners desperately seeking to escape the infamous Rasu Prison near Vilnnius, Lithuania. Only 11 survived the war and lived to tell the story of their courageous escape on the last night of Passover, April 15, 1944 (see “Holocaust Escape Tunnel Found in Lithuania,” Jewish Ledger, July 3, 2016).

Science reporters at The New York Times were among the first to report on the discovery of the Holocaust escape tunnel, calling it one of the most memorable science stories of 2016. The discovery was also the subject of hundreds of stories worldwide, including in Newsweek, The Washington Post, CNN and the BBC.

Prof. Richard Freund being interviewed for the documentary on the grounds of HKP, August 1, 2017. (Courtesy of the University of Hartford)

The tunnel’s discovery became the subject of “Holocaust Escape Tunnel,” a NOVA science series documentary that was broadcast in the United States on PBS in April and May, then in Israel in June. and, on the evening of July 18, 2017 the auditorium of the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum was filled with local diplomats, Lithuanians and University of Hartford students as the director of the Museum, Markus Zingerus introduced the documentary to a packed house.

“We found the remains of the tunnel using Electrical Resistivity Tomography and Ground Penetrating Radar. Two non-invasive technologies that revealed what traditional archaeology could not,” says Freund, who is director of the University of Hartford’s Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies and a noted archaeologist.

Recently, says Freund, his team returned to Lithuania, bringing with them more students and even newer technologies to help resolve some of the most important parts of the history of the Holocaust in that country, as well as the history of its Jewish community.

The following is Freund’s summary of his team’s work in Vilna, Lithuania this summer:

Lithuania is a relatively small country in Eastern Europe with a small population. For more than five centuries, however, Lithuania was home to one of the most creative and well-known Judaisms in the world. At one point almost 40 percent of Vilnius was Jewish. It was a diverse Jewish community made up of poets and writers of all types, secularists, Enlighteners, Yiddish and religious language and literature specialists, composers, painters, doctors and lawyers, rich and poor. For this reason it was known as the “Jerusalem of the North” – until 1941, when the Nazi transformed most of the country into killing fields.

Our excavation projects in Vilna during the summer of 2017 included the excavations of the Great Synagogue of Vilna, the killing sites of Fort IX, VII and IV of Kaunas (Kovno, in Yiddish), the Jewish Cemetery of Kovno, the Nazi POW camp of Silute and the labor camp of HKP on the outskirts of Vilna, where our investigations were filmed for a new television documentary for airing in 2018.

The results were impressive.

At the Great Synagogue two mikvaot (ritual baths) were uncovered. The mikvah or ritual bath is a significant part of Jewish life, used by men and women, often daily, weekly and monthly.

In the areas adjacent to the mikvaot thousands of small finds of coins, glass objects, ceramics and personal items were made. This is one of the best ways to understand the greatness of the Jewish people of Vilnius before the Holocaust. Without first studying the written and material culture of the Jews of Vilna, the depth of the loss experienced in the Holocaust cannot be fully grasped.

Our students dug alongside Israelis and Lithuanian students and volunteers.

The Forts of Kaunas

The Forts of Kaunas (Kovno) were originally constructed by the Russians in the 19th and 20th centuries to protect Kaunas from invaders. The Nazis used them starting in 1941 as ready-made concentration camps and killing fields.

There were no extermination camps in Lithuania like those in Poland. Instead, a “Holocaust by Bullets” involved to a great extent the local population, who were counted on in a totally different way than in Western and Central Europe.

The so-called “Burning Brigade,” composed of Jews tasked with burning the corpses at Fort IX, burned up to 50,000. Our investigation centered on what remains are still buried in the so-called “battlefield” today – a 100-square meter field sited between the fort and the massive monument built by Soviets.

The Jewish Cemetery of Kovno

Our research was requested and sponsored by the Jewish Community Lithuania and the Municipality of Kaunas and cultural ministry. Each site played a key role in understanding the extent of the “hidden Holocaust.” These sites are often unmarked and based solely on testimonies of survivors, which tell us that thousands of bodies are located in mass burials on these sites, that only our ground penetrating radar and electrical resistivity tomography can identify.

Silute: A little known Nazi POW camp in Central western Lithuania

The Unites States embassy in Lithuania requested ground penetrating radar assistance to search for the remains of three soldiers from World War II. These U.S. airmen, who were shot down in other places in Europe and brought to this POW camp in western Lithuania, died in 1944. They are thought to be the last U.S. airmen who died in captivity and have not been retrieved. Our geoscience teams and our students saw this project particularly as a labor of love. The search for these World War II soldiers employs the same technique we used at all other Holocaust-era sites. Our preliminary results were presented at the U.S. embassy on August 3. They will follow up with our results.

HKP: The New 2018 Documentary of Courage and Compassion

The last part of our work involved collecting the evidence about the site where the “Oskar Schindler” of Lithuania – Major Karl Plagge – resisted Nazi orders and made a brave attempt to save some of the Jewish men, women and children of Vilna.

This University of Hartford research project really began more than a decade ago when Dr. Michael Good, a Connecticut physician, came to the Greenberg Center and offered to speak about a new book he had written entitled The Search for Major Plagge. Published in 2005, the book was a labor of love for which Good had worked hard to contact many of the survivors of the HKP labor camp now living around the world. He wrote the book about HKP 552 (HKP is a German acronym for Heereskraftfahrpark) that maintained and repaired military vehicles.

In July 1941, during the German invasion of the Soviet Union, HKP 562 was deployed to Vilnius (Vilna), Lithuania for the war effort. When Plagge, a Nazi party member, witnessed the genocide being carried out against the local Jewish population, something inside him changed. He would later testify: “I saw unbelievable things [in Vilnius] that I could not support… It was then that I began to work against the Nazis.”

A car repair shop run by Plagge on the outskirts of Vilna in 1943-44 was really his attempt to save 1,250 Jews – among them Good’s mother and grandfather.

The story of an altruistic Nazi who attempted to save Jewish men, women and children in a massive deception of the local SS authorities is an incredible story. We featured Dr. Good and his book at our Holocaust Educators’ Workshop in 2005 and I did not think much about it until 2016 when we were in Vilnius and taken to other potential sites to survey in the future. One of the sites was HKP.

One of the most problematic aspects of Holocaust archaeology is that so many of the sites that we want to know about have been seriously changed over the past 70 years and so, it is often difficult to recover original information about what happened at a site. Even at most killing fields, it is hard to get a good clear scientific perspective when so many things have been dramatically changed.

At HKP, we stood in 2016 in front of two buildings built by the Baron de Hirsch Foundation in the early 20th century. These were very well-built apartments (“Cheap Houses” – called: “Bilike heyzer” in Yiddish) and were intended to take the poor out of the Jewish quarter and give them a living space. Two six-storied buildings stand there today as they stood during the days when Plagge attempted to save the last remnants of the Jewish ghetto in August 1943 (with some slight renovations).

It would have been a complete triumph for Plagge (who, after several tries, was named a “Righteous of All Nations” by Yad VaShem), had the Nazis not decided to liquidate the HKP site in the closing days of the Vilnius campaign in July 1944. These Jews, however, had skills honed by their work in the car vehicle repair workshop. They constructed in the walls and basements and rafters of the buildings finely crafted malinas that saved a portion of the Jews from the camp.

Our work at HKP this summer was two fold:

Our first goal was to find the mass burials of Jews who did not make it to their hiding places or simply were captured and killed at the site. Our second goal was to find the malinas and see if they were still intact. That proved to be a very difficult but rewarding task captured by the film crew for a documentary that will probably air in 2018.

“Vilna: The Jerusalem of Lithuania,” an exhibition featuring the excavation project in Lithuania, will be featured at the University of Hartford’s Museum of Jewish Civilization this academic year. The exhibit will open on Sunday, Oct. 30, with a talk by Professor Samuel Kassow of Trinity College, who will speak about Vilna and Warsaw. Professor Freund will discuss his team’s most recent discoveries, as well as work planned for 2018 on Wednesday, Nov. 8, 2017. For more information: (860) 768.4964, www.hartford.edu/greenberg.

CAP: One of the two mikvot (ritual baths) discovered in the excavations of the Great Synagogue in July 2017. (Courtesy of the University of Hartford)