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How science is helping unearth an 80-year-old Holocaust mystery

Out of the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, remnants of resistance emerge, thanks to advanced geoscientific tools and a team determined to keep the horrors of history from fading.

In a grassy patch of public park in central Warsaw last week, archaeologists dug up a rusted metal coat hook and the tangled chain of a decayed necklace. The objects couldn’t be more ordinary. Or more extraordinary.

The team excavated them from the buried rubble of the Warsaw Ghetto, where German occupiers sealed hundreds of thousands of Poland’s Jews into crowded, desperate squalor during World War II and over 80,000 died inside the walls of starvation, exposure and infectious diseases. Amid the twisted metal and bits of glass, the archaeologists unearthed small, unassuming remnants of daily life, suspended in hardened earth «like a time capsule,» says Philip Reeder, a professor of natural and environmental science at Pittsburgh’s Duquesne University and chief cartographer for the group working on the dig.

A fork. A light-green heart-shaped keepsake. A palm-size silver memorial medallion for a man named Nachum Morgenstern who died in 1880, inscribed in Hebrew.

«It makes you think,» Reeder muses of the tiny heart. «Did it belong to a child who lived in that house and most likely ended up dead when the ghetto was liquidated?»

The excavation — organized by Poland’s Warsaw Ghetto Museum and led by its research specialist Jacek Konik — is part of a broader effort to fill gaps in Holocaust history using geoscientific tools. These include ground-penetrating radar; GPS systems; magnetometers, which study variations in Earth’s geomagnetic field; and electrical resistivity tomography, a technique typically used for engineering and environmental investigations that images subsurface structures down as far as 660 feet (200 meters). Geoscience allows for what’s called «non-invasive archaeology.»

«Archaeology is the most destructive science on Earth,» says Richard Freund, an archaeologist and professor of Jewish studies at Christopher Newport University in Virginia. «What’s good about the geoscience is you don’t destroy anything before you stick a spade in the earth. It’s not very labor intensive and, most importantly, it’s not very expensive.»

Because these advanced tools identify and map historical sites without disturbing human remains, they also enable searches that honor the view held by some that digging up Holocaust graves disrespects the victims.

«It’s a game changer for Holocaust studies,» says Freund. He heads a multidisciplinary geo-archaeological research group aimed at unearthing lost Holocaust history to preserve the past and to protect the future from similar depravity. The group includes Geoscientists Without Borders, a program of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists that applies geoscience to humanitarian efforts.

This summer in Warsaw’s Krasinskich Park, a powerful metal detector turned up an anomaly that Freund’s team thought could be part of the Ringelblum Archive, a vast undercover cache of documents collected by as many as 60 volunteers determined to bear witness to Jewish life in Poland under Nazi occupation. The archive contains tens of thousands of invaluable items that testify to terror and suffering, but also to courage and acts of defiance. Collated in secret, the archive itself represents one such act.

The archive — spearheaded by Warsaw-based Jewish historian and political activist Emanuel Ringelblum starting in fall 1939 when Germany invaded Poland — includes underground newspapers, essays, letters, postcards, diaries, last wills and testaments, tram tickets, ration tickets, Nazi decrees, school schedules and original drawings, literature and poetry by Jewish artists and intellectuals that bring daily life in wartime Warsaw and beyond to vivid life.

In 1946, one of the few survivors of the ghetto guided a search party to metal boxes filled with archive documents amid the ghetto’s ruins. Polish construction workers building new apartments chanced upon two milk cans holding more archive material in 1950. Another milk can has long been rumored — based on diaries like Ringelblum’s — to be hidden at the site of an old brushmaker’s shop near the ghetto’s edge.

The archaeologists had hoped the metal object detected this summer would be that missing piece. Instead, they dug into the rocky earth last week to find a large steel beam collapsed on top of brick walls.

This was a letdown, but still a significant victory, as the other, more subtle artifacts they found carry their own historical and emotional value.

«In many ways it’s a somber experience,» Reeder says of uncovering such everyday relics. «But in many ways it’s an exhilarating experience. You get to tell the stories of people who can’t.»

Freund has led international teams exploring some 30 Holocaust-era sites in Poland, Latvia, Greece and Lithuania. There, researchers have mapped sites of mass burials and used radar and radio waves to uncover a 100-foot (30-meter) hidden escape tunnel leading out of a little-known Nazi extermination site at Ponar forest, known today as Paneriai. Eighty Jewish prisoners dug the tunnel over 76 nights using only their hands and rudimentary tools like spoons.

Just 12 prisoners managed to make it through the escape tunnel to the forest, with 11 surviving to recount constructing the passageway and squeezing through it to avoid massacre. But until Freund’s team found the tunnel, there hadn’t been physical evidence to reinforce the survivors’ accounts.

More than 100,000 people died at Ponar, bullet by bullet, including 70,000 Jews, as well as Poles and Russians. The tunnel’s discovery sheds light on another piece of the story: the tenacity and hope some prisoners still managed to harbor in the most unspeakable circumstances.

«We’re using science to help write or rewrite history,» Reeder says.

Electrical resistivity tomography images the ground’s subsurface by assessing the transition of electrical charges at various depths. Because different materials conduct electricity in different ways, the ERT instrument can delineate between stone, sand, clay, organic material or open voids buried underground. It reports findings back to an attached monitor and, after processing the information with ERT-specific software, generates images that outline the shape of the underground finds.

«There’s nothing it cannot locate,» Freund says.

In July, 21-year-old Christopher Newport University undergraduate Mikaela Martínez Dettinger stood in Krasinskich Park and watched tangible pieces of the past pulled from the ground attached to electricity-conducting metal ERT stakes as passersby rode their bikes and pushed strollers in the afternoon heat.

«The tips of [the stakes] were all stained terracotta orange, and it was because we had literally been hammering them into the rubble of the Warsaw Ghetto factory that was right beneath our feet,» says Martínez Dettinger, a senior studying political science, philosophy and comparative religion who joined Freund in Poland as a research intern this summer.

«I never want to make it sound like I know what it would have been like to be in [ghetto inhabitants’] shoes,» Martínez Dettinger added, «but you can feel in your heart the sorrow or the feelings of anger or persistence these people must have felt.»

Martínez Dettinger, who wants to pursue a career in archaeology, worries her generation doesn’t know enough about Holocaust horrors. She cites a 2020 national survey of Holocaust awareness among American millennials and members of Gen Z from 50 states. Of all survey respondents, 63% didn’t know 6 million Jews were murdered and 36% thought «2 million or fewer Jews» were killed. Of those polled, 48% couldn’t name a single ghetto or concentration camp.

This summer, visiting the most notorious of those camps, Auschwitz, Martínez Dettinger walked the path that prisoners took to the gas chambers where they took their last breaths. And she toured warehouses where prisoners sorted fellow inmates’ suitcases and other personal effects. As she stepped off a gravel path onto the floor of one warehouse, she noticed the sound of her footsteps changing and realized she was standing on hundreds of buttons that had once fastened shirts, possibly like the one she was wearing that day.

With most Holocaust survivors now in their 80s and 90s, fewer and fewer are alive to share their memories. Holocaust deniers distort the facts of the mass extermination or claim it never happened at all. Earlier this month, a Texas school district came under fire after an administrator discussed with teachers the potential need to offer «opposing» views of the Holocaust, based on a new state law that requires teachers to present multiple perspectives when covering «widely debated and currently controversial» issues.

«The science helps prove if atrocities have taken place and can be used to demonstrate war crimes,» says Alastair McClymont, a Calgary-based geophysicist and environmental consultant who joined the Ponar excavation in 2016 and just returned home from working on the Warsaw dig. «Holocaust education helps young people understand how important it is to protect human rights and keep democracies from failing.»

«May this treasure end up in good hands, may it live to see better times. May it alarm and alert the world to what happened,» 19-year-old Dawid Graber, one of the Jewish volunteers who hid the Ringelblum Archive, wrote in his last will and testament.

The Ringelblum Archive isn’t the only trove of eyewitness testimony to survive the Holocaust, but it’s considered the most comprehensive, valuable chronicle of Jewish life in occupied Poland, and a vital piece in the history of Jewish resistance. UNESCO included the archive in its Memory of the World register, alongside the original manuscripts of composer Frederic Chopin and writings by astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus.

Sealed off in November 1940, the Warsaw Ghetto confined more than 350,000 Jews, about 30% of the city’s population, into 2.4% of the city’s total area, or about 1.3 square miles. German SS and police forces liquidated the ghetto in May 1943 following the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a monthlong armed revolt of Jewish ghetto residents trying to prevent their deportation to death camps.

Before the ghetto’s obliteration, the archivists — a group code-named Oyneg Shabes («Sabbath pleasure») — strategically hid the archive, divided in three parts to increase the chance at least some of the documents might survive. They also transmitted to the Polish underground all the information they’d recorded about deportations and murders. The underground smuggled the materials out of the country so the free world could learn first-hand of the horrors taking place.

But as Warsaw was rebuilt post-war, some city maps shifted, and that has complicated the search for the archive’s missing piece.

Using subsurface mapping techniques, Freund’s team surmised that the wartime location of the brushmaker’s shop at 34 Świętojerska Street doesn’t correspond with the modern-day 34 Świętojerska Street, where the Chinese embassy now stands — and where another team using traditional archaeology methods already tried, unsuccessfully, to find the missing part of the archive. The geoscientists concluded the old shop can now be found across the street beneath Krasinskich Park, countering long-held assumptions about the best place to search for the lost section of the archive.

«We solved an 80-year-old mystery,» Freund says.

At the end of one long workday in the park this summer, Martínez Dettinger found Freund sitting on an equipment bin, staring transfixed at a section of grass with pink flags stuck in it to indicate scanners had found an object of interest. She asked him a question, but he couldn’t seem to summon the words to answer.

«He could not take his eyes off the piece of grass, and he looked at me and goes, ‘This could be the Ringelblum Archive,'» Martínez Dettinger recalls. «It felt like a moment out of a movie.»

Last week’s excavation might not have produced the cinematic scene the team envisioned, at least not yet. But they hope the Polish government will issue further permits so they can excavate more of the area they’ve identified as the former 34 Świętojerska Street.

«What we were unable to cry and shriek out to the world, we buried in the ground,» the young Dawid Graber wrote. Now that Freund’s team has pinpointed the original location of the brushmaker’s shop, they’re determined to make more silenced voices heard.

«The work,» Freund says, «will continue.»

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Technologies

Today’s NYT Connections: Sports Edition Hints and Answers for Feb. 4, #499

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for Feb. 4, No. 499.

Looking for the most recent regular Connections answers? Click here for today’s Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle and Strands puzzles.

Today’s Connections: Sports Edition is a tough one. One of the words —«fronton» — might not be known to all the people who attempt the puzzle. There’s also a heavy focus on one specific team, which can be tough if you don’t know that roster well. If today’s puzzle has you stuck but you still want to crack it, keep reading for hints and answers.

Connections: Sports Edition is published by The Athletic, the subscription-based sports journalism site owned by The Times. It doesn’t appear in the NYT Games app, but it does in The Athletic’s own app. Or you can play it for free online.

Read more: NYT Connections: Sports Edition Puzzle Comes Out of Beta

Hints for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Here are four hints for the groupings in today’s Connections: Sports Edition puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.

Yellow group hint: Nice victory!

Green group hint: I’ll give you that guy for this guy.

Blue group hint: Where to play.

Purple group hint: Florida hoops.

Answers for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Yellow group: Win smoothly.

Green group: Fantasy sports trade options.

Blue group: Areas of play, in different sports.

Purple group: Members of the Orlando Magic.

Read more: Wordle Cheat Sheet: Here Are the Most Popular Letters Used in English Words

What are today’s Connections: Sports Edition answers?

The yellow words in today’s Connections

The theme is win smoothly. The four answers are breeze, coast, cruise and waltz.

The green words in today’s Connections

The theme is fantasy sports trade options. The four answers are accept, counter, propose and reject.

The blue words in today’s Connections

The theme is areas of play, in different sports. The four answers are course, court, fronton and rink.

The purple words in today’s Connections

The theme is members of the Orlando Magic. The four answers are Banchero, Bane, Black and Suggs.

Toughest Connections: Sports Edition categories

The Connections: Sports Edition puzzle can be tough, but it really depends on which sports you know the most about. My husband aces anything having to do with Formula 1, my best friend is a hockey buff, and I can answer any question about Minnesota teams.

That said, it’s hard to pick the toughest Connections categories, but here are some I found exceptionally mind-blowing.

#1: Serie A Clubs. Answers: Atalanta, Juventus, Lazio, Roma.

#2: WNBA MVPs. Answers: Catchings, Delle Donne, Fowles and Stewart.

#3: Premier League team nicknames. Answers: Bees, Cherries, Foxes and Hammers.

#4: Homophones of NBA player names. Answers: Barns, Connect, Heart and Hero.

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Technologies

Xbox Cloud Gaming Ad-Supported Tier: When Does It Start, How Much Will It Cost and More

Ads could remove the sting of Xbox Game Pass price hikes, but will it be worth it?

Xbox Cloud Gaming is one of the key selling points of Xbox Game Pass, and it generally works well. The service lets gamers stream Xbox titles to a wide range of devices, including phones, tablets, handhelds and select smart TVs from Samsung, LG and Hisense. However, following the Xbox Game Pass price increase from November, streaming alone may not be enough to keep some subscribers on board, which is where an ad-supported tier could come into play.

Microsoft confirmed the existence of an ad-supported tier last year but has not shared details on when it will launch or what it will include. New screenshots shared by players suggest the tier may be arriving soon, though questions remain about how it will work and what limitations it may have.

Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.

When will the Xbox Cloud Gaming ad-supported tier launch? 

Microsoft hasn’t made an official announcement yet, but it’s expected to roll out sometime this year, according to Windows Central. Last month, some gamers saw a different loading screen for Xbox Cloud Gaming with a message saying «1 hour of ad-supported play time per session,» which would point to the ads coming soon. 

How much will the Xbox Cloud Gaming ad-supported tier cost? 

In October, Microsoft confirmed it was internally testing the ad-supported tier, and at the time, said it would be free. Going by the load screen message I mentioned earlier, there will likely be a limit on how long people can play on the tier and during internal testing, players would have to watch a 2-minute ad. 

What games will be available on the ad-supported tier? 

Rumors about the internal testing suggested players would only have access to certain games for free, but the question is, which ones? Microsoft has a significant number of games available to stream, whether it’s purchased digital games or those available with an Xbox Game Pass subscription. Microsoft may allow all the digital games in a player’s library to be streamed and might make a few games available for free on a weekly or monthly basis, similar to the Free Play Days games. 

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Technologies

My Experience With United’s Starlink Service: How All In-Flight Wi-Fi Should Be

No need to load up devices with movies on long flights. You can stream them — and even live events — on Starlink-equipped United flights.

If I weren’t buckled into a seat, I might not have noticed that I was using in-flight Wi-Fi. When it came to working on my laptop and streaming movies on my phone and tablet, I could have been on my broadband at home.

But instead I was 30,000 feet up connected to Starlink Wi-Fi, on a United Airlines flight between Chicago and Minneapolis and thinking back to all the times I’d fought with expensive, slow, annoying internet access on planes. The ginger ale offered by a friendly attendant was a nice addition, too.

This experience was a demonstration flight on United’s first mainline Boeing 737-800 aircraft to be outfitted with the new satellite hardware. United now offers Starlink Wi-Fi service on 25% of its fleet, which includes 300 regional aircraft and dozens of mainline planes during 2025. It’s aiming to install the low-profile technology on up to 500 aircraft by the end of 2026.

At a time when our phones and smartwatches have satellite connectivity options — helping us reach emergency responders or send text messages when we’re out of range of a cell signal — Starlink and United are providing travelers with an upgraded convenience. What’s more, we’re getting in-flight Wi-Fi with speeds and connectivity that rival what we experience at home or the office.

Air travel presents a conundrum: If you need Wi-Fi in the air and it’s not working, you’re cooked. There’s no stepping out to a coffee shop hotspot or rebooting your home router. In-flight Wi-Fi has improved over the years, but it still feels risky whether it will work well or at all. And you don’t discover that until you’re already in the air.

The plane I traveled on isn’t the first United aircraft carrying Starlink’s satellite Wi-Fi equipment. United began outfitting many of its regional Embraer E175 jets in March after signing a deal with Starlink’s parent company, SpaceX, last year. Although it’s the inaugural United mainline aircraft, Hawaiian Airlines got the jump late last year when it outfitted its Airbus planes with the technology.

The Boeing 737-800 I flew on went into active service the next day, starting with a leg from Houston to Fort Lauderdale. Over the coming months, United expects to outfit approximately 15 mainline Boeing 737-800 planes per month with Starlink antennas.

United is offering Starlink Wi-Fi access free to United MileagePlus members. The Standard Wi-Fi option costs $8 or 1,600 miles for MileagePlus members, or $10 for everybody else. Subscriptions for frequent travelers start at $49 a month (or 7,500 miles).

In-flight Wi-Fi is all about the experience

Believe me, I want to talk about speeds and bandwidth and what a Starlink connection could mean for getting work done or being entertained in the air. But it all starts with getting connected, and too often, that experience sucks.

On my flight from Seattle to Chicago the day before my demo, United’s Standard Wi-Fi took nearly an hour to connect to any of my devices. (United uses different internet providers depending on the aircraft and operating area, and this flight was connected by satellite internet provider ViaSat.) Once the main menu page loaded, selecting most options, including «sign in» and «free messaging,» timed out with an error that there was no network connection. 

That cut into my work time, but more importantly, it was incredibly frustrating. Many of us look forward to focused time on a flight to get things done without interruptions, and more frustration is the last thing we want to add to our air travel experience.

Two experiences stood out when I was on the Starlink-equipped plane. First, it operates gate-to-gate, so you can connect on your phone or tablet (laptops still need to be put away during takeoff) as soon as you get settled in your seat. After we’d landed and were taxiing back to the gate, I forgot that I was still connected through Starlink. 

For almost as long as I’ve owned a cellphone, wheels-down meant it’s time to switch off Airplane mode and embrace the familiar connection of local cellular.

Second, the few sign-on steps I had to go through weren’t any more onerous than getting on a public cafe or hotel Wi-Fi network. After connecting to the United Wi-FI network, a portal window opened with a trio of screens explaining how great the new service is (you can skip them) and a field to enter my United MileagePlus account and password.

Oh, and then there’s a video ad, which is 15 seconds or less. (If you’ve been reading so far and thinking, «Wait, it can’t really be free, can it?» there’s your answer.) That ad turns out to be important: You aren’t connected until the video completes.

I was impatient and dismissed the ad on my laptop, which led to some trouble getting connected. Another journalist on the flight mentioned that he encountered the same situation, and the friendly United tech staff on the flight were curious whether the ad had played when they helped me diagnose the issue. I also emptied my browser caches and told the computer to forget the Wi-Fi network, essentially starting me from scratch.

As far as I can tell, no one else on the flight experienced this problem, but it’s safe to say there could have been some prelaunch bugs being worked out. United’s tech support won’t be on hand for regular flights, which is why one of them mentioned they were trying to iron out any points where flyers might run into difficulty.

Once connected, I could concentrate on trying to use as much bandwidth as possible and look outside occasionally since United scheduled this flight on a beautiful autumn day (instead of bringing everyone to Chicago in the dead of winter).

How Starlink Wi-Fi performed

The hardware that makes this happen is a pair of low-profile 500Mbps antennas mounted on the top of the fuselage. Unlike current units on planes offering standard Wi-Fi, the antennas are essentially exposed to communicate with the network of nearly 8,000 Starlink satellites operating in low Earth orbit (LEO), or about 350 miles in altitude. 

To compare, the antenna module on a non-Starlink-equipped United plane parked at the next gate was much larger to shield its antennas, which need to adjust their angles during flight to talk to high-altitude satellites about 22,000 miles up.

In the time it takes a signal to go from a plane to high-altitude satellites, the signal can round-trip the distance between an aircraft and the Starlink satellites 70 times, according to Mara Palcisco, United Airlines vice president of engineering and reliability. 

(This is also different from T-Satellite, the Starlink-powered satellite technology offered by T-Mobile. T-Satellite uses a separate collection of satellites to work with phones using a portion of the cellular spectrum.)

What does that mean in terms of the internet experience? Honestly, I’d think I was at home on my high-speed fiber internet if not for the cabin noise and the occasional tight banking turn. I streamed the (underrated, in my opinion) movie Cowboys & Aliens over Netflix on my iPad, played one of United’s available videos in a window on my MacBook Pro and watched YouTube videos on my iPhone.

Also, because this was a special flight for the press and several United employees, I initiated a video call with two colleagues. Usually, video and voice calls are not allowed — in fact, they’re illegal — and United makes a point of telling customers that they shouldn’t engage in any behavior that disturbs the people around them, including calls, listening to audio without headphones or watching media that would make others uncomfortable. You can watch a live call, but technically not talk on one, and that’s behavior flight attendants will have to enforce.

In this instance, we were encouraged to go ahead, so I had a hard-to-hear video conference with CNET managing editor Patrick Holland and senior reporter David Lumb (maybe it’s time to invest in a pair of AirPods Pro 3). The video quality was stellar — no, I’m not making a Starlink pun, I promise — even better than a few recent calls we’ve had in our respective offices. A FaceTime call with a friend was similar: clear, sharp video with no telltale streaming artifacts.

But let’s get to numbers. It’s always a nerd joy to go to Speedtest.net or run the Speedtest app and be surprised at the numbers it sends back. I consistently got around 250Mbps of download speed and anywhere from 25Mbps to 65Mbps upload speed. I saw that on all of my devices: iPhone 17 Pro, M1 iPad Pro and a 2021 MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro chip.

To put that into perspective, SpaceX says that Starlink residential internet gets up to 350Mbps download speeds, depending on location. According to an Ookla report, Starlink’s median performance is 105Mbps download, 15Mbps upload and 45ms latency. CNET senior writer Joe Supan saw similar performance when recently testing the Starlink Mini in Washington’s North Cascades mountains. (Disclosure: CNET’s parent company, Ziff Davis, also owns Ookla.)

To make what now looks like an unfair comparison, when I did get United’s standard Wi-Fi access the night before (which I paid $8 for), my speeds were 9.65Mbps down and 1.03Mbps up. Yes, those decimal points are in the correct places.

Streaming video, whether watching in-flight movies, catching up on a series on Netflix or Apple TV or watching live sports, will undoubtedly become more prevalent on flights when this level of bandwidth is available. In fact, when I chatted during the flight with Grant Milstead, United vice president of digital technology, I asked whether the in-flight videos available via United’s portal were cached on a server aboard the plane. (On my flight the previous night, I could view those even when an internet connection was elusive.) 

He said that for mainline flights, which carry roughly 170 passengers, the company would still maintain those local servers for redundancy. But the regional Embraer E175 jets, the first of United’s fleet to be outfitted with the Starlink technology, rely on streamed content with no local backup. Given that the video and audio quality, from my perspective, was indistinguishable from broadband at home, that doesn’t come as a surprise.

While waiting for my trip back home (on a plane not equipped with Starlink Wi-Fi), I pondered my lasting impression of this assignment, which had me fly to Chicago, circle above Wisconsin for a couple of hours and then fly back to Seattle. 

On my flight with Starlink Wi-Fi, I had uncompromised internet access. I wasn’t thinking about latency, artifacts or whether I was getting my $8 worth. I could work, watch videos, play live video games and just be bothered with any of the usual complications. And that was the best experience.

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