Ancient history

The Bielskis, a family of Jewish partisans who fought the Nazis in Poland and Belarus

Collective behavior tends to be gregarious, something that manifests itself in both the aggressive and passive aspects. Some examples of the latter are found in the great massacres caused by wars or genocidal policies, in which the victims seem resigned to their fateful fate. That was precisely one of the characteristics of the Holocaust of the Jews during the Second World War. However, there were no exceptions in which they organized to defend themselves; the insurrection of the Warsaw Ghetto is the best known case but there were more. For example, that of the Bielski partisans.

Bielski was the surname of a Jewish family from the village of Stankiewicze, which currently belongs to Belarus but was part of Poland until its occupation by the Soviet Union in September 1939. It consisted of David and Bella, along with an extraordinarily large offspring. of ten sons and two daughters. Of all of them it is necessary to mention the names of four, Tuvia, Asael, Alexander (also known as Zus) and Aron, because they would be the ones who constituted the aforementioned guerrilla group.

Although they were millers and shopkeepers, there was one with a slightly more restless resume:Tuvia, the third, who during the First World War learned German from the soldiers who fought against the tsarist army, acting as an interpreter, and who in 1927 was part of the Polish Army, going into business after graduating two years later; yes, eventually exercising smuggling. He married Rifka, an older woman with whom he started running a store in Subotniki.

Given his history, the arrival of the Soviets prompted him to move to Lida. He did it alone since his wife refused to follow him and he found a new love:Sonia Warshavsky, whom he married in 1939 after divorcing Rifka. In any case, the flag of the hammer and sickle had also arrived there without causing danger to Tuvia. In fact, it was the opposite because they offered him the appointment of commissioner. The family status improved slightly because the Bielskis became local administrators, although his neighbors, many of them with relatives arrested on political charges, did not see him favorably.

That was how things were, with a certain contained tension, when something happened that was going to alter them even more:on June 22, 1941, the Germans began Operation Barbarossa, that is, the invasion of the USSR, shattering the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact that both sides had signed only to gain time. Germany was able to dedicate four million men to the campaign thanks to the fact that it already controlled more than half of Europe and the rest were either allied or neutral. The first to fall was Soviet Poland, followed by Belarus and the Baltic republics, all in one month.

Tuvia and his brothers were called up but the overwhelming air superiority of the Luftwaffe he swept away all opposition and the defense units were disintegrated. The Bielskis went to their parental home in Stankiewicze and remained there until July, when the fateful Nazi instructions on the Jews arrived. While the expansion of the front to the east continued, the Nazis chose Lida and Novogródek, the closest urban centers to Stankiewicze, to locate a ghetto -one more of the many they established in the region- that would concentrate all the Jews from the vicinity. .

Among them was the Bielski family, the only one of the six from Stankiewicze and who added to their Jewish condition that they sympathized with communism. She was interned in the ghetto, where she remained united until December, when the killings at the hands of the Einsatzgruppen began. (Operative Groups, itinerant squads made up of members of the SS and SD dedicated to murdering Jews, Gypsies and political commissars, although Polish intellectuals and Catholic priests were not spared either).

That same month their parents, David and Bella, were killed, followed by other relatives, in a massacre that claimed 5,000 lives on the 8th. Tuvia, Alexander, Asael and Aron were able to escape and took refuge in the woods, where they would spend the next two years surrendered. to the fight against the murderers of their parents. To do this, they created a small group of partisans with another thirteen escapees plus other volunteers who joined them, reaching about forty troops by the spring of 1942.

Tuvia, whose wife had also died at the hands of the Nazis along with Alexander's (and his son), became the chief more because of charisma and leadership capacity than because of military experience, since he had not passed corporal. However, he knew the environment well and knew how to carry out the first steps of that desperate bet, buying weapons from his former smuggler friends, infiltrating recruiters in the ghettos, etc. It can be deduced from this a strong personality that, according to some testimonies, was guilty of excessive authoritarianism.

Moreover, there were complaints from some subordinates, such as Israel Kessler, to the Soviet commanders because, they said, Tuvia kept gold and jewels contradicting his own orders in this regard; They demanded his arrest and prosecution. The warning was heard and an investigation was carried out that finally not only exonerated him, considering that the money was to purchase weapons, but also executed Kessler for trying to leave the group to form his own. A witness assured that it was Tuvia himself who shot him in the neck and then had the prisoner's grave destroyed.

Later, other stories came to light that cast more shadows on that peculiar leader:some accused him of totally sympathizing with Zionism, something that he, in effect, had done in his youth; others, such as a cousin of Tuvia himself, mentioned inappropriate behavior with new women arriving in the forest, in that they were subjected to a kind of humiliating hazing, entering the camp shelters naked. However, discipline was strict and life was militarized, as befitted the circumstances.

Despite the criticism, that improvised chief managed to get hundreds of people of all ages and both sexes to come to the Naliboki forest, a densely wooded area surrounded by swamps. Most of them were not fit to fight and of a total of 1,236 individuals, only a hundred and a half would participate in the actions, but no one was wanted to be left out because this meant a de facto death sentence. if they found them. On the other hand, searching for them in the foliage was difficult for the enemy because they did not camp in sight but in zemlyankas , Slavic word to designate half-buried dwellings that took advantage of slopes and slopes of the land, covering themselves with vegetation and being untraceable.

The description does not seem flattering but they knew how to organize certain comforts by building kitchens, a mill with a bakery, a medical clinic with a cabin for quarantines (typhus was the order of the day) and even bathrooms. They also had cows and artisan workshops that made clothing, repaired shoes, repaired weapons, and even supplied parts to other guerrilla groups, among other things. There was also a school, a synagogue and even a court with a dungeon. All this underground.

And it is that, due to the lack of equipment, the priority was common survival, hence they hardly took part in important armed actions (only Alexander, who joined Soviet partisans to learn). What they did do was supply the Soviet soldiers with clothing and footwear but, above all, look for food and everything that was useful, for which they seized it from non-Jewish families, by force if they resisted; it was a kind of revenge for the pre-war anti-Semitism that existed in the area. That did not prevent them from also retaliating against the collaborators, killing them along with their relatives to set an example.

As fugitives kept arriving from many ghettos where Tuvia had agreed with the Judenrat (the Jewish councils that ran them), Bielski's partisans continued to grow in number, prompting the Germans to drop leaflets from the air offering up to a hundred thousand marks in reward for their leader. It did not work and in August 1943 they started Operation Hermann to try to catch him. The partisans suffered heavy casualties and the towns around the forest were devastated, with the gentile population suffering the consequences.

Seeing that it was impossible to face the enemy, the partisans divided into small bands to escape and meet again in the Jasinowo forest, staging an exodus as unusual as it was successful. In the autumn the group had grown even more with the addition of some Gypsies, Poles and Belarusians fleeing the horror, the first to escape death, the others to avoid forced labor in Germany. Most of them, however, were taken in by General Chernysev's Soviet partisans, who tried to integrate Bielski's partisans into his forces.

Without success, because they had developed a kind of corporate spirit quite independent and unconditional from Tuvia; it is significant that they named the camp Little Jerusalem . Now, the region was under Chernysev's strategic command and in September he ordered them to split into two groups. One, called Ordzhonikidze (last name of a famous Georgian communist), would be a Jewish fighting cell led by the Soviet commander Lyushenko; the others, later named Bielski Otriad , they would continue the same.

One of Chernysev's concerns was the allies' complaints about the brutal methods used by the partisans against the civilian population, which, as we have seen, were not limited to indiscriminately confiscating supplies but also murdered those who resisted, accusing them of being suspected of sympathy. towards the Nazis; sometimes it was true, although motivated as a reaction to that violence, but the repression did not spare even the children. The Soviet command tried to put a stop to these excesses, despite the fact that the local commander, Kacper Miłaszewski, sympathized with Bielski for taking in so many homeless people.

Tuvia prepared a report to defend himself in which he listed 38 war missions that involved the destruction of a couple of locomotives, thirty railway wagons, another telegraph pole and 4 bridges, along with the death of 381 enemies and suffering in return some 50 kills. He also claimed to have killed 33 spies and provocateurs (probably peasants who resisted looting). Some consider these figures to be exaggerated, which, in any case, only included 14 Germans killed by them because the rest were achieved by collaborating with Soviet forces. Of course, Tuvia did say that “…I would rather save a single old Jewish woman than kill ten German soldiers” .

Despite everything, in September 1943 the communist military commanders began to have friction with the Polish partisan groups because they considered them a problem for the future, in a context in which the war was already unfavorable to Hitler. Operation Hermann had led to the replacement of Miłaszewski by Adolf Pilch, one of those Polish soldiers trained in Great Britain and parachuted back to his country to organize the resistance. What he should never have imagined was that it would be his Soviet allies who would become the enemy.

Indeed, his battalion had to hand over their weapons after threatening to shoot all the officers, most of whom were arrested; Not so Pilch, who managed to escape with some assistants taking advantage of the fact that Tuvia and his men, who actively collaborated in the disarmament, were distracted looting everything they found. This was how Polish forces and pro-Soviet partisans would go on to face each other in a fight within another. Some historians believe that Bielski's men could be responsible for war crimes, both for their actions in these events and for those committed against the civilian population described above.

When the summer of 1944 came and the Red Army launched an offensive on Belarus, the guerrillas were no longer needed and disbanded. Then the tables turned. The NKVD reopened the investigation into Tuvia's controversial behavior regarding personal enrichment while, on the other hand, his brother Asael enlisted in his ranks and died at the Battle of Könisberg in 1945; he never got to know the daughter he had with his brother-in-law's sister, Chaja.

Tuvia returned to leave well rid but suspicious of the new regime. After the war, he returned to Poland and then went to Israel, where he had helped his cousin Yehuda (also a partisan) escape from the NKVD. He married an old girlfriend named Lila Tiktin and in 1956 settled in New York with Alexander (who also remarried, Sonia, a young refugee whose life he saved) and the youngest of the family, Aron. . The three of them worked in the transportation company of his older brother, Walter, who had emigrated to the US before the war. They died there, the first in 1987 and the second in 1995, although their bodies were moved to Jerusalem. Aron, who changed his last name to Bell, is still alive.