The Bielski partisans were a Jewish resistance group that operated in the Naliboki forest of western Belorussia between 1941 and 1944. They are best known for the size of the community they sheltered: at the peak in the summer of 1944, around 1,200 Jewish men, women and children were living in the forest under their protection. It is the largest documented case of armed Jewish self-rescue during the Holocaust. Around 1,200 of those they took in survived to walk out of the forest when the Red Army arrived in July 1944.
The brothers
The Bielski brothers were the four sons of David and Beila Bielski, the only Jewish family in the village of Stankiewicze in the Nowogródek district of pre-war Poland (now western Belarus). The eldest, Tuvia (born 1906), had served in the Polish army in the early 1930s, returned to the village to run a small flour mill, and had a working knowledge of the forests around Nowogródek that would later prove decisive. Zus (born 1912) and Asael (born 1908) were similarly familiar with the local terrain. Aron, the youngest, was thirteen when the war reached the village.
The German occupation of the area in June 1941 was followed within months by the systematic murder of the Jewish population. Tuvia and Zus’s wives, parents, and most of their relatives were killed during the Nowogródek and Lida ghetto liquidations of 1941 and 1942. The four brothers escaped into the forest in the spring of 1942 with a small group of relatives and other escaped Jews, mostly from Lida and Nowogródek. Tuvia took command. The group’s first decisions were the decisions that defined what it would later become.
The decision to take everyone
Most partisan groups operating in the eastern forests, whether Soviet, Polish or independent, were reluctant to accept women, children, the elderly, the sick or anyone unable to fight. Food was scarce, security was tight, and a non-combatant population was a liability. The Bielskis took the opposite decision. They accepted every Jew who reached them. Tuvia’s reported answer to critics who pressed for a more military focus was: “I would rather save one old Jewish woman than kill ten German soldiers.”
The decision shaped the camp the group built. By the autumn of 1943 the Bielski community in the Naliboki forest had a bakery, a tannery, a sausage maker, a soap maker, a metalsmith, a clockmaker, a tailor’s shop, a carpentry shop, a flour mill, a school for the children, a synagogue and a small medical clinic. The community had its own court for internal disputes. It had its own elected council under Tuvia. Its members called the camp Jerusalem, after the city to which they hoped to return.
The community supported itself through a combination of food gathered from local peasant villages (sometimes by negotiation, sometimes by armed requisition), supplies received from the Soviet partisan command, and what its members produced in the forest workshops. The Bielski group had a working military unit of around 100 to 150 fighters that conducted operations against German garrisons, railway lines and local collaborators, and that protected the camp itself from German anti-partisan sweeps. The military operations were the smaller half of the group’s work. The rescue was the larger half.
The Naliboki sweep of 1943
The largest single threat to the group was the German anti-partisan operation Hermann, conducted in the Naliboki forest in July and August 1943. Around 50,000 German and auxiliary troops swept the forest in a coordinated operation that killed thousands of partisans, Jewish refugees and civilians. The Bielski community was nearly destroyed. The group split into smaller units, hid in the densest swamps and waited out the sweep. When it ended the survivors regrouped at a new camp deeper in the forest. The community then grew again over the autumn and winter of 1943 to 1944 as more Jews escaped from the surviving ghettos.
Liberation
The Red Army reached the Nowogródek area in July 1944. The Bielski group emerged from the forest with around 1,200 survivors. The figure includes the women, the children, the elderly and the sick that almost no other partisan group would have accepted. Asael Bielski was conscripted into the Red Army immediately on liberation and was killed at Königsberg in February 1945. Tuvia, Zus and Aron survived the war and emigrated, first to Israel and then, in Tuvia and Zus’s case, to New York, where they ran a small trucking business in Brooklyn for the rest of their working lives. Tuvia died in 1987 and Zus in 1995. Aron lived in New York until his death in 2018.
The historiography
The Bielski story was substantially unknown outside the survivor community for decades. The principal English-language account is Nechama Tec’s Defiance: The Bielski Partisans (Oxford University Press, 1993), based on extensive interviews with the survivors and the brothers themselves. Tec’s book was the basis for Edward Zwick’s 2008 film Defiance, with Daniel Craig as Tuvia, Liev Schreiber as Zus and Jamie Bell as Asael. The film simplified some of the chronology and dramatised the relationship between the brothers; the underlying facts of the rescue are accurately rendered.
The descendants of those rescued by the Bielskis number in the tens of thousands by 2026. The community continues to gather periodically. The forest itself is now a Belarusian state nature reserve; the camp sites are unmarked.
Sources
- Nechama Tec, Defiance: The Bielski Partisans, Oxford University Press, 1993
- Peter Duffy, The Bielski Brothers: The True Story of Three Men Who Defied the Nazis, Built a Village in the Forest, and Saved 1,200 Jews, HarperCollins, 2003
- Yehuda Bauer, The Death of the Shtetl, Yale University Press, 2009 (chapters on the Nowogródek region)
- Tuvia Bielski (with Sima Drabkin), Yehudei Yaar (Jews of the Forest), Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1946 (Tuvia’s own Hebrew memoir, written immediately after the war)
- Edward Zwick (dir), Defiance, Paramount Vantage, 2008
- USHMM, “The Bielski Partisans”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org
- Yad Vashem, Bielski partisans collection, https://www.yadvashem.org