UNLESS IT WILL BE RECORDED, IT WILL NEVER BE KNOWN TO THE WORLD AT LARGE, THE UNIQUE POSITION OF THE JEWISH PARTISANS WAS THAT WE DIDN'T ONLY HAVE TO FIGHT THE ENEMY, BUT WE HAD TO FIGHT AND BE CAREFUL, LOOKING SIDEWAYS AND BACKWARDS...THERE WAS A MOTTO, "THE GERMANS KILL THE JEWS IN THE CITIES, WE KILL THE GERMANS IN THE FORESTS.
LITMAN LITOW, JEWISH PARTISAN IN POLISH AND RUSSIAN FORESTS

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THE RIGHTEOUS JEWISH PARTISANS

                                                       

PARTISAN: a member of a group of armed civilians engaged in harassing an enemy within an occupied territory during World War II

                    

Since the end of WWII, the subject of Jewish resistance has been an enigmatic one.  Volumes of scholarly works have been written, documenting the accounts of widespread resistance and the victories the resisters gained against the Nazis.  Yet the prevailing historical analysis is that Jewish resistance was at its best, small in number and ineffective, and at its worst, wrong and detrimental to the rest of the European Jewish population.  The particular view that “Jews went like lambs to the slaughter” has been aided by the omission in history books of the existence and prevalence of the Jewish resistance movement.  That omission is a disservice to Jews and non Jews alike. With knowledge of the experiences of Jews who did fight back, we gain a greater comprehension of the circumstances of the many Jews who could not.  


WHO EXACLTY WERE THE JEWISH PARTISANS?

There are estimates of up to 100,000 Jewish partisans living and fighting in the forests of Europe during the war.  
The Jewish partisans were primarily young, working class Jews who escaped the Ghettos.  Some did flee to the forests before they were rounded up by the Nazis.  They existed wherever the Nazis existed but primarily in the east:  from the Ukraine to Yugoslavia to Romania, throughout Poland, Belarus and what today is Lithuania.  

WHY DO WE NOT KNOW ABOUT THE JEWISH PARTISANS?

Considering the volumes upon volumes of books, essays, documentaries, fictionalized accounts, plays, musicals, lectures, graphic novels and puppet shows about the Holocaust, there exists a staggering lack of information about the Jewish resistance fighters.  
Many reasons abound why the subject is relatively unknown.  There’s the simple fact that after the war, people wanted to forget about it.  Survivors didn’t speak of it and often times, children of the partisans didn’t know what their parents did until they were in old age.  
Partisans were also directly or indirectly associated with the Red army or the Polish Communist forces or other Left Wing affiliation.  Many of these partisans came to the U.S. just in time for McCarthyism and traded their silence on their Holocaust experiences for patriotism and appreciation of their new homeland. 

Perhaps a philosophical historical approach to understanding the silence on the subject is more telling.  
Going back to the 19th century, the Jews of Eastern Europe were a people who lived among others who were often hostile towards them.  In order to get along, one of the strategies was to quietly accept, negotiate, beg, but definitely not to show any sort of militancy and aggressiveness towards their neighbors.  The Jews' desire to get along as peacefully as possible, later translated to a stereotype that Jews are a passive, intellectual and gentle people who are happy to accept little and put up with a lot.  
This view is one that Jews as well as non Jews perpetuate and it’s  full of complications.  While it’s not true that Jews ‘went like sheep to the slaughter’, the fact that we think they did is a common trope.  

WHY IS THIS VIEW INSISTED UPON?

A couple of reasons can be given.  After the war many American Jews felt both guilty by their own inaction and ashamed by what they saw in the presumed passivity of the European Jews.  To hear about those who fought back then invokes the question ‘Why didn’t they all fight back?’  However the real question should be:  Given all the mitigating circumstances and everything against them, how did so many Jews manage to fight back?  
Yet we fail to see the events of that time in that manner.
Several partisans themselves have stated another reason:  To maintain a victim status, to be perceived as gentle, as passive, as hapless, has become a politically useful image.



                                  “AFTER THE WAR, THE WORLD STARTED LOOKING
                                   AT THE JEWS AS MARTYRS.  AND HERE COMES A JEW
                                   WHO SAYS HE FOUGHT.  THAT'S NOT GOOD.  
                                   NO ONE WANTED TO TALK TO ME AT ALL.  
                                   BECAUSE I KILLED.  YOU UNDERSTAND."
                                   SAM GRUBER, JEWISH PARTISAN IN RUSSIAN FOREST

SOME PARTISAN BACKGROUND

After the Partisans escaped and fled to the forests, they did all they could to obtain weapons off of dead and living German and their allied soldiers.  Once they secured weapons they were able to find a semi regular food supply, often invading homes of the anti semites living in the area. They took clothes off of dead soldiers, sometimes stuffing the shoes to make them fit properly, a necessity when traveling through the forests for such distances.  Over time their attention shifted from self preservation to actively fighting back against the Nazis.  Bands of roving partisan groups, or "otriads", working under the cover of night and with detailed knowledge of the forest area, succeeded in destroying crucial Nazi bases and killing battalions of Nazi soldiers.

While some Jewish partisan groups limited participation exclusively to armed and able men, a few, like the Bielski and Zorin detachments of the Nalibocka Forest in Belorussia, maintained an open door policy for all Jews.  The Zorin detachment, under the commandment of Simcha Zorin, a loyal communist, consisted of approximately 600 Jews, many from the Minsk area.
The Bielski partisans, led by the charismatic Tuvia Bielski, made up the largest Jewish group.  Consisting of roughly 1,200 Jewish women, men and children, this otriad, was notable for accepting any Jew who wished to join, including the young, the old, the unarmed and the informed.  Remarkably, the group suffered only an estimated 55 lives lost during the war.  According to Dr. Nechama Tec, a leading scholar in the resistance movement, with a 5% loss to the total group, the casualties the Bielskis endured is much lower than other partisan units, both Jewish and non Jewish.  It is estimated that 53% of the Jewish partisans in Lithuania perished and 33% of the Jews who participated in Russian detachments also died.  From 1942 to 1944, the attrition rate of Russian partisans is estimated to be roughly 40%. 
​It’s been attributed to the Bielskis’ “open door” policy as responsible for the group’s survival rate.  Its’ members benefited from a safety in numbers, as well as from the organized variety of useful skills retained in the group.  The concentration of Jews in the Bielski unit also reduced the sense of extreme isolation that many partisans experienced.  Jewish partisans in Russian and Polish units often had to hide their identity as Jews in order to survive.  And just as inmates of the death camps were not necessarily aware of the existence of Jewish partisans, due to the lack of outside news partisans did not know the extent of the destruction and existence of the death camps.  

                                     WE HAD NO WAY OF KNOWING WHAT WAS                                                         HAPPENING WITH THE WAR IN A WIDER CONTEXT                                             ...IT WAS DIFFICULT TO SEE ANY LONG-TERM                                                     POSSIBILITIES OTHER THAN DEATH AT GERMAN                                               HANDS.  HOW LONG COULD WE EXPECT
                                     TO LIVE BY STEALING FOOD FROM MAINLY HOSTILE                                         FARMS? ...BUT WE WERE JEWS WHO WERE STILL                                               ALIVE AND THAT WAS SOMETHING.  IT WAS ENOUGH                                         AT LEAST, TO PUSH US FROM ONE DAY TO THE NEXT.
                                     JACK SUTIN, JEWISH PARTISAN
                                     IN THE POLISH-RUSSIAN FOREST

The questions most frequently asked about the Holocaust and the European Jews        who suffered are:
  Why didn't the victims escape?
  Why didn't they rebel?
  Why didn't they avoid capture?
As Eli Wiesel wrote, "The question is not why did the Jews not fight, but how so many of them did.  Tormented, beaten, starved, where did they find the strength-spiritual and physical-to resist?"


                                     TOO MANY COMRADES, FRIENDS AND FIGHTERS                                                 PERISHED IN THE STRUGGLE, AND IN TELLING THIS                                         STORY I BELIEVE I AM FULFILLING THEIR DYING                                               WISH THAT THEIR SUFFERINGS SHOULD NOT BE                                               FORGOTTEN.
                                     SAM GRUBER, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE                                                         FEDERATION OF FORMER JEWISH FIGHTERS, IN                                                 INTERVIEW






To find out more about the Jewish Resistance, please contact us at:
 [email protected]
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