The Minsk Ghetto Resistance is the case of an exceptionally large and well-organised Jewish underground that succeeded in moving thousands of ghetto inhabitants out to partisan units in the surrounding forests. Where most ghetto resistance organisations could mount only an armed last stand inside the ghetto walls, Minsk produced a sustained and partially successful escape operation. Around 6,000 to 10,000 Minsk Jews reached the surrounding forests and joined the Soviet partisan movement during the German occupation. Several thousand of them survived the war as partisans. The Minsk operation is the largest single ghetto-to-partisan transfer in the Holocaust record.
The setting
Minsk in 1941 was the capital of Soviet Belarus. The pre-war Jewish population of the city was around 70,000, around a third of the city. After the German occupation in late June 1941, the Jewish population, including refugees concentrated in the city from surrounding areas, came to around 100,000 people. From November 1941 the German authorities also deported around 35,000 German, Austrian and Czech Jews to Minsk, holding them in a separate section of the ghetto known as the Hamburg Ghetto.
The killings began immediately. Mass shootings of Minsk Jews took place at multiple sites around the city throughout the autumn of 1941 and through 1942 and 1943. Around 100,000 people were killed at the Tuchinka pit and at other sites in the Minsk region. The killings were carried out by the Einsatzgruppen and by Belarusian and Lithuanian auxiliary forces.
The underground
The Minsk Jewish underground was unusual for several reasons. It was substantially Communist in orientation, drawing on the pre-war Soviet political culture of the city. It maintained close relations with the wider Belarusian Soviet partisan movement, which was the largest and most effective partisan movement in occupied Europe. And it benefited from a sympathetic Belarusian non-Jewish population in the rural areas around the city, who provided shelter, food and information to the partisan movement and to the Jewish escapers.
The leader of the Minsk Jewish underground was Hersh Smolar, a Polish Jewish Communist who had been resident in Minsk before the war. The underground organised hundreds of cells across the ghetto, accumulated weapons and intelligence, and from late 1941 onwards began the systematic transfer of ghetto inhabitants to the partisan units in the surrounding forests.
The escape operation
The Minsk operation moved Jewish ghetto inhabitants out in groups of typically 20 to 50 at a time. Each group was led by a guide familiar with the route to a particular partisan camp. The transfers happened at night, with the inhabitants leaving the ghetto through gaps in the wire that the underground had identified or arranged. The route to the forests took several days on foot, sometimes by horse-drawn cart, with periodic shelter in safe houses provided by sympathetic Belarusians.
Once at the partisan camps, the escapers had to be accepted by the partisan command. The reception was variable. Some Soviet partisan commanders welcomed the new fighters; others were antisemitic and refused them or treated them badly. The Minsk underground built relationships with particular partisan commanders who could be relied on. The Bielski group, the largest specifically Jewish partisan unit, accepted Minsk escapers along with refugees from other ghettos and was the destination for many of the transfers.
Around 6,000 to 10,000 Minsk Jews reached the partisans through this route between late 1941 and the final liquidation of the ghetto in October 1943. Of those, around 3,000 survived the war as active partisans. Several hundred more survived in non-combatant capacities in the partisan camps. The figure is, by Holocaust standards, exceptional. Most ghetto inhabitants who escaped to the forests in any region died: of cold, of starvation, in firefights with German pursuit forces, or of betrayal by hostile local civilians. The Minsk operation produced survivors at a rate that no other ghetto matched.
The Hamburg Ghetto
The German Jews held in the Hamburg Ghetto section of Minsk had a different experience. They had been deported from the Reich on the assumption that they would be resettled in the east. They arrived in Minsk to find conditions that were worse than they had left, and a Jewish neighbouring population that did not speak their language. They had no Soviet political experience and no underground network. The Belarusian rural population around Minsk did not generally distinguish between Soviet and German Jews when it came to providing shelter, but the German Jews had less ability to make use of the shelter when offered. Most of the German Jews in the Hamburg Ghetto were murdered in the killings of 1942 and 1943. A few escaped to the partisans alongside the Minsk underground operations.
The end of the ghetto
The Minsk Ghetto was finally liquidated on 21 October 1943. The remaining ghetto inhabitants, around 4,000 people, were murdered. The underground operations had reduced the ghetto population substantially through the transfers to the forests, but most of those who remained at the moment of the final liquidation were the elderly, the sick, and those who had been unable or unwilling to leave.
Smolar after the war
Hersh Smolar survived the war as a partisan and returned to Soviet politics. He was the editor of the Yiddish-language Polish Communist newspaper after 1945 and was a senior figure in the small post-war Polish Jewish Communist establishment. He was forced out during the 1968 Polish Communist anti-Zionist campaign and emigrated to Israel, where he wrote his memoir The Minsk Ghetto: Soviet Jewish Partisans Against the Nazis, published in 1989. The book is one of the few first-hand accounts of the Minsk operation, written by the man who organised it.
What the Minsk record matters for
Minsk shows what was possible when the conditions for escape lined up: a sympathetic rural population, a strong partisan movement, an experienced underground leadership, and a city near terrain that gave cover. None of these conditions was present in most ghettos. Where they were, escape and survival on the scale of Minsk became possible. The Minsk record is an answer to the question of why other ghettos did not do the same. The answer is that they could not. Minsk was the exception that the conditions made.
See also
Sources
- Hersh Smolar, The Minsk Ghetto: Soviet Jewish Partisans Against the Nazis, Holocaust Library, 1989
- Barbara Epstein, The Minsk Ghetto 1941-1943: Jewish Resistance and Soviet Internationalism, University of California Press, 2008
- Nechama Tec, Defiance: The Bielski Partisans, Oxford University Press, 1993
- USHMM: Minsk