NARRATOR: They're watching you.
More than 6,000 satellites circle the Earth.
Every day, they uncover new, mysterious phenomena
that defy explanation.
Strange symbols in the land of the Vikings.
It's a massive game changer in human prehistory.
NARRATOR: The river of blood.
It looks like somebody took a knife
and sliced open the Earth.
NARRATOR: And Canada's secret Cold War code.
Nothing like it had ever been made before.
NARRATOR: Baffling phenomena, mysteries from space.
What on Earth are they?
[theme music playing]
Spring 2020.
Aerial archaeologists take to the skies over
the fjords and mountains of northern Norway.
As an onboard laser scans the frozen landscape,
it uncovers a mystery hidden beneath the snow.
RUBEN: This is not something you'd ordinarily see.
It almost looks like machine gun fire on the land.
To see a series of dots
in this landscape is very strange.
It's very hard to know what they mean
and why they're there.
NARRATOR: The weird marks are located in
the county of Finnmark,
the northernmost point in continental Europe.
Closer analysis reveals they appear to
be a line of pits or holes.
This part of Norway up in the Arctic Circle has
got to be one of the most remote areas on Earth.
So what could have made these holes
is really something of a mystery.
NARRATOR: Archaeologist Karen Bellinger
studies the image in more detail.
Given the remote location, and knowing
the people who lived in this area,
the only explanation I can think of for these
giant pits is that they were involved in hunting.
NARRATOR: Investigations on the ground
confirm that the holes are pit traps.
They are the legacy of an extraordinary group of people
who have thrived in this brutal landscape
for thousands of years.
BELLINGER: This image shows both their real ingenuity and grit,
but also the absolute essential nature of being able
to hunt effectively.
It was a matter of life and death.
NARRATOR: Humans first arrive in Scandinavia around
12,000 years ago, after the last Ice Age.
They face a daily battle for survival as they chase
new lands revealed by the receding glaciers
and ice sheets.
RUBEN: This is a very harsh region to call home.
You don't have a lot of opportunity
for agriculture in this really cold climate.
HUNT: Your summer is very short,
so you're really going to be limited to one source of food,
and that's protein.
NARRATOR: The nomadic tribes become experts
in hunting megafauna, like mammoths.
But the traps in the image were
built to capture a very different prey.
Let's put it this way --
if you're gonna spend the time and effort to dig 50 holes
using primitive tools,
you want more than one animal.
You want to capture a lot of animals.
I'm left with one conclusion -- these are reindeer
hunting pits.
NARRATOR: Some of the reindeer pits in
the image were built during the Stone Age.
This suggests they were once used
by the oldest surviving Norwegian tribe, the Sami.
BELLINGER: The Sami are an incredibly resourceful people.
They've managed to survive, even to thrive, in this really
harsh environment
where they've developed an entire economy and lifestyle
around hunting reindeer herds.
NARRATOR: There are around 80,000 Sami people
living in Scandinavia.
They manage herds of up to 5,000 reindeer
as they migrate between winter and summer pastures.
HUNT: The Sami people are the best
reindeer herders in all of the world.
RUBEN: The Sami have lived alongside reindeer
for thousands of years.
The ability to hunt animals like this that could sustain
so many people for so long
was crucial to the survival of the Sami.
NARRATOR: The 21st century Sami people rely on snowmobiles
and stun guns to corral and kill their animals.
But their ancestors faced very different challenges.
HORTON: Reindeers are extremely difficult to hunt.
They are very fast, and certainly in the Stone Age,
we're talking obviously stone tools
to stalk and then attack a weakened animal that had moved
apart from the herd.
NARRATOR: To trap and slaughter multiple animals,
the prehistoric Sami people construct holes lined
with wood and camouflaged with birch and moss.
The pits are deep enough that an animal can't jump out
or climb out, and if their legs aren't broken on impact,
there are sharp stakes inside that would impale the animals.
NARRATOR: The tribes make their traps along known reindeer
migration routes,
increasing the likelihood of successful hunts.
When you look at the location of the holes in the image,
they're located in what you might call strategic spots.
If you have enough based out in an arc,
some of them are bound to fall in the pits
NARRATOR: For the Sami,
each reindeer is a walking superstore of supplies.
Everything from the bones to the blood is
used to sustain them through the arctic winter.
They've used every possible bit of that animal inside
and out -- for clothing,
for shelter, for tools, you name it.
HORTON: For the Sami, the reindeers
were absolutely critical.
So without these pits, they probably
couldn't have survived in this hostile environment.
NARRATOR: Analysts speculate that hunting herds rather than
single animals doesn't just provide
Stone Age tribes with the food and supplies
they need to survive.
It also frees up resources
to make other technological advances,
accelerating human evolution.
JANULIS: Large-scale trapping done cooperatively to save food
for winter gives you time to do things other than hunt.
It's a massive game changer in human prehistory.
NARRATOR: It appears the pits remain in use
until the 16th century CE,
when advances in reindeer herding mean the Sami
no longer need to rely on seasonal hunting.
Over the following centuries,
they are reclaimed by this frozen landscape,
only to be revealed once more from the skies.
These holes are an incredible example of the ingenuity of
human beings in their battle to survive
in a harsh wilderness.
NARRATOR: Coming up, Spain's weird blood river.
This is a permanent condition of the river -- why?
NARRATOR: And a flying saucer.
MUNOZ: This was pushing the boundaries of
physics itself.
NARRATOR: March 2021.
An orbiting camera passes over
southwestern Spain and captures this image.
RUBEN: The image looks fairly standard,
other than the fact that the river
running through it is completely blood red.
A. MORGAN: This is kind of disturbing to look at.
It looks like somebody took a knife
and sliced open the Earth.
NARRATOR: Elsewhere on Earth, satellites
have uncovered similar red rivers,
the results of toxic spills or industrial accidents.
But this waterway is different.
Normally, a river that runs red does
so for a limited amount of time.
But old satellite images show that
this river has run red for decades.
This is not a one time accident.
This is a permanent condition of the river -- why?
NARRATOR: Analysts consult historic records of the region.
They reveal something intriguing.
The records show that this area was home
to one of the earliest mines on the Earth.
AUERBACH: What we're seeing here is not
pollution as we would understand it.
This river is flowing red with rust.
NARRATOR: The river in the image sits
on the Iberian Pyrite Belt,
a 150-mile-long strip of land rich in mineral reserves.
One of them is a metal that
will help define the course of history.
A. MORGAN: The earliest miners in this area were interested
in it because of its rich deposits of copper,
and you can use copper to make bronze.
The Bronze Age is this critical age of metals, and this
was only possible by finding new sources of copper in
the landscape.
NARRATOR: The first people to mine copper from the river are
the Iberians, in around 3,000 BCE.
Stone tools and weapons are replaced with
ones forged from metal, revolutionizing
agriculture and warfare.
The advent of work in bronze brought greater efficiency
across all classes
of human tools, ranging from knives to spears
to swords to cooking pots.
AUERBACH: Bronze was the strongest metal
that was known at the time,
and since you needed copper to make bronze,
kingdoms or empires that controlled quantities of
copper were going to become
wealthy and powerful as a result.
NARRATOR: Around 2,000 years later,
another metal lures those seeking power and riches to
the site in the image.
Even after the Bronze Age ended, this still remained
a valuable territory,
particularly to the Phoenicians, who were
interested in an entirely
different resource to be found here -- silver.
NARRATOR: The Phoenicians are perhaps the greatest traders
of antiquity.
Silver mined from the red river plays a vital role
in establishing an economic empire that thrives for
hundreds of years.
The Venetians were incredible seafarers,
and they plied their goods
the length and breadth of the Mediterranean.
BELLINGER: There's a legend that says that the Phoenician trade
in silver was so huge from this mine,
that when their boats were full of silver,
they would dispose of their old anchors
and craft new ones of silver.
NARRATOR: Following the Phoenicians,
the Romans extract more
riches from the site seen from space,
burrowing shafts 450 feet deep into the bedrock.
This release is reddish metal particles into its waters,
but it doesn't fully explain their lava-like color.
ORWOLL: The bedrock and all of that land surrounding the river
is rich in metal sulfides, and as they've been
doing all of this mining,
it's been getting churned up and then released
into the river.
NARRATOR: Metal sulfides contain the element sulfur.
As they leach into the river,
they oxidize, forming sulfuric acid,
meaning the waters here have the same pH level as vinegar.
RUBEN: In a river this acidic, most life would not thrive,
but there's a type of bacteria that eats sulfur
that does very well here.
AUERBACH: Those sulfides fed sulfide-eating bacteria,
and one of the byproducts of that process
is ferric iron, which,
when encountering water, turns it red.
NARRATOR: In 1492, Christopher Columbus
set sail from the mouth
of the river on his voyage to the New World.
Four centuries later, its waters turn an even more
vibrant red when
the most powerful empire of the era acquires the rights to
operate a mine there.
In the 19th century, this was
the site of a huge British copper mine.
The British mined fast quantities of copper
and utterly trashed the environment in the process.
NARRATOR: Under British ownership, the river becomes
the world's leading producer of copper.
During their eight decades here,
the mining operation creates vast amounts of
sulfurous fumes,
triggering clouds of acid rain,
which kill around half a million trees nearby.
HORTON: They employed the most destructive machinery that was
available at the time to create
huge, opencast mines to take out the ore,
which could then be smelted into copper.
The scale of this environmental destruction
means that metals and sulfides
continue to seep into the river to this day,
creating a ribbon of red that stretches for dozens of miles,
a 5,000-year-old testament to our plundering of
the natural world, visible from space.
AUERBACH: You hear the phrase bandied about talking about
the damage that human activity does to the environment
as causing the land to bleed -- well, in this image,
in a very real way, it is.
NARRATOR: Coming up, the super jet that never was.
We may be looking at one of Canada's most
monumental failures.
NARRATOR: And journey to the end of the world.
The mission was fraught with danger from the very beginning.
NARRATOR: June 3rd, 2021.
A satellite scans the shores of Lake Ontario, Canada.
KOUROUNIS: There's something very unusual going on
in this wooded part of Canada.
WALTERS: What we can see is this kind of huge ring, which
is marked or built into the ground right by the lake.
NARRATOR: The 300-foot-diameter ring sits in
isolation in a dense patch of woodland.
KOUROUNIS: There's no real indication as to what
or who created this.
It's almost as if this structure
was hidden away from sight.
NARRATOR: Local records suggest that the giant
circle does indeed have a secretive past,
one which charts some of
the most incredible events in 20th century aviation.
It's reckoned that this secluded area was once
the top secret testing facility of a really infamous
military project.
We may be looking at the birthplace of one
of Canada's greatest technological successes,
and, perhaps, one of its most monumental failures.
NARRATOR: The military project has its origins in
the fire-filled skies of World War II.
As part of Allied attempts to outgun the Luftwaffe,
Canada dramatically increases
its aircraft production capabilities.
Going on to manufacture around 16,000 planes
over the course of the conflict.
AUERBACH: Canada manufactured some of
the most iconic war planes,
such as the Lancaster and the Hawker Hurricane.
And as part of that process,
they built up extraordinary expertise in
airplane construction.
MUNOZ: Now, after the war, Canada wanted to capitalize on
that technology to give their country
the upper hand in whatever a post World War II
world would look like.
NARRATOR: In the post World War II years,
one of the greatest dangers Canada faces is long-range
Soviet bombers, whose flight paths
take them over its Arctic territories.
In response, the government tasks its new aviation industry
with designing a plane capable of neutralizing this threat.
There were many complex specifications for the plane.
It had to be able to operate both in the brutal conditions
of the Arctic,
but also be able to fly far enough and fast enough to get
there in the first place.
MORAN: What the government wanted was
extremely sophisticated,
and nothing like it had ever been made before.
NARRATOR: In 1954, the Canadian government partners with Avro
to design its new plane,
a company with a track record of constructing
legendary aircraft.
WALTERS: For my money,
one of Avro's major achievements was the C102 jetliner.
It was Canada's first jet plane, and it was also
responsible for Canada's first
jet fighter, and that, of course,
was the CF-100 Canuck.
NARRATOR: As part of a program code-named Project Y,
the company also builds the Avrocar,
a kind of vertical takeoff flying saucer.
The kind of work that this group was doing was really
pushing the envelope in terms of
design, how aerospace engineering could potentially
work on future platforms, and even
the boundaries of physics itself.
NARRATOR: To tackle the Soviet nuclear threat,
Avro engineers design a plane
that redefines fighter jet capabilities,
one that gives rise to the strange circle seen from space.
The resulting fighter was truly revolutionary.
They called it the Avro Arrow Interceptor,
and the plane was an absolute marvel.
NARRATOR: Production of the Arrow begins in 1955, to
the west of the site in the image.
AUERBACH: They replaced the traditional manual control
system with a new computer-controlled system,
what they now call fly-by-wire, and this was the first time
that that type of control system had been used outside of
experimental aircraft.
MUNOZ: What the Canadians had done here was really kind of put
a marker down of what could be achievable in fighter aircraft
for the future.
NARRATOR: To put the Arrow's supersonic turbojet engines to
the test,
engineers turn to the circular structure in the woods.
MORAN: The engines were put in wheel carts that
were then tethered to a bolt in the middle.
Then they would ignite the engines, and they
would just race around the track at top speed.
MUNOZ: And that way, engineers and scientists could clock
the speed and determine
the power of the engine in sort of
a controlled environment.
NARRATOR: Despite the success of these tests,
as the project rolls on, its costs spiral,
with the budget soaring almost tenfold.
On February 20, 1959,
the government cancels the program.
KOUROUNIS: Despite being so technologically advanced,
the government ordered that all
the Arrows were to be completely dismantled,
basically washing their hands of the entire business.
MUNOZ: It went from cutting-edge technology
to the cutting room floor.
NARRATOR: While the test site is reclaimed by nature,
the plane's story doesn't end there.
NASA subsequently recruits some of the Arrow's
pioneering engineers,
meaning its legacy lives on to this day.
WALTERS: Many of them went on to play fundamental roles
on really key projects, like Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo.
KOUROUNIS: It seems fitting to me how we can use satellites
to look down at these echoes
of an engineering project that planted the seeds
that took man into space.
NARRATOR: Coming up,
Antarctica's extraterrestrial cipher.
This could get us one step closer to
a viable colony on Mars.
NARRATOR: And mystery creatures in the Pacific.
These are navigating in ways we still can't explain.
NARRATOR: March 28, 2022.
A satellite passes over Antarctica -- as it scans
the north easterly edge of this
5.5-million-square-mile land mass,
it captures something weird.
RODRIGUEZ McROBBIE: This is a strange image.
We've got miles and miles of what should be pristine snow,
but instead, we've got this scaly grid pattern.
It's like a giant chessboard
with all of these individual squares.
Some of them look like they're raised above others.
NARRATOR: The weird grid pattern covers around a square mile
of the frozen ground.
WALTERS: Because these squares also uniform,
you know, you have to consider if this is manmade.
If it were manmade, I would have to think that in such
a remote location,
the military would be involved.
NARRATOR: Declassified records seem to support this theory.
AUERBACH: Shortly after the end of the Second World War,
this area becomes home to a secret US military expedition
known as Operation Highjump.
NARRATOR: Operation Highjump begins in late 1946,
when the first of dozens of ships,
aircraft, and almost 5,000 troops arrive in Antarctica.
It is the largest expedition to the continent in history.
The mission was fraught with danger from the very beginning.
Even just landing a plane in the Antarctic
to bring in vital supplies is an immense challenge.
NARRATOR: The military's stated objectives include
training personnel,
testing equipment,
and aerial mapping of the continent.
But some observers claim this is just a cover.
AUERBACH: Very, very little information leaked out about it,
but it was enough to prompt a raft of speculation about it.
Amongst the rumors floating around was that it was
part of an expedition to assault a secret Nazi base.
NARRATOR: As part of the operation,
the military establishes a headquarters on the ice,
code-named Little America.
WALTERS: If this is the remains of Little America,
perhaps this grid is the foundation for where troop
encampments could be placed.
NARRATOR: Local geological records reveal
the shapes have a very different origin.
It's kind of hard to believe looking at this,
but it's actually a natural pattern.
RODRIGUEZ McROBBIE: What we're looking at here is
a rare geological phenomenon called patterned ground.
NARRATOR: Patterned ground is the term
given to strange shapes
that only appear in certain regions of our planet.
Patterned ground is a phenomenon that geologists
still don't understand that well,
but it tends to occur in parts of the world where temperature
fluctuates above and below freezing.
NARRATOR: In summer, temperatures in Antarctica
can reach around 65 degrees Fahrenheit,
but in winter, they can drop to below
-120.
This can cause the ground to shrink,
creating stresses and cracks on the surface.
RODRIGUEZ McROBBIE: The ground cracks just like a dry lake bed.
But then during the warmer months, as some of the surface
snow melts, water can flow into these cracks.
SZULGIT: When that water reaches permafrost level,
it re-freezes, and that creates this wedge of
ice that just gets bigger and bigger and bigger,
forcing these cracks to grow.
NARRATOR: This freeze-thaw process is repeated each year,
slowly creating polygonal shapes on the surface.
WALTERS: Eventually, the ice wedge becomes so big
that it actually pushes up the cracks
and forms of rims we see in the pattern
on the satellite image.
SZULGIT: We're talking about a huge cracking of the Earth
that's taking place over hundreds of years and totally
reshaping this region.
NARRATOR: What intrigues scientists is that this strange
phenomenon doesn't only reform parts of our planet,
it's also reshaping other worlds in the solar system.
NASA scientists have captured images just like
this all across the polar regions of Mars.
NARRATOR: The images were taken above
the northern lowlands of Mars,
an area identified as
a target for possible future colonization.
They could indicate the presence of life-giving
reserves of ice on the Red Planet.
RODRIGUEZ McROBBIE: This patterned ground on Mars
can give us big clues on how much water
that might be under the surface.
Decoding the secrets of this patterned ground
could get us one step closer to a viable colony on Mars.
NARRATOR: An extraterrestrial code from the end of the world,
revealed from space.
Humanity has come so far in its understanding of
the natural world, but every now and then
nature still throws us something that leaves us stunned.
NARRATOR: Coming up,
the mystery of the kamikaze turtles.
You would think it would kill them, so what's going on?
NARRATOR: And the forest of horrors.
What we're seeing is a window into
one of the darkest times in human history.
NARRATOR: Every year, animals in their
countless millions embark on
long migrations to reach new feeding and breeding grounds.
It's only since satellite technology has evolved,
and we've been able to actually
tag these animals that we've started to learn much more
about these incredible journeys.
NARRATOR: Marine biologists are increasingly turning to GPS
technology to track loggerhead turtles,
hoping to shed some light on their extraordinary migrations
across our oceans.
SPICER RICE: These journeys are extremely arduous,
and the animals who are making them
are navigating in ways that, many times, we still
can't explain.
NARRATOR: In 2019, researchers track a group of over 200
loggerheads as they migrate
eastward from Japan to feeding grounds across
the Pacific Ocean.
But as they monitor their movements,
something strange happens.
They tracked a lot of animals, and most of them did
the normal thing,
but a few kind of went off script.
SPICER RICE: This journey took them from their birthplace
in Japan to deep in the Pacific Ocean.
That's normal, but then, they kept going
all the way to Mexico.
NARRATOR: What puzzles scientists is that
as the turtles head to Mexico,
they travel through the Eastern Pacific Barrier,
a frigid stretch of water some 4,000 miles long
and up to seven miles deep.
KERLEY: These turtles need warmth,
they're cold-blooded animals, so they need warm water to keep
them moving across the Pacific.
KAYS: The GPS tracking data is showing that some of
these sea turtles are swimming through water that's so cold,
you would think it would kill them.
So what's going on?
NARRATOR: Roland Kays studies the data in more detail.
One of the possibilities is that the turtles didn't
actually swim through this cold water themselves,
they're riding in a boat, and that would be a bad thing,
because that means that they would have been poached.
NARRATOR: Over the past three decades,
it's estimated that more than a million
turtles have been snatched from the seas,
part of a wildlife trafficking industry worth
up to $23 billion dollars a year.
KAYS: They're snatched from the sea and eaten or sold
on the black market, which given it's an endangered species,
isn't sustainable.
NARRATOR: Other analysts don't think poaching can
explain the strange pattern in the image.
I don't see that this is ship movement, because if we were
looking at ship movement,
I would expect to see very straight lines
working their way across the ocean.
NARRATOR: Further satellite data reveals that the animals
instead benefited from a freak meteorological event
when crossing the Pacific.
SPICER RICE: These baffling turtle journeys are caused by
a strange phenomenon
that's creating these channels of warm waters through
the ocean, almost like highways.
RODRIGUEZ McROBBIE: Normally, the North American
Pacific Coast stays cold,
but this particular migration may have been aided
by an El Nino event.
NARRATOR: An El Nino event is triggered when east
to west trade winds over the Pacific weaken.
This leads to the warmer currents, which
normally travel westward across the ocean,
flipping direction.
When that happens, not only does it mess up the water
temperatures of the Pacific Ocean,
but it changes the weather patterns
around the entire world.
NARRATOR: First detected by sailors in the 1600s,
El Nino events can lead to catastrophic storms,
droughts, and wildfires across the globe,
but it also provides a temporary
haven for the migrating loggerhead turtles.
KAYS: This new corridor of warm water allowed them to keep
going and find feeding grounds off the coast
of Mexico, while the other turtles
that didn't find this had to
truck all the way back across the Pacific to Japan.
NARRATOR: The heating of our planet has also led
to the formation of what's known as "the Blob,"
a 1,000-mile-wide patch of warmer water in the Pacific,
that's a magnet for the cold-blooded turtles.
CERVENY: The sea turtles are gonna say, "Ooh, this is
"much better than what we had previously seen
in this area, and we're gonna move into it."
So the Blob actually changed
the migration routes of the sea turtles.
NARRATOR: What's good news for the turtles
is bad news for other marine life.
The Blob's suffocating waters have killed tens of millions
of birds and fish and fueled toxic algal blooms.
The weird migration pattern revealed from space is,
it seems, a possible harbinger of doom.
SPICER RICE: If these phenomena continue,
the consequences are gonna be much more
complicated than just turtles changing
their migration patterns.
CERVENY: These changes are alarming.
They have implications, not only to the sea life that's
in the Pacific Ocean,
but around the entire world.
NARRATOR: Coming up, the strange structures that
changed history.
WALTERS: It helps to make sure that the atrocities
committed in these very places are never forgotten.
NARRATOR: October 14, 2021.
A satellite scans the city of Krakow in Poland
and capture something out of place.
This image has a really ominous, creepy feel to it.
There are a series of
abandoned structures hidden in these woods.
NARRATOR: The weird structures sit in what appears
to be a giant 800,000-square-foot hole.
It's obviously something quite destructive
that's happened in this area.
RODRIGUEZ McROBBIE: All around this woodland
is a bustling city.
So why has this area just been left to rot?
It's really odd.
NARRATOR: Historic records reveal there is a good reason
why this strange patch of landscape remains untouched
by urban sprawl.
NELSON: What we're seeing in this satellite image is kind of
a window back into one of the darkest times in
human history.
[cannons blasting]
NARRATOR: That history begins on September 1, 1939,
when Hitler's forces sweep into Poland,
plunging the world into a war,
which will claim around 70 million lives.
Poland was always on the front lines of Hitler's ambitions.
It's the centerpiece of his Lebensraum policy,
the policy of living space,
the idea that expansion of German territory was
necessary to the success of the German race.
NARRATOR: To fuel his conquest of Western Europe,
Hitler commandeers many of Poland's industrial facilities,
including the site in the image.
Looking at the records,
this is a Nazi quarry, the Liban Quarry.
And landscape around this place is made up of limestone.
Limestone is a rock that has many uses.
One of those uses is quicklime.
NARRATOR: Quicklime,
made by heating limestone to remove carbon dioxide,
is an important ingredient in steel making.
That means the quarry in the image is vital to Hitler's
war factories, factories that produce
46,000 tanks, 110,000 aircraft,
and over eight million rifles during the conflict.
If you're in a war, and you need to generate weapons,
you're going to need a steady supply of the raw resources
to make these weapons.
NARRATOR: In 1942, the Germans turn
the quarry into a forced labor camp.
Eight hundred men are put to work, taken from
the 25,000 people incarcerated at the nearby
Plaszow concentration camp.
WALTERS: The people working in this place were forced to work.
They were people who had been captured by
the Nazis and then condemned to a life of
backbreaking cruelty.
NARRATOR: Over the course of the war,
the Nazis force around 14 million people to work
in labor camps like Liban.
The working conditions and lack of food and medicine mean
the life expectancy in most
camps is six months.
Being sent to forced labor camp was
effectively a death sentence.
There was no sense of preserving this labor.
There was always plenty more to be brought in, and so
they would have basically been forced to work
until they dropped.
NARRATOR: The Nazis also inflict deep psychological
torture on those working at the site in the image.
As they walk through the quarry,
the prisoners must follow a path paved with
the gravestones of local Jewish people.
Poland, I think, takes the full force of
Nazi hatred and their ideas of racial inferiority.
We see all of the consequences of
that happening right here in the Liban Quarry.
NARRATOR: The quarry remains in use until 1944, when encroaching
Russian troops begin to push Nazi forces out of Poland.
[glass shattering]
After the war, it is abandoned.
But the story of this hellish labor camp doesn't end there.
SPICER RICE: In 1993, the quarry actually takes on a new life,
because Steven Spielberg selects this location as
the place where he will reconstruct Plaszow labor camp
to tell the story of "Schindler's List."
NARRATOR: For the film, Spielberg's team
reconstructs the barracks and watchtowers,
which once housed and terrorized
those working at the quarry.
In the years since, it has become a lasting
memorial to those who perished here all those years ago.
It's a fitting final chapter in the life of this quarry.
This film helps to bring to
light the horrors of places like this
[sobbing quietly]
and helps to make sure that the atrocities committed in
these very places are never forgotten.