Cholawsky - Jews of Bielorussia During World War II

First published 1998 by OPA (Overseas Publishers Association)

Published 2018 by Routledge

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Cholawsky, Shalom, 1914

The Jews of Bielorussia during World War II

1. World War, 19391945 Jewish resistance Belarus

2. World War, 19391945 Jewish resistance Belarus Case studies

I. Title

940.5337

ISBN 13: 978-90-5702-193-0 (hbk)

This study fills a lacuna in the history of the fate of the Jews in Bielorussia during the Holocaust. The ghettos of Bielorussia were populated by a vibrant Jewish community, with its own particular traditions, its own unique characteristics justifying our detailed examination of its fate. In general, it may be said that every region, both in Eastern Europe and in other parts of the continent, differed from its neighbors. For Bielorussia that statement is of even greater validity. This region of forests and marshes, situated at the edge of the society and economy of the political unit to which it belonged (once Poland and today Belarus), contained villages and towns serving as centers for farming and forestry. The Bielorussians arrived at their self-awareness late and only partially, and the many Jews who lived there could not but feel themselves as being on a higher level of cultural development than the local society. There was, therefore, no assimilation. But the alienation which existed with its origin in a combination of religious and cultural motives on the one hand, and the simple economic fact that the Jews formed a middle stratum of craftsmen and petty traders on the other, was not extreme to the point of murderous hatred as it was in the Ukraine. That is not to say that the Bielorussians were a Jew-loving people or that we could plant a very thick forest of trees in honor of gentiles who went out of their way to help Jews. But there were such gentiles among them, and in a far larger proportion than among the Lithuanians to the northwest or the Ukrainians to the south. In the face of Nazi murderousness, the Jews had greater prospects of survival in the Bielorussian villages than in other regions.

The forest alters the picture we have of central or western Poland: Wild forest and not a grove of cultivated woods; a jungle-forest where only those privy to its secret knew its paths; where it was not possible to exist except in the few villages or the farms cleared from its midst.

Dr Cholawsky paints a broad picture of the area, the Jews within it and their special culture. This is the true Jewish town, rather than the product of nostalgic sentimentality. In the 1930s it was a town where the majority were already secular and Zionist, with Hebrew disseminated from the Tarbut school, and with strong Zionist movements. There was a great deal of poverty in it, but there were also many cultural enterprises. The townspeople were, as I have said, craftsmen, shopkeepers and traders for the most part, but there was also an important group of intellectuals and a few wealthy persons and among them industrialists and bigger traders.

The Soviet era, 19391941, enjoys a careful treatment at Dr Cholawskys hands. It forms the background for the events which took place after the German invasion of the USSR. Nazi policies, though they may already be familiar to us in their broadest sense, are described in detail. This books uniqueness, however lies in its description and analysis of the fate of the regions Jews, imprisoned into ghettos run by the Jewish Councils or Judenrats, and sentenced to harsh extinction.

The battle for the lives of these Jews is the books central theme. The Judenrte are revealed to have been for the most part, though not always, authentic Jewish leaders of the Jewish public, whom they attempted to help and rescue. There were also those who came to the point of armed resistance. The public responded and the proximity of the forest opened possibilities that did not exist in central and western Poland where there are no forests of this kind.

The book before us describes the organization for active resistance and for battle, and points to the fact that we have here a mass phenomenon and not something exceptional. That unique phenomenon is carefully examined, the author analyzes the motives, the paths taken and the results. In the end, many thousands went into the forest. Here the books story concludes and we can only hope that Dr Cholawsky will continue his research and tell us what happened in the forest in both Western and Eastern Bielorussia and the armed resistance within it.

Here we have a special tribe of Jews, a special way of response, and an author who is not only an historian trained in his craft, but was also the commander of the first revolt in the region in Nieswiezh. He has written about that experience in another book: Soldiers from the Ghetto, published by Moreshet in 1973. Dr Cholawsky has opened a window for us onto an important section of Jewry, whose heirs we are, as we are the heirs of all the Jews who died in the Holocaust, a Jewry that fought for its life as long as it could. The descriptions and analyses in this book will assist us in our attempt to understand that reality, and for that we thank the author.

Yehuda Bauer

Ever since the establishment of the first Jewish communities (after the Mongolian conquest) the Jews of Bielorussia had been affected by Bielorussias lack of political independence. Political changes in this geographical area, a region of dispute and war between Russia, Poland and Lithuania, also affected the economic, social and cultural development of its Jews. Up until the fourteenth century, the Bielorussian Jews had been the subjects of the Lithuanian principalities; with growing Polish influence in the area they became an integral part of Polish Jewry and subject to the good graces of the Polish rulers. After Polands partition in 1772 and until the end of World War I, they formed part of Russian Jewry. With Bielorussias partition following the Riga Pact of 1920, the Bielorussian Jews found themselves once more divided.

According to the first population census of independent Poland in 1921, the Jews numbered 2,850,000, 10.5 percent of the total population. This census did not include Upper Silesia, the city of Vilno and the Vilno, Troki, Oszmiana and Swieciany districts; from the end of the nineteenth century until the 1920s the Jewish population declined in these districts.