No Road Leading Back

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20th century
A01=Chris Heath
Author_Chris Heath
ben macintyre
Category=NHD
Category=NHTZ1
chris heath
cold case
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
europe
germany
history
holocaust
investigation
jewish
jonathan freedland
journalist
lithuania
nazi
non-fiction
ponar
true story

Product details

  • ISBN 9780349136295
  • Weight: 480g
  • Dimensions: 126 x 196mm
  • Publication Date: 04 Sep 2025
  • Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Paperback
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'A stunning book, a powerful investigation, utterly compelling,' James Holland, The Daily Telegraph, Five stars

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.

Chris Heath has been a contributing editor at GQ since 2003. He was previously contributing editor at Details Magazine and Rolling Stone. He has won the 2013 National Magazine Award for Reporting for the story '18 Tigers, 17 Lions, 8 Bears, 3 Cougars, 2 Wolves, 1 Baboon, 1 Macaque, and 1 Man Dead in Ohio'. His books include Pet Shop Boys, Literally and the 2004 number one UK bestseller Feel, about Robbie Williams. In recent years he has written about the aftermaths of the 2011 Japanese tsunami and of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans; Iraqi refugees in Syria; and a Colorado man traveling on repeated solo missions to kill Osama Bin Laden, among many other subjects. Currently based in London and New York, Chris grew up south of Birmingham.

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