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

From August 1941 to October 1943, about 100,000 Jews were ghettoized in Minsk, the occupied capital of Soviet Belorussia. Barbara Epstein tells the little-known story of the valiant effort to help Jews escape into the dense forests nearby, where they might find units of Soviet partisans. About 10,000 Jews succeeded; perhaps half surviving until the return of the Red Army in 1944. Barbara Epstein cites various reasons for the relative neglect of this history, including Western Jews' fixation on the Warsaw ghetto resistance and their anticommunist bias, which blinded them to the inspiring image of interethnic (if Soviet-style) cooperation in occupied Minsk. Epstein concludes, "from the vantage point of the . . . twenty-first century, armed struggle seems less inspiring than it once may have. That for the Minsk ghetto saving lives was a major goal, if subordinate to taking up arms, is to its credit" (p. 292). The principal strength and weakness of this book spring from the author's dependence on recent interviews in Minsk and Israel, as well as on a number of transcribed postwar interviews. Unlike the ghettos in Warsaw and Łódź, the Minsk ghetto apparently did not leave behind significant quantities of original documents assembled in clandestine archives.

Epstein begins by delineating Jewish-Belorussian solidarity during the Second World War. Throughout Eastern Europe, Communists were the most reliable allies of Jewish underground organizations (p. 35). The Communists' weakness generally deprived the Jews of a potential ally. To explain why Minsk was different, Epstein underscores the key factors of Soviet internationalism, Belorussian tolerance, a relative absence of strong ethnic friction, and the acculturation of Minsk Jews (p. 41).

The organization of the Minsk ghetto occurred in late July 1941, when all Jews were ordered to move into a run-down former Jewish neighborhood, now surrounded with barbed wire. The Germans also brought in thousands of Jews from other places, including about 5,000 from Germany and other Central European lands (pp. 82-91). In a series of "actions" (called "pogroms" by Minsk Jews) in November 1941, March 1942, and July 1942, the Germans gradually murdered more than 60,000 Jews outside Minsk. In the largest, in July 1942, the Germans employed four trucks fitted out as mobile gas chambers. On October 21, 1943, most of the remaining 2,000 Jews were trucked away to be killed (pp. 100-109). Chapters 4 and 5 describe how underground conspiratorial groups arose and cooperated in both the Minsk ghetto and in the rest of the city.

The vast majority of Jews who escaped did so in the spring and summer of 1943, ironically without direct help by the underground (p. 191). But Epstein has compiled a mosaic of narratives of wartime heroism based on testimonies and memoirs, most of them from the viewpoint of women, including several who were child guides for fleeing groups (pp. 213-19). Among documented instances of aid is the romantic adventure of German Lt. Willi Schultz and his lover, Ilse Stein—a German-Jewish deportee. In March 1943 they escaped together to the forest and were clandestinely flown to Moscow. Schultz was arrested and eventually died in a POW camp (pp. 219-27). The story was turned into a German theatrical movie in 1994 as Die Judin und der Hauptmann: Die Geschichte der Ilse Stein (p. 317).

Sadly, members of the Minsk underground came to be regarded by the Soviets as probable traitors working for the Germans: since the Germans arrested hundreds during two sweeps in 1942, those left behind were considered possible collaborators. (The Soviets assumed that anyone who had lived under German rule and survived likely was a traitor.) At least 126 veterans of the Minsk underground were arrested and imprisoned in the Gulag. Not until 1960 did appeals bring about their rehabilitation (pp. 229-51).

Epstein compares the Minsk ghetto to those in Vilna, Bialystok, Warsaw, and elsewhere. In some ways the experience of Lithuania's...