A neighbor had informed on Aaron Bielski by pointing him out on the street to the Germans; he had been walking on the sidewalk, while his mother, because she wore the Jewish star, had to walk in the gutter. Arrested and interrogated as to the whereabouts of his brothers, this eleven-year-old was taken to the police station and forced to dig a trench. The police and Germans threatened to shoot him unless he told them where they could find Zush and Tuvia. The Germans ordered him to jump in the trench and lie down. ‘They said to me this is how it will be when we shoot you. It was terror; I grew up very fast during those moments; but I told them I had no idea where my brothers were.’ The terror, which he refers to throughout the interview, surfaces in his words, movements, pacing back and forth across the kitchen, reaching for his cigarettes. Even now, this 72-year-old survivor seems close to the terror, to its grip on consciousness and memory. It is like, as he put it, a ‘cloud in the soul’ that refuses to disperse. As the youngest Bielski, he had it ‘pretty good in the woods… . I never had time to think about my parents.’ Fighting and surviving defined his moral universe; ‘I quickly became a man’; and while he had a rifle and gun, he never used them. ‘But I wish my brothers would have let me kill Germans; I wasn’t a pushover; when Germans or the anti-Semites who informed on us were killed, I wanted to be there; I wanted to see it; and there were times when I wished I had been the one pulling the trigger. But my brothers never put me in harm’s way.’
In 1948, Aaron joined the Israeli army:
‘They thought I was crazy, every night around 4:00 a.m. the Arabs screamed, “Kill the Jews, kill the Jews.” … I laughed as loud as I could. Compared to what I had been through, this was nothing. Don’t get me wrong; the Israelis were great soldiers, as tough as they come. But no one in that unit had seen what I saw or survived with a partisan brigade.’
Relief from his terrorized consciousness came through the witnessing of violent retribution. He remembers an execution which helped his effort to forget, at least for a moment, the memory of his murdered parents or the memory of his father being beaten. A fighter in the unit who escaped detection in the ghetto by hiding in a cesspool ‘up to his chin’ for 48 hours, killed a collaborator:
‘The man threw this collaborator down onto the floor; screamed this was for his parents, took an ax and chopped off his head. He and a couple of the others took the body and head and threw them on a bridge they had burned a day or two earlier. The note they placed on the body said something to the effect that this will be the fate of collaborators and anyone who turns in Jews.’
The stories increase Aaron’s agitation; and after describing this scene, he searches for other images and memories, each one evoking the next, until they come spinning out of him in staccato words and hard glances. His childhood stolen from him, brutally buried in Novogrudek, Aaron still feels the hate. ‘I can’t get away from it; the death of my parents. You have no idea, the beating of my father, part of my life was formed when I saw him suffering and bleeding.’ His innocence as a child had been shattered: ‘My life was forced on me; I had no choice over this.’ But his will as an adult recovered itself in the brigade. ‘I had choices when I went into the forest.’ What never disappeared was the rage: ‘My anger never left me; it stayed inside, like a stone locked up in my soul. I couldn’t cry about any of this until twenty years ago … those few weeks in the ghetto, the police station … turned me into ice. The forests protected the ice, but never dissolved it.’ His brothers taught him how to control his fear. ‘It was terrible, this control of fear; you have to put yourself in another place; you have to will to forget loss and pain… . We all controlled it, because if you didn’t, you couldn’t survive and you made mistakes. And mistakes meant death.’
When Aaron asked his brothers, Tuvia, Zush and Asael, why they had fled to the forest, all gave the same answer: ‘It was simple common sense; what else were we to do?’ But it was not simple common sense, certainly not to the tens of thousands of Jews in the ghettos who saw the forests as death. Aaron: ‘We were never going to leave the woods; we would be dead before they put us in a concentration camp.’ Yet, many Jews, including thousands from the villages around Novogrudek, saw it the other way: fleeing their families would bring death. Sonia Bielski understood their dilemma: ‘Where would they have gone? They had no experience in the woods; if it’s a choice between the certainty of staying with your family and trying to help them, and the uncertainty of a world you know nothing about … where’s the choice going to be?’ The journey from ghetto to forest, filled with danger, required a resolve to leave family and friends and venture into a universe most Jews could not imagine. Aaron: ‘Older people, city people, even people from our own town, made mistakes; they thought they could bargain with the Germans.’ The Judenrat, he argued, rarely encouraged exodus from the ghettos: ‘They believed the [Germans’] promises of resettlement. But even if there had been no collaboration between the Germans and the Judenrat, what did city people know from the woods? We lived there all our life, so the natural thing to do was to hide and live in them. We knew how to do it.’
But it would be wrong, he cautioned me, to think that the Bielski unit never had to deal with serious internal conflicts: ‘It was not easy; there was jealousy and stupidity. But even though many people disliked others and fought amongst themselves, petty stuff, we all managed to cooperate; there were rules, for example, no rapes. We lived as a community.’ Occasionally, city people found their way to the brigade:
‘If city people found us, they adapted. I remember a barber
came to our unit; he knew nothing about the forests. At first it
was funny; he tried to climb up on a horse with his right foot
on the left side. Of course, he ended up backwards. We
laughed; his predicament and embarrassment lifted our spirits,
if just for a moment. But after a couple of months the guy
turned into a great fighter and went on missions with Zush’s
partisans.
We tried to lead a civil life; we had concerts in the woods,
entertainers, like accordion players. And sometimes those con
certs made us cry … because they brought back the past.’
I asked him how he perceived his Jewish identity:
‘I saw it through the anti-Semitism; the hatred; the anti-Semitism of the Soviet partisans, the collaborators, the Poles who wanted to kill us. That made my identity as a partisan, a Jew; it’s why I took risks. I knew myself as a Jew who fought people who wanted to kill me. I was proud to be a Jew because the anti-Semites wanted to kill me. Look, here in the woods, I have my own rifle; I am surrounded by rifles. I know my brothers kill collaborators and Germans; I hear the stories; I speak with them after their missions.’
Tales of battles and victories restore the self; set right the past. ‘You realize your pride; you’re not afraid anymore; you look for the guy who beat up your father; you take revenge. That was our religion. It’s different now, of course. I go to shul and I’m deeply religious; but then religion meant killing Germans and collaborators. It was a primitive life, but a proud life … you see things and you understand what had to be done …’
At that moment his voice trails off, and again, like so many of the partisan survivors I interviewed, his eyes, his consciousness, seemed to be back there and the tears start to flow:
‘You asked me about religion, spirit … those days I thought not about God, but about death, my death, my brothers’ death, but even more than those fears, the deaths of those I hated. Some of the older people prayed; but I prayed that my brothers and his fighters would kill people. How could you not pray for killing when you saw what I did … it was horrible.’
He stops abruptly; lights another cigarette, pours himself a small glass of whisky. ‘I don’t know how I can say this …’ He paces, but looks at me; I think, does he want me to ask him to stop, not to have to go on? But as I’m about to respond, he dismisses me with a gesture of the hand as
if to communicate ‘No, don’t tell me not to speak.’
‘You need to hear this … a little ten-year-old girl is walking on the street; a normal day; I know her, a Jewish girl in the village.
Two Germans come up and start harassing her; they grab her, one takes her by the arm and the other by the leg; they laugh and pull, each one laughing harder than the other, each one pulling, straining. They pull until … until they tear her apart … she becomes pieces strewn on the ground. And the Germans walk off, still laughing … . How, after seeing this, could I be religious? How could I not hate? I was a kid; these memories never leave me. My brothers and I, how could we speak about God? Would God let a sweet, innocent child be torn apart?’
* * *
As we stand in front of this lovely apartment building in Palm Beach, with its shiny nameplate and understated 1930s elegance, saying goodbye to one another on a warm soothing day, Aaron Bell takes my arm and looks at me, eyes deep blue, piercing, cynical, despairing: ‘Thank God, you never had to go through these things; you grew up in heaven, with luck and luxury; you have no idea what it’s like to be a Jew in a Gentile world.’ Of course, he’s right; what can anyone who has not been through this say? For the young Aaron Bielski, fighting kept him alive; but something else sustained his life, something more elusive, but still present in his words. Fighting, yes, kept him close to his brothers and partially blocked the images of his father being beaten and slowly dying. But his hatred, his witnessing and prayer for revenge suggest an effort at purgation, at ridding the self and its history of the omnipresence of death. Violence for the child evolved into a complex ritual of healing, a moral and psychological process that pushed back into the recesses of consciousness the direct memory of brutalization. But it seemed to me now that Aaron Bell was telling me that it failed; no matter how brutal he could be, how vicious in retribution his brothers and their fighters, the memory of violent loss never goes away, etched into the psyche like an ancient stone carving, an icon, guarding sacred terrain. Death never deserts memory. He wants me to tell the story; get it right, describe a terrorized child surviving the madness, but a survival riddled with wounds that lay open to time and consciousness. ‘The terror; it is there, inside me; it is me.’ It was that thought that stayed, circling in my head, a hammer shattering the peaceful landscape.
The Moral Goodness of Violence: Necessity in the Forests
Political organization and political action
Jewish partisans, tied together by the passions of revenge and hate, refused to allow themselves to be defined by despair; yet, they possessed an overwhelming advantage over ghetto inhabitants: partisan units never suffered the devastating hunger or the susceptibility to disease that afflicted the ghetto. Even though the mortality rate in some units was as high as 75 percent (most the result of wounds sustained in combat), the accounts of partisan fighters show individuals not only recovering their selfhood, but discovering forms of political organization that, while based on strict command structure, never existed in order to give over to the enemy a quota of bodies. Partisan units sought to engage the enemy and take the enemy’s life; revenge, and in some instances rescue, not uncertainty and the hope that ‘negotiation’ characteristic of ghetto leadership would end the killing, drove these units.
Partisan brigades, both Soviet and Jewish, could hardly be described as democratic; the command organization derived from the Soviet army and communist methods of organization, and the brigade commander was an absolute ruler. Some underground units in the ghettos were organized as cells comprised of four or five individuals, each cell never knowing the identity of the others, with strict secrecy over membership defining inter-cell communication, and only commanders knowing all the details. Approximately 6 percent of all partisan fighters were Jews, but the proportion of
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Jews engaged in partisan resistance to their own population was almost double that of other nationalities.
In the forests, some of the units were as small as 10–20 strong. By July 1944, one unit numbered 137 male combatants and 422 women, children and elderly and in the case of the Bielskis, as large as 1,200. All units possessed strong and inviolable lines of authority. Smaller family camps operated on similar principles. Women, children and the elderly functioned in support capacities; combat assignments were for those with weapons. There were some eight to ten family camps in Byelorussia. These family camps played a major role in saving the lives of thousands of Jews who otherwise would have perished in the forests; approximately 5,200 Jews found their way to them. The casualty rates were low in these camps; the Bielski Brigade suffered only 6 percent casualties, as compared to 75 percent in some fighting units.
One partisan recalls that, after reaching the safety of the forest and joining a local partisan brigade:
‘A remarkable transformation took place. We felt stronger, almost unconquerable. In possession of an instrument for defense and attack, we had absolute control. Only yesterday we were creeping through the fields and villages, dreading every rustle and movement, fearful of the light of day. As an organized fighting group, with these weapons, we were able to leave the forest on horseback or on foot, with our guns suspended from our shoulders.’1
On balance though, even in the face of knowledge about the transports and the gas chambers, partisan bands had little influence on ghetto inhabitants. A letter smuggled into the Stolptiz ghetto by a partisan courier reads:
‘Time is your enemy. Organize yourselves while it is still feasible. Your young lives are precious. Let them not be destroyed. At all cost collect weapons. Time is short. Prepare to join in the partisan life. We can no longer listen to what our elders say. We must fight. I speak from experience. Nothing will be gained by our deaths in the ghetto.
Your friend, Siomka Farfel’2
If Frantz Fanon had known of these brigades, if he had met Zush Bielski, he may very well have used the data in The Wretched of the Earth3 to bear out his thesis: violence restores the psychological health of the oppressed and victimized. For Fanon, the colonized recovered their humanity only after they had crossed the psychological divide separating inaction, passivity and acceptance from action, transcendence and negation. Violence not only negated the oppressor’s effort to dehumanize the victim, it also did away with the negative self-image imposed on the victim by the oppressor or colonizer. In the case of the Jews, being outside the ghetto and the deteriorating environment of compromise, death and collaboration, the self could begin, once again, to live as a human being, but the action of living required the externalization of rage, turning against the aggressor what the aggressor had used against the self: violence.
Survivor accounts of killing Germans, in working together without fear of degradation, suggest that traditional values of compromise, negation and reason – used by the Judenrate with the Germans – could not work. Partisan leaders like Zush Bielski refused to compromise; they acted decisively and made a virtue out of killing (it was the supreme value in the camps) – a perspective beyond the vision of most Judenrat authority. In the forests, killing restored the self’s humanity and brought back from the dead many who psychologically had been shattered by ghettoization. Faye Schulman recalls: ‘My life consisted of swamps, water, ice and freezing cold weather; my lot a rifle and a bed on the hard ground winter and summer. I was not allowed to be sick – there was no medicine. The water I drank was full of bugs, but nothing happened to me. I was stronger than steel.’4 The forests brought her life.
A woman partisan remembers the pleasure of violence:
‘Everyone started beating them – with rifle butts, fists, boots. We beat them to mush. I remember that they were lying on the ground just barely breathing. And I … I don’t think I could ever do it again… . I came up to one of the German officers who had his legs spread. I started to kick him again and again in the groin. I was kicking and screaming, “For my mama! For my tate [daddy]! For my sisters!” I went on screaming out every name I could remember – all my relat
ives and friends who had been murdered. It was such a release! It was as if I had finally done what my mother had asked me to do. I still remembered my mother’s last words as she was waiting to be taken to the grave, “Tell Rochelle to take nekome [revenge] – revenge. Revenge!”’5
The damage done by Jewish partisan units including the Bielski Unit suggests their success in implementing the philosophy and action of violence. The Vilna detachments alone derailed 242 trains, 113 locomotives and 1,065 railroad cars; destroyed 12 storehouses, 35 bridges, 257 vehicles, 1,409 miles of railroad tracks, 4.2 miles of communication wires and 11 tanks; and engaged over 4,800 enemy soldiers.6 What is so striking about these figures is how strongly they contrast to the despairing diaries typical of ghetto life, and how critical the issue of violence was to Jewish survival and the recovery of Jewish self-respect. The following is an eyewitness account of partisan actions against the Germans; it is typical of what the fighting units accomplished:
‘I belonged to the sapper commandos. I crawled under bridges and planted mines. We were followed by an inspection unit checking to see if we’d carried out our assignments. German trains crashed down off the banks or were smashed on the tracks. We captured tons of supplies headed for the front. I manned a machine gun and stopped the Germans from harvesting the wheat… . I belonged to the assault group. There were seventy-five of us. We blew up the three German artillery pieces… . Several Jewish and Russian soldiers and I liberated a transport of 400 Jewish girls, who were barefoot and almost naked… . The girls were in a pitiful state. Some muttered as if they were insane.’7
When the Germans met resistance they backed off, whether that resistance came from people like Raul Wallenberg in Budapest or the five-man partisan brigade deep in a Russian forest. Disconnected, fragmented selves, falling into a deadly catatonia (common in the ghettos) were much less likely to appear in resistance bands – and much of the explanation for this can be found in the group project whose primary objective lay in warding off threats to identity through the organization of violence and the maintenance of communities committed to violent action.
Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust Page 10