The Cave (working title)

What if your life depended on you descending into a dank and pitch black underground cave, with no gear, not for a day, not for a week...but possibly for years? Could you survive? THE CAVE is the story of the longest ever-recorded uninterrupted underground survival in human history.

With no place safe left to go, 38 people silently slid down a muddy hole in the ground to escape the Nazis as they annihilated the Jews of Southwestern Ukraine. While the war raged above their heads, five Jewish families survived for 527 days, in two massive cave systems. It was an incredibly hostile environment, but it became a refuge from the slaughter above ground. The women, older men, and children never left the cave. The heroes were teenage boys and young men in their 20s who ventured out to collect food, chop firewood, and gather essential supplies, putting their lives on the line every time they left the cave. Theirs is a survival story of heart-stopping heroic acts and youthful ingenuity. What they accomplished is unimaginable: in the region that was the single most dangerous place on earth to be a Jew, every single person, from grandparents down to a one-year-old baby, emerged alive. This summer, four of those young heroes, now in their 70s and 80s, will journey back to Ukraine with their grandchildren to enter THE CAVE for the very first time in 66 years.

Note: unedited footage of the caving team.

How the story was discovered

New York State investigator and well-known cave explorer, Chris Nicola, uncovered this story in the mid 1990s when he, along with a group of elite Ukrainian cavers, were mapping Ozernaja (or Blue Lakes Cave). It is the 11th longest and 2nd largest gypsum cave system in the world. Nicola, an Indiana Jones-type character with a New York accent, stumbled upon objects left by the survivors ---buttons, shoes, a grinding stone, even a house key. He spent the next seven years trying to figure out if vague rumors were true – that with no gear or training, a group of desperate people had lived in this cave for months on end, and survived. Perhaps some still remained to tell their tale. When Nicola finally did confirm the story’s authenticity, it turned out that more than a dozen survivors were still alive, one of them lived only 15 miles away.

Chris Nicola will be the survivors’ guide when they return to the cave this summer. He will also be doing further archeological research in Blue Lakes Cave with one of the survivor’s grandsons, who has become a cave explorer, too. Chris Nicola’s Caving website.

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