Nazi assassins: they rescued fleeing Jews, killed Nazis, killed aides and even received a Hollywood tribute - but the State of Israel did not glorify their miraculous story
Nazi Germany's surprise attack on the USSR in June 1941 doomed most Jews in the Soviet Union. The rapid advance of invading forces, plus the fact that Jews lived mostly in the western part of the country, relatively close to the border, prevented them from escaping eastward. For a few weeks millions of Jews in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Lithuania and Belarus fell into the hands of the oppressors.
Photo: Class Room Without Borders, Ghetto Fighters' House Archives, from Wikipedia
Among the thousands of cities, towns and villages occupied by the Germans as early as the beginning of the war was also the small village of Stankiewicz.
If in the nearby cities, Novogrudok and Lida, there was a large Jewish population, then in Stankiewicz there lived one Jewish family - the Belsky family.
David and Beila Belsky had ten sons and two daughters, the eldest of whom learned from a young age that a Jew could survive among the Gentiles only if he was strong and stood his ground without bowing his head.
"At the beginning of the war, the neighbors advised my parents to flee east," says Aharon Belsky, now 93, in a Skype conversation with "Israel Hashavua" from his home in Florida.
"But because not all the brothers were home at the time, the parents refused. They could not imagine an escape that would leave some of their children behind. When the first units of the Germans, two of the older brothers, Alexander Zissel (called by Kol Zus) and Asahel, arrived, they decided to hide in the woods."
Tuvia, the older brother of the Belsky family, adopted a false identity and first tried to hide from the Germans in the city of Lida.
The rest of the family was forced to move to the Novogrudok ghetto.
For some time the brothers hiding outside were still able to maintain contact with the ghetto residents.
But similar to their conduct in other places, the Germans did not wait long, and within a few months underwent a random killing of Jews to total annihilation.
What happened then, Aaron even now, almost eight decades later, can not describe without tears: "In December 1941, the ghetto residents began to be systematically murdered. Some were shot, and others were buried alive. In this wave, the Germans murdered about 5,000 Jews, including "Our parents, three of the younger siblings and Zus' wife along with their baby daughter."
Bastards with respect
Aaron was then 13. From the terrible terror he experienced, when he witnessed the murder of his relatives, he lost the ability to speak and remained silent for two years.
Despite this he managed to escape to the forest, where he reunited with Tuvia, Zus and Asahel.
The brothers spent the first winter in constant flight.
They slept in the barns of local villagers, sometimes splitting and reuniting.
Tuvia managed to enter Lida's ghetto and take some of his family members out.
According to Aharon, at this time the group's first camp was set up in the depths of the forests: "We were looking for more relatives, and so close to 20 people gathered in the forest in Chekowitzky. Behind my brothers I felt like behind a defensive wall.
Kitchen and makeshift flour mill. The Jews who stayed in the Belsky camp in the Nalibuka Forest, 1944 // Photos: Class Room Without Borders, Ghetto Fighters' House Archive, from Wikipedia
But danger lurks at every step.
We had to hide from both the Germans and the police, who were made up of locals and assisted by the Germans. "
At this point it was clear that survival necessitated the acquisition of weapons, and the opportunity for this came after the Belsky brothers encountered a gang of Red Army soldiers, who were also wandering in a deep forest in the German home front.
Together they stormed the house of a local policeman and managed to grab him and the weapon he had.
The policeman was executed for collaborating with the Nazis, and his small arsenal allowed the Belsky brothers to feel more protected.
When the group was based in the forest, Aaron received a rifle from his older brother.
"The rifle was longer than me," he recalls, "but they taught me how to use it. Still, my first mission did not require the use of weapons. I had to sneak into the surrounding ghettos to call on the Jews imprisoned to flee to the forest for as long as possible. "And join us. I did not wear the yellow badge, and in addition I was very small, so I could get and slip anywhere."
Aaron and other emissaries who snuck into the ghettos succeeded in the mission of persuasion.
The number of Jews who joined the Belsky camp in the forest at first resembled a drip, but over time the drip became a real escape stream, until they gathered in the camp in the Nalibuka forest, a thick, tangled forest full of swamps, no less than 1,200 Jews in the area.
About 70% of them were women, children and the elderly.
Unlike the classical partisan units that operated in the Nazi-occupied territories, the Belsky brothers accepted every Jew - armed or unarmed, young or old, healthy or sick - without calculating how "effective" he was in surviving in the forest or his value as a soldier.
Tuvia, who was the group's commander, put it in simple and clear words: "In my opinion, it is better to save one old Jewish woman than to kill ten German soldiers."
His unit's name spread far and wide, and even other partisan units (which often had antisemitic spirits) would send to a Jewish Belsky unit, which roamed the forests.
Reality surpasses the film. Leib Schreiber and Daniel Craig in "Resistance" // Photos: Class Room Without Borders, Ghetto Fighters' House Archive, from Wikipedia
Aaron remembers that in the first days of the war Father David ordered everyone to make every effort to survive.
The war will not last forever, he predicted, and the Germans would be defeated in it.
The Belsky brothers acted in accordance with their father's order.
They did not often attack the supply lines of the Germans, as the ordinary partisans did, and focused on rescuing their people.
This is not to say that the members of the group refrained from fighting.
On the contrary, the partisan unit of the Belsky brothers did not hesitate to use force, defense and attack.
About 150 members of the camp took an active part in military operations.
They moved through the forests non-stop, raiding the ghettos and small police stations, killing Germans and killing their aides, rescuing Jews seeking refuge and succeeding against all odds the war until the German withdrawal in 1944.
After the war, there were those who accused her of violence against the non-Jewish population of the area, but the accusers "forgot" to say that the same population abused Jews for no wrong, handed them over to the Nazis, and sometimes participated in the massacre of defenseless Jews.
Belsky's partisans did not apologize for harming their brother.
"Everyone who raised a hand against the Belsky brothers and the Jews who were under their protection paid a price for it," Aaron recalls, not without pride, and when you hear his tone, you realize what a special spirit served the family in which he grew up.
The Belsky Brothers Battalion dropped its fear on the Novogrudok area in retaliatory actions against policemen and peasants who murdered Jews, until the German authorities set a reward of 100,000 Reichsmarks for anyone who would arrest the brothers.
In an orderly column, to Novogrudok
The election of Tuvia, a graduate of a Zionist youth movement, as the camp commander was not accidental.
By the way, it really was a choice - at a democratically convened meeting to discuss the unit's organizational arrangements, Tuvia was nominated for the post of commander, and received the sweeping support and cheers from members.
He was the most mature and experienced member of the group, and managed to serve in two armies, the Polish army and the Red Army, but beyond these dry figures, Tuvia ministered security.
By virtue of his leadership, he also forced those who hesitated to accept the notion that every Jewish soul should be saved, although increasing the number of children and women in the camp made it difficult for the unit to move and increased the difficulty of obtaining enough food for all.
Difficulties increased especially in crossings from forest to forest, and in such times of crisis only thanks to the character of the commander the frictions between the members of the unit were avoided and discipline was maintained, without which it was not possible to survive.
When the Germans and the various collaborators worked around to create a "Jewish-free" space and completely destroy Jewish towns, the Belsky brothers established an entire Jewish town in the depths of the forest.
The partisans lived in trenches, branch sukkot and other temporary structures, and alongside them built a central kitchen, an improvised flour mill, a bakery, a bathhouse, a clinic and a quarantine camp for patients with infectious diseases such as climbing, framing and forging workshops, a school and a synagogue.
Herds of cows provided the camp people with milk, and local farmers were forced to give them additional groceries.
As the number of people in the battalion increased, the understanding took root that it was desirable to divide them into sub-units.
Camp Commander Tuvia Belsky // Photos: Class Room Without Borders, Ghetto Fighters' House Archive, from Wikipedia
Several groups were sent from the camp to search for food, and the people were divided according to the kitchens, group group and kitchen.
The groups would receive the ingredients from the general kitchen, according to the number of their members.
In a similar way, the frequent move from one camp site to another was made, especially when there was a growing fear that the Germans, with the help of local residents, might surpass the camp site.
In July 1944, the Nalibuka Forest area was liberated from German occupation, and the Belsky Brothers' Battalion carried out its final maneuver.
More than 1,100 people left the camp for the last time, moving in an orderly line toward Novogrudok.
In this journey, too, Tuvia took care to guard his men, and placed his armed fighters on both sides of the convoy, so that they could protect the column from any harasser and enemy.
According to various estimates, during all its years of existence, the Belsky Brothers Unit lost only about 55 people.
Given the terrible circumstances of its existence in the German home front, this is a low number by all accounts.
At the same time, the Belsky men killed 381 enemy soldiers, some in joint operations with the other Soviet partisans, blew up German trains and bridges.
Unfortunately, the exit from the forest did not put an end to the tragedies of the Belsky family.
One of the four brothers, Asael Belsky, was drafted into the army immediately upon the liberation of Belarus, and in 1945, shortly before the end of the war, he was killed in battle in Germany.
"When the war ended, we were so sad," Aaron concludes.
"On the face of it, it's all over, we were free to go home, like everyone else. But we no longer had a home. The Nazis destroyed everything. In the years of survival in the forest, when I was a child, I learned to never give up, and always think tomorrow will be better. And if not tomorrow , So the next day, or in a week, or sometime in the future. I think the ability to want, hope, struggle and believe is what saved my life. Luckily for us, Tuvia, Zus and I managed to get out of the USSR, immigrate to Palestine, and even win the War of Independence.
"Since those days, I have kept in my heart the immense respect for the State of Israel, a state that was surrounded by an ocean of enemies and haters of Jews, and behold, they saw it today - a real power of which I am so proud."
Did the State of Israel and its citizens treat the Belsky brothers with similar respect and pride?
Not sure.
Surprisingly, young Israel did not elevate the Belsky brothers to a miracle, even though their actions were the ultimate example of Jewish heroism, thus conforming to the emerging Zionist ethos.
Perhaps "guilty" of this is the fact that in the 1950s the brothers went down to the United States with their families and settled there. Tuvia Belsky died in the United States in 1987, but a year later his bones were moved to Jerusalem and brought for burial in a full military ceremony.
Zus died in 1995, and Aaron remains the last witness to the heroism of the family.
"The Power of the Human Spirit"
For decades after World War II, official Soviet historiography did everything to erase the unbelievable story of the Belsky brothers and the history of the partisan unit they established from Jewish and general collective memory.
Tuvia, Zus, Asael, Aaron and their friends had no place in the narrative of the heroism of the Soviet partisans.
The brothers' focus on rescuing Jews, their bourgeois-Zionist background, and the fact that they left the USSR for Israel did not suit the authorities, who sought to eliminate the Jewish Holocaust and emphasize the general Soviet aspect of fighting the Nazis.
For objects in oblivion, and even in the blackening of the memory of the brothers, joined another side, the Poles.
These accused Belsky's partisans of involvement in the Nalibuka massacre, in which Soviet partisans killed 128 Polish villagers, mostly men who were members of a self-defense unit that collaborated with the Nazis.
It turns out that the vision of the submissive and annihilated Jew receives much more support and empathy than the vision of the warrior and avenger Jew, which the Belsky brothers realized during the days of survival and rescue in the forests of Belarus.
"Resistance", a film by Edward Zwick, based on the story of the Belsky brothers and released in 2008, took the mass rescue in the forests of Belarus from relative anonymity.
Like any Hollywood movie, it is well made, but the reality, as Aaron Belsky remembers it, is tens of times more than it.
On Sunday, November 29, the Ghetto Fighters' House Museum, the first and only Holocaust museum in the world established by Holocaust survivors, will hold a special zoom meeting with Aaron Belsky, led by Prof. Hanna Jablonka.
The meeting will be attended by Asahala Weinstein-Belsky, daughter of Asael Belsky, and members of the second and third generation of members of the Novogrudok community, whose parents survived thanks to the Belsky brothers.
"We see this important event as an opportunity for a unique and extraordinary expression of the power of the human spirit in one of the darkest periods in human history," says Yigal Cohen, director general of the Ghetto Fighters' House.