RUDNINKAI, Lithuania (JTA) — Deep in the trees and swampy thickets of Lithuania’s Rudninkai Forest, a series of makeshift forts is sinking into the earth.

These represent the remains of underground bunkers where Jewish partisans resisted their annihilation in the Holocaust. Under German occupation, some 400 Jews escaped the Vilnius ghetto to this forest and organized attacks against the Nazis.

After World War II, the story of these partisans was folded into Soviet propaganda, leaving a shroud of mystery over the bunkers. Now, construction of a new German military base in the area is throwing into question the fate of the forts — and the memory of their fighters.

Jewish former partisans and their descendants have traveled for decades to visit the bunkers, which mark the only memorial to their resistance in Lithuania. But in recent months, new obstacles have appeared: Signs forbidding entry and demarcating a “dangerous area” are installed on the road to the forest and pinned on trees approaching the forts.

Lithuania is nearing the final stage of constructing a military base for German troops in Rudninkai Forest, nestled about 27 miles south of Vilnius. The training ground near the former partisan camps was planned after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine to shore up NATO’s eastern flank. Strategically located some 12 miles from the border with Moscow-allied Belarus and east of Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave, the troops will be Germany’s first permanent deployment abroad since WWII. About 5,000 German soldiers will begin arriving this fall.

“You cannot easily find the forts, so those who know how to get there, we just go,” Ausra Mikulskiene, a Jewish history tour guide from Vilnius, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “But now, there are ‘Do not enter’ stickers and stop signs. It’s becoming impossible to get there because they are closing all of the forest.”

Mikulskiene has brought the children and grandchildren of Jewish partisans to Rūdninkai for 10 years. They need her guidance to find eight standing forts, covered in logs and soil, which are not marked on maps and GPS systems. In such remote corners of the forest, partisans planned to ambush their enemies, lay explosives on German trains and equipment, and sabotage telephone lines and infrastructure in Vilnius.

The bunkers are not protected by the Lithuanian government as cultural heritage sites, and they have deteriorated over years of neglect. But as the German base is completed and military training begins, Mikulskiene worries that prohibitory signs related to construction will turn into more serious barriers to the forts, and visitors could lose access altogether.

Twists of history over decades plunged the forts into obscurity. Lithuania was occupied from 1944 to 1990 by the Soviet Union, which honored hundreds of Soviet partisans who went to Rudninkai Forest to battle the Germans. The Jewish partisans who joined them, and who helped Russian forces liberate Vilnius from the Nazis in 1944, were not part of this narrative.

The Lithuanian Soviet Republic, or Lithuanian SSR, began to commemorate Soviet partisans on the site of the Rudninkai forts in the 1970s. Soviet and Jewish fighters only had access to wood and soil to build their bunkers. But the forts standing today are reinforced with concrete, an indication that the Soviet government fortified the structures to serve as memorials, said Mikulskiene. She remembers visiting the site on a school trip in........

© The Times of Israel