Holocaust escape tunnel discovery a blow against deniers

The awful story of the Nazi treatment of European Jews may be most awful in Lithuania, then a part of the Soviet Union in which 95 percent of the Jewish population was killed. But a recent discovery near the nation’s capital, Vilnius, offers a glimmer of something a bit brighter: a tunnel through which a handful of Jews, awaiting execution underground, were able to escape.

The tunnel’s exact location was only confirmed this month, as archeologists investigated near the place where 100,000 people, 70,000 of them Jewish, were killed by the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators.

The full story will be told through a NOVA documentary next year on PBS. For now, we spoke to Paula Apsell, a NOVA senior executive producer, at her office at Boston’s WGBH. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.