Tens of thousands of Jews fought in the partisan units that operated in the forests, mountains and occupied cities of Europe during the Second World War. They fought as members of national resistance movements, as members of communist and Soviet partisan units, and in some cases as separately organised Jewish partisan groups. Their numbers were small in proportion to the size of the Jewish populations they came from, but their contribution to Allied operations behind enemy lines, to Jewish escape and survival, and to the wider record of resistance, is significant.
The Eastern European partisans
The largest body of Jewish partisans operated in the forests of Belarus, Lithuania, Ukraine, eastern Poland and the western Soviet Union. The terrain was wooded, the rural population was thin, and German control over the countryside was limited to the towns and main roads. Jewish ghetto inhabitants who escaped before liquidation, often by jumping from deportation trains or breaking out of the ghetto at moments when the perimeter was less heavily guarded, made their way to the forests and either joined existing Soviet partisan units or formed their own.
The largest specifically Jewish partisan group was the Bielski group, which operated in the Naliboki forest in Belarus from 1941 to 1944 under the leadership of the brothers Tuvia, Asael and Zus Bielski. The group grew to around 1,200 people, including non-combatant women, children and elderly. Almost all of them survived the war. The Bielski operation was unusual in that its primary purpose was the protection of Jewish life rather than military operations against the German army, although the group did also conduct sabotage and combat operations. The story is told on its own page.
Other major Jewish partisan units included the Bocian and Pomsta groups operating in the Lipichanskaya forest, the Iskra group in Ukraine, and the Vilna Jewish partisan brigade led by Abba Kovner. Most operated either as Jewish detachments within Soviet partisan brigades or as autonomous units in close liaison with the Soviet command.
The relationship with Soviet partisans
Soviet partisan units in the occupied territories were officially open to all anti-fascist fighters and many Jewish escapees joined them. The relationship was difficult. Some Soviet partisan commanders were antisemitic and refused to accept Jewish recruits, or accepted them and treated them badly. Some local non-Jewish partisans murdered Jewish escapees they encountered in the forest. Other Soviet commanders welcomed Jewish recruits and gave them positions of responsibility. The variation was so wide that whether a Jewish escapee in 1942 lived or died often came down to which partisan unit they encountered first.
The Western European partisans
Jewish involvement in resistance movements in Western Europe was substantial in proportion to the size of the Jewish populations there. In France, Jewish partisans operated within the Resistance, with separately organised Jewish units such as the Armée Juive and the FTP-MOI Jewish company in Paris. The Manouchian Group, named for its Armenian leader Missak Manouchian, included Jewish fighters and was responsible for some of the most prominent Resistance attacks on German targets in Paris. Most of its members were captured and executed in February 1944. The poster the Germans produced as propaganda after the executions, the Affiche Rouge, identified each member by name and origin, in an attempt to portray the Resistance as foreign and Jewish; the propaganda backfired, and the poster has become one of the iconic images of the French Resistance.
In Belgium, the Comite de Defense des Juifs led organised resistance to the deportations, including the famous attack on Convoy XX on 19 April 1943, in which three young resistance fighters with one pistol stopped a deportation train and helped 231 prisoners escape, of whom around 115 survived the war. In Italy, Jewish partisans fought with the wider Italian Resistance, particularly in the north, and several rose to senior commanding positions.
The ghetto fighters
Some of the most famous Jewish armed resistance happened inside the ghettos rather than in the forests. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1943 was the largest such action, with the Jewish Combat Organisation under Mordechai Anielewicz fighting an SS deployment for nearly four weeks. The Białystok Ghetto Uprising in August 1943, the Vilna Ghetto Resistance, the Kraków Resistance attacks of 1942 to 1943, the Łódź Ghetto resistance, and the Minsk Ghetto Resistance were similar actions on smaller scales. Each is covered on its own page in the Poland and the Ghettos section. The ghetto fighters were not partisans in the strict sense, but they were the same kind of people, doing the same kind of work in different terrain.
The numbers
The total number of Jewish partisans in Europe is estimated at between 20,000 and 30,000 active fighters at peak, with several times that many in associated non-combatant roles in the forest camps. They are a small share of the European Jewish population of around nine and a half million in 1939. They are not a small share of the Jewish population physically able to fight: most Jews who could have fought were already in the camps or the ghettos by the time effective resistance became possible. The partisans were drawn from the small fraction who had got out, who had reached the terrain where resistance was possible, and who had survived the journey.
What it meant
The Jewish partisans did not turn the war. The military significance of their operations, while real, was modest in the wider context of the Second World War. What they achieved was different. They saved lives, sometimes thousands at a time as in the Bielski case. They produced testimony, given by survivors who would not otherwise have survived, that is now part of the historical record. They demonstrated that Jewish armed resistance was possible, against the regime’s claim that it was not, and against the post-war myth that the Jews of Europe had gone to their deaths without fighting. Several thousand of them are buried in forests they fought in. Their graves are mostly unmarked.
See also
- The Białystok Ghetto Uprising 1943
- The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 1943
- The Kraków Resistance
- The Vilna Ghetto Resistance
- The Minsk Ghetto Resistance
Sources
- Yehuda Bauer, The Jewish Emergence from Powerlessness, University of Toronto Press, 1979
- Nechama Tec, Defiance: The Bielski Partisans, Oxford University Press, 1993
- Yitzhak Arad, The Partisan: From the Valley of Death to Mount Zion, Holocaust Library, 1979
- USHMM: Jewish Partisans