The Minsk Ghetto 1941-1943: Jewish Resistance and Soviet Internationalism (review)

Resistance to the Nazi Holocaust employed more than one strategy. Jews who escaped the ghetto of Minsk to join partisans in the woods engaged in an act of defiance no less honorable than that of the Jews who used armed resistance in the well-known Warsaw ghetto uprising. Epstein supports this thesis by building her case with facts, names, and details as dense as the nearby woods where partisans, including Jews, gathered to fight Nazi occupation. Historical, political, and geographical circumstances in Byelorussia—Minsk, in particular—provided the opportunity for Jews to attempt to defy certain death. Four waves of Nazi massacres of Jews in the Minsk ghetto from 1941 to 1942 made it all too evident what fate awaited them. Some 10,000 Jews from a ghetto population of about 100,000 dared to join forces with bands of partisans, with the intent not only to save their own lives but also to bring victory to the Soviet Union.

Contrasted with Warsaw or Kovno, Minsk had been under Soviet rule for about two decades by 1941. During that period, relatively good relations had developed between Jews and Byelorussian Communists, who adopted an internationalist attitude of acceptance of all people. Because of these friendly ties, the ghetto underground linked with a well-organized city underground. Individual acts of courage on the part of Communists, Byelorussians, Jews, POWS, and even a few sympathetic Germans made it possible to form a conduit from the ghetto to the forest close enough to reach in a day's journey. Lax guarding of the ghetto and elaborate ruses allowed Jewish men and women, especially if armed, to join partisan forces and often, with the help of clergy, to spirit away Jewish children to orphanages or to sequester them in private Byelorussian homes. Not all outcomes, perhaps not even half, were successful. Some escapees and their helpers were executed despite clever planning and immense daring. To cap the list of cascading tragedies, the Soviets after the war felt nothing but mistrust of the participants of both the Byelorussian and Jewish underground, suspecting that survival depended on collaboration with the Germans. At worst, survivors were killed; at best, they suffered discrimination. It took decades of pleading by survivors to win belated Soviet recognition; for many this grudging official acceptance came too late.

Based on memoirs, a substantial number of interviews with survivors in both Minsk and Israel, and copious secondary material, Epstein describes in detail numerous acts of resistance that place Minsk on the honor roll of Jewish defiance of Nazi genocide, a record that historians have largely ignored. Maps of Eastern Europe, the Minsk ghetto, and locations of partisan bands, as well as a roster of names with brief biographies, enhance the book. While there are innumerable, and perhaps unavoidable, repetitions of events in a narrative organized topically rather than chronologically, this book serves as a sturdy memorial to the Jews of Minsk and to all those who aided them. A painfully sad book to read, it nonetheless fills in the blank spaces of a chapter of history filled with horrendous hatred but also with soaring heroism.