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No Road Leading Back

  • Author Chris Heath
  • Narrator Vas Eli
  • Publisher Little, Brown Book Group
  • Publish Date 3 September 2024
  • Run Time 21 hours and 14 minutes
  • Format Audio
  • Genre History.

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What to expect

'A stunning book, a powerful investigation, utterly compelling,' James Holland, The Daily Telegraph, Five stars

'Terrifying' Simon Schama

Ponar, Lithuania. 1944. The Nazis have enslaved Jewish men to exhume and incinerate the bodies of more than 70,000 Jews previously shot to death in the forest. Trapped in almost unimaginable horror, a group develop an audacious escape plan. Despite being guarded day and night, they dig a tunnel with their bare hands. Twelve men escape - an act of great bravery and desperation as well as extraordinary imagination.

Based on first-person accounts of the escapees and on every scrap of evidence that has been documented, repressed or amplified since, No Road Leading Back resurrects the lives of the twelve and their acts of witness, as well as providing an urgent analysis of why their story has rarely been told - and never accurately. Author Chris Heath explores the cultural use and misuse of Holocaust testimony and the need for us to face uncomfortable historical truths with honesty and accuracy.

This shattering and inspiring true story of prisoners who dug their way out of torture and imprisonment 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.

Critics Review

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
David Herman
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
Heather Clark, author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
Utterly absorbing in its powerfully detailed horror and inspiring redemption: a must-read in Holocaust studies
Kirkus Reviews
The present moment is an argument for the urgency of this book. A monumental act of reconstruction, it helps restore historical specificity to an unfathomable reality too easily turned into a politically expedient metaphor that has made Holocaust inversion the latest in a litany of ancient calumnies
Jonathan Rosen, author of The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions
No Road Leading Back is a stunning book, a powerful investigation, utterly compelling, at times stomach-churning and deeply shocking, but also by turns tragic, wistful and curiously uplifting... Five Stars
Daily Telegraph
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
Rich Cohen, author of The Avengers: A Jewish War Story
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
Booklist, starred review
Author Chris Heath
Narrator Vas Eli
Duration 21 hours and 14 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9781405563246
Format Audiobook
Publisher Little, Brown Book Group
Genre History
Availability AU, GB, IE

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