INNOVATION January-February 2017

Uncovering History, Lithuania, 2016 This may sound like a novel or a film script, more fiction than fact, but it did happen. With help from Calgary-based APEGBC member Paul Bauman, P.Eng., the desperation, ingenuity and bravery of the Burning Brigade has been proven for all time. In 1939, in the Paneriai forest just outside the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, the country’s Russian occupiers built a series of large pits, about 25 metres across and six metres deep, intended as foundations for airplane fuel tanks. In 1941, after the Germans pushed the Russians out of Lithuania, the Nazis decided to use the empty pits for their first experiments in mass extermination. “It was ground-zero of the Holocaust,” says Bauman. Over three years, the Nazis marched more than 100,000 men, women, and children—70,000 of them Jews—through the forest and to the pits, then “shot them 10 by 10.” By 1944, the Nazis were losing the war and decided to try to cover up the Paneriai killings. They ordered 80 prisoners—70 Jews, nine Russians and one Pole, about half from Stutthoff concentration camp in Poland and half from surrounding Lithuanian villages— to dig up and burn the evidence. But, after at least one prisoner recognised his own loved ones in the stacks of decomposing bodies, the Burning Brigade decided on a different plan. With their legs shackled, and metal spoons and cups their only tools, they spent 76 nights digging a tunnel out of Pit Six, where they lived. Finally, one dark April night, the Brigade members filed off their chains, crawled out the tunnel, then cut a gap through a thick row of barbed wire. Verifying the Past, Improving the Future BC Geoscientists and Engineers Are Donating Their Time and Expertise to Projects around the World Robin J. Miller

Paul Bauman, P.Eng., and an international team of volunteer archaeologists, geophysicists and historians located and mapped a narrow, 34-metre-long tunnel that was dug in 1944 by prisoners escaping the Nazis in Lithuania. P hotos , Paul Bauman, P.Eng.

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