“It happened, therefore it can happen again …
and it can happen everywhere.”
Primo Levi (1919-1987)
— The Drowned and the Saved
April 24 is Yom HaShoah (Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day), commemorating the estimated 6 million Jews and 5 million others who were systematically and brutally murdered by the most educated and industrially advanced nation in Europe.
This year also marks the 73rd anniversary of the resilience and triumph of the Bielski Partisans, the most renowned Jewish partisan group in the forests of Western Belorussia (Eastern Poland) during World War II. And it is the 23rd yahrzeit for its mystery man, Yehuda Bielski, who was my father.
On September 1, 1939, one week after signing the secret Molotov-Ribbentrop Non Aggression Pact that divided and annexed Poland between the Germans and the Soviets, the German army attacked, thundering into Poland in a dizzying nonstop blitzkrieg (lightning war) wave of terror and annihilation. Sixteen days later the Soviets attacked from the East.
The two mightiest totalitarian states in the world thus brought millions of people to the precipice of a new Dark Age.
Lieutenant Yehuda Bielski was badly wounded. In ferocious battles outside of Warsaw he sometimes wondered whether, as a Polish officer and Jew, he would get a German bullet in front or a Polish bullet in back from a soldier in his platoon. It was a German bullet. The courageous but badly outnumbered and poorly armed Polish army retreated.
Ripping the insignias off his uniform, Yehuda knew he had to avoid capture and get to a hospital. He tried to ignore the throbbing pain in his wounded leg and mounting thirst as he limped his way to Warsaw.
German batteries pounded, pouring shells as the Luftwaffe strafed its targets. The rutted roads were full of vehicles, animals, and frightened people of all ages carrying assorted belongings. A farmer on a crowded wagon gave Yehuda a place. As they drove by smoldering ruins, he saw the trains bringing German troops to Poland with signs declaring: “We’re off to Poland to kill the Jews.” He understood this war was something different. Poland had just gotten a small taste of the horror to come.
The Poles were fiercely Catholic, patriotic, and anti-German. They also had a history of anti-Semitism. Between 1935 and 1938 Poles attacked Jews in the streets, stole their property, and destroyed their homes. Jews were murdered in towns and villages across Poland. Only months before the German invasion, hundreds of Jews were violently assaulted.
Even so, there were extraordinary Polish men and women who, at enormous risk to themselves and their families, aided and sheltered thousands of Jews, including many children, most of whom survived the war. More than 6,000 of these brave rescuers, far more than from any other Nazi-occupied country, are honored and memorialized at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem as “Righteous Among the Nations.”
* * * * *
Early one morning, a hospital nun woke Yehuda with the news that the SS were in the building searching for Polish officers and Jews. He was barely recovered. She led him to a side door and he made his escape into Nazi-occupied Warsaw. He wanted to go home, to Novogrudek in Eastern Poland.
As Yehuda maneuvered his way home, he witnessed how Jews were singled out for brutal, barbaric attacks. SS troops beat terrified men and women with rubber truncheons and clubs, smashing bones and skulls. Anything they liked, especially watches and jewelry, was stolen. Jewish men were forced into hard labor under frightful conditions. Random shootings were common. Homes and shops were looted and demolished. He saw Jews shoved into a synagogue that was then torched. Most Poles, including the police and clergy, were indifferent bystanders to the destruction of their fellow citizens.
Yehuda returned to a Soviet-occupied Novogrudek. He had been born and raised in this large, lively town on the border of Belorussia. The Russians had made some changes and people adjusted as best they could. As Yehuda’s wound healed, he worked with his wife in her beauty salon business and built an additional, smaller house on his property.
The large Bielski family had lived in Poland for several hundred years. Yehuda was the youngest of seven children. His father owned a glazing business. His mother died when he was nine. Educated at the Tarbut Zionist School, he spoke several languages: Polish, Russian, Yiddish, Hebrew, and some German (years later, he would learn English). He played the violin and guitar. He was an excellent athlete and an accomplished ballroom dancer. Discipline, proper behavior, and good grooming were important to him.
On June 22, 1941, Germany attacked the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa. The Russians were taken entirely by surprise. The swift advance of roughly 3.8 million Germans was devastating. Most of the trapped Jews had no idea what awaited them.
* * * * *
Following the Wehrmacht were the Einsatzgruppen extermination squads specifically formed to expedite the slaughter of Jews. In the invasion of Poland Jews had been rounded up and imprisoned in ghettos that would keep them in and Poles and other non-Jews out. With the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Nazis became more advanced in their thinking.
Systematic mass executions would now be carried out in the immediate area of conquered territory without delay. The organized mass murder by the Einsatzgruppen at such close range in broad daylight was done in full view of onlookers and with the support and participation of the German Order Police, SS, and Wehrmacht who coordinated the shooting units. Tens of thousands of voluntary auxiliary police units were recruited from the local population
The sadistic hatred of the civilian collaborators was well known. With bestial ferocity and exhilaration they helped herd Jews – often their neighbors – to the pre-dug massacre ditches that became mass graves. And they participated in the shootings.
Some German officers in charge of the killing action noted the savagery and grotesque violence perpetrated by the Eastern Europeans (especially Lithuanians, Latvians, and Ukrainians) upon the Jews. They cabled Berlin about the need to control and conceal such excess carnage. The process was too messy. More “honorable” killing methods were preferred.
“Who will question our methods?” the Fuhrer asked. After all, there had been limited universal outrage since Hitler became chancellor. Significant numbers of Eastern European militias helped to guard ghettos, prisons, and concentration camps.
The Germans bombed Novogrudek. Combat troops quickly entered the town followed by the Einsatzgruppen. The terror began immediately, with continuous violent assaults, killing, and looting. Men were taken into forced labor and never came back. Two well-guarded ghettos, surrounded by fences and barbed wire, were created at each end of the town.
After routine selections for extermination, people were taken to the woods close to town and shot. One ghetto was liquidated. Yehuda, a prisoner in the second ghetto, had survived two selections and knew the chances surviving another were slim. He planned an escape.
A Christian friend unexpectedly delivered a letter to Yehuda from his older first cousin, Tuvia, who had recently fled from his rural village to the forest with his three brothers, sister, several relatives, and friends. They had played in the forest as children and knew it well.
“Bring your wife, a few good men, and we will build something together,” he wrote. He urged Yehuda to join him without delay for he needed his military expertise.
One night, leading his wife and eight carefully chosen potential fighters, Yehuda approached the ghetto fence. Avoiding the guards, they removed fence boards, cut through the barbed wire, and escaped into the forest.
After several days walking through the woods, the group met up with Yehuda’s cousins. Yehuda was dismayed by the lack of structure and discipline he observed. According to Peter Duffy in his book The Bielski Brothers, at a meeting held shortly after his arrival Yehuda addressed the group: “We have come here into the forest, my dear ones, not to eat and drink and enjoy ourselves. We have come here . . . to stay alive. We must think only of one important thing: revenge and revenge again on the murderers.” Armed resistance was his answer.
When Yehuda’s plan to secure weapons and attack the enemy was agreed upon, he continued: “We must choose a commander and we must give our unit a name.” He nominated Tuvia to lead the group. With Yehuda’s military focus, the Bielski Partisans emerged.
* * * * *
Tuvia wanted to allow desperate Jews of all ages to join the group. His brother Zus wanted to turn away outsiders and keep the group small. Tuvia wanted to avoid contact with the Germans and hostile locals, hoping to save as many people as possible. His brother wanted to fight the enemy and left to join one of the Red Army/NKVD (secret police)-controlled partisan units that were fighting behind German lines. He later returned to the Bielski Partisans camp.
The base camp was comprised of the Bielskis, their wives, girlfriends, relatives, and friends. It was surrounded with smaller camps. People worked during the day and slept at night in camouflaged underground bunkers. They built a primitive forest village that included workshops, a bathhouse, an infirmary, a theater, and a synagogue. People improvised and endured frigid weather, illness, forest surgery, and other personal hardships. Supplies were procured by any means necessary.
The small but highly effective military wing Yehuda organized and coordinated evolved into daring guerilla fighters and saboteurs. Obtaining arms remained pivotal. Eventually, Russian planes dropped large quantities of automatic weapons to the partisans. Collaborators who turned Jews over to the Germans were hunted down and killed.
The rules of the camp were made and strictly enforced by the three oldest Bielski brothers. For those who broke them, there was a jail. Challenges to the authority and leadership of these unrestrained, explosive brothers were sometimes resolved through the end of a gun. An unyielding hierarchy existed and those who wanted to remain understood their places. In this remote and unlawful environment of dense forests and swamps, those under their protection, and the protection of other commanders, survived as thousands were massacred around them.
Yehuda was known to fellow partisans as the “eydl” (refined) Bielski because of his demeanor and attitude. Despite their different backgrounds and dispositions, Yehuda and Tuvia worked well together in the forest. Tuvia protected Yehuda from Stalin’s dreaded NKVD, which regarded all Polish officers as enemies of the Soviet regime to be shot on sight, and Yehuda adroitly evaded them. He became the mystery man.
Yehuda had developed a reputation for rescuing Jews from heavily guarded ghettos. Tuvia asked him to assemble several fighters to get the Boldos out of the Novogrudek ghetto. They were the parents of a Bielski partisan who would later marry Zus. Yehuda knew them well. The armed partisans rescued the parents and some others and brought them back to the forest. They survived the war. Years later in Israel, Mr. Boldo acknowledged with gratitude and admiration: “Yehuda brought us all out alive.”
* * * * *
Tragically, Yehuda’s wife was killed during a German ambush. The following year Yehuda met and befriended Lola Hudes, who had recently joined the Bielski partisans, her fourth partisan group.
Lola had been born and educated in Lodz, a large Polish manufacturing city. Her father was a prosperous and sophisticated distributor. The youngest sister of six siblings, she was raised in comfort and style. She spoke Polish and an excellent High German. Soon she would master Russian and Yiddish and, later on, Hebrew in Israel and English in America. She was preparing to go to university in France when the Nazis entered the city.
“There was a sense of terror in the city,” she recalled. “I decided to leave.” Her mother pleaded with her to stay, but her father had different thoughts: “We do not know what the future brings and we cannot decide for our grown children where life or death lies.” His final words to her were: “Do what you must and make every effort to survive.”
Shortly before the Lodz ghetto was established, Lola, dressed in multiple layers, Swiss walking shoes, and with a rucksack on her back, fled east to the German-free Russian zone. Her language skills were now invaluable. Traveling on German military transport trains, passenger trains, and on foot she reached the Soviet-occupied Belorussian city of Baranovichi. She stayed with friends and found a job. Eventually she moved further east to the town of Stolpce. Her brother and his wife, who had escaped from the Lodz ghetto, joined her.
The German advance was so rapid that within a short time they found themselves prisoners in the Stolpce ghetto. “At night the Lithuanian guards would shoot into houses,” Lola said. “There were always wounded and dead.” Her brother was picked up by the SS and beaten to death, his body thrown into the gutter.
The kommandant of Stolpce, impressed with Lola’s German and typing ability, chose her to work for him at headquarters. He protected her from the ongoing selections to the massacre pits. When he told her he had received orders to evacuate Stolpce and that the SS would be taking over, she understood the final liquidation of the ghetto was imminent. “Be gone from here,” he warned.
Her initial escape plan with two others backfired. Working late on the escape evening, she was unable to steal a revolver and ammunition as planned. Instead, in order to create chaos the following morning, she took as many headquarters keys as she could fit into the extra coat pockets she had sewn.
When darkness enveloped Stolpce, she headed toward the ghetto fence. Avoiding the guards, Lola pressed against the earth and crawled on her stomach underneath the barbed wire. Slowly, dodging the searchlights that lit up the field, she inched her way into the dark forest.
Besides being young and in good health, Lola had characteristics that enabled her to succeed. She was alert and observant, made decisions instantly, took risks, and had an incredible will to live.
Lola hid in the countryside, taking secondary roads, blending with the trees and fields, and avoiding most locals. She traded some of her city clothes and personal items for food, native clothes, and transport. Occasionally a sympathetic peasant gave her temporary shelter. Packs of wolves, wild boars, and bears roamed the forest.
She joined a small, defenseless partisan group. Later she joined another similar partisan group deeper in the forest. Always hungry, they slept in ditches covered by leaves for warmth. When she heard there was a larger, armed partisan group much deeper in the Naliboki forest, she joined them.
The Kessler Partisans were a camp of about 60 fighters familiar with the forest. They considered Lola’s language skills useful and took her in. “They were armed and very tough,” Lola said. “Mrs. Kessler was never without her gun.”
The Kessler Partisans and Bielski Partisans later merged.
The Bielski brothers immediately confiscated the Kessler Partisans’ belongings. “They took anything they wanted” Lola recalled, “especially money, valuables and women’s intimate apparel, a greatly needed possession in the woods which they gave to their wives and girlfriends.” Their crude language shocked her. “Soon I discovered that no unattached young woman was safe among them.”
Sometime afterward Kessler got into a power struggle with the brothers, a situation that could have severely endangered the entire partisan camp with disastrous consequences. It ended abruptly when Asael Bielski shot Kessler. Tuvia stopped his brother from killing Mrs. Kessler.
* * * * *
The massive Russian army was on its victorious drive to the final showdown in Berlin. In the summer of 1944 the Russians told the Bielski Partisans they could return to their homes. The area was clear of Germans. For the approximately 1,250 partisans, the war was over.
They had endured in the forest for nearly three years under conditions of extraordinary peril and deprivation. Most of the partisans walked out of the woods with minimal possessions. Lola, bereft of most of the items she had brought from home, exited wearing one black and one brown shoe.
The survivors had lost many beloved family members who were swept up by the Nazis and their collaborators. They lost their homes, belongings, and savings. Some lost much desired educational opportunities. Some developed physical ailments they endured for the rest of their lives. Some had psychological disabilities. Many bore emotional scars. Despite any limitations, most of them pursued a new life with energy and determination.
Yehuda and Lola returned to his house in Novogrudok and married. The NKVD finally caught up with him. He was summoned to NKVD headquarters where he was interrogated and warned. He understood his days were numbered. Leaving everything behind, Yehuda and Lola fled. Climbing atop a coal train heading west and holding onto the slippery coal, they reached Poland.
Lodz had become a registration center for returning Polish Jewish survivors. Lola discovered the extent of the horror and believed no one in her family had survived. Hoping somebody might one day return from the ashes, she signed her name in the registration log “Lola Hudes Bielski – destination Palestine.”
Yehuda, who had also lost his entire family, had always planned to go to Palestine after the war. After 2,000 years a new, modern Jewish state would arise where the Jews would fulfill their destiny, determine their own fate, and defend themselves. There was no future for Jews in Poland.
The Poles had profited from the Jewish catastrophe. They did not want to relinquish the Jewish property they had exploited and plundered. Murders and pogroms spread across Poland for two years after the German surrender in May 1945. Hundreds were killed and wounded. Jews ran for their lives. The entire time Yehuda and Lola were in Poland, they slept with a small ax under their pillows.
Jews had lived in Poland for a thousand years. Prior to World War II there were about 3,300,000 Jews in Poland. Ninety percent were murdered. Poland became virtually Judenrein.
In Budapest, Yehuda was recruited by the Jewish Agency in Palestine and offered a job. From Bari, Italy, he was assigned to escort about 200 Holocaust survivors on a crammed, dilapidated vessel across the Mediterranean to British-occupied Palestine avoiding the Royal Navy sea patrols and blockade.
Yehuda joined the Irgun, the Revisionist underground army formed to defend Jews from Arab terrorism and pressure the British out of Palestine. Commissioned an officer in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), Yehuda was the only Bielski commander to be so recognized. He fought with bravery and distinction in Israel’s War of Independence. Once again Yehuda was seriously wounded in battle. This time it was an Arab bullet. On May 14, 1948, Israel was reborn.
Yehuda and Lola with their two children came to America in 1952 and lived near Lincoln Center in Manhattan. Yehuda became a businessman, Lola a painter. Two more children were born (one died in infancy). They never granted interviews and avoided all publicity. They became known as Julius and Lola Bell.
Editor’s Note: For more information about Yehuda and Lola Bielski, see http://www.sztetl.org.pl/en/article/nowogrodek/16,accountsmemories/40430,yehuda-and-lola-bielski/.