About twenty-seven miles south of Vilnius, in swampy thicket, eight forts are sinking into the ground. They are covered over with logs and soil. They are not marked on any map, and no GPS will take you to them. People find them because somebody who knows the way walks them in.

They were dug by Jews. Roughly four hundred got out of the Vilnius ghetto into Rudninkai Forest under German occupation and organised there — not hiding, but attacking. The bunkers they lived and planned in are, JTA reports, the only memorial to Jewish armed resistance anywhere in Lithuania.

They are not protected. The Lithuanian government does not list them as cultural heritage, and decades of neglect have done what neglect does. After the war the Soviets absorbed the partisans into their own story, which is a particular way of losing something — not destroyed, but folded into someone else's account of itself until you cannot see the original shape.

Now Lithuania is finishing a military base in that forest for German troops, planned after Russia's invasion of Ukraine to hold NATO's eastern flank. The training ground sits near the partisan camps. Signs have gone up on the approach roads — no entry, dangerous area. A Vilnius guide who has been bringing the children and grandchildren of partisans out to the forts for ten years told JTA it is becoming impossible to reach them.

Set that beside the last two entries here. A cave under a house in Silwan surfaced because police were breaking up a fight. A cache of scrolls came out of a cliff because shepherds went looking for a goat. Evidence arrives sideways, by accident, and once it is out it cannot be argued back into the ground.

This is the same beat running the other way. Nothing here is being destroyed and nobody is denying anything. A base is being built for reasons that have nothing to do with Jews, on ground that happens to hold the only physical record of four hundred people who decided to fight. The bunkers do not need demolishing. They need only to become slightly harder to walk to, for slightly too long, and there is no longer anyone left who remembers the way.