Forest Jews -
Belsky brothers
Forest Jews - the Belsky brothers Three brothers - Tuvya, Asael and Zus - saved as many Jews as the world famous Oskar Schindler. The partisan detachment, led by the eldest of the brothers, destroyed almost as many enemies in battles with the occupiers as the heroes of the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto. For many years, materials about their exploits were only mentioned in a few books published outside the USSR. Who would have allowed in the former USSR to write about the heroic exploits of Jews who left for Israel after the war?!
Tevye, Zus and Asael Belsky
Peter Duffy once came across a reference on the Internet to the so-called “Forest Jews”. I became interested in what it was and discovered that relatives and descendants of these heroes lived not far from him in Brooklyn. Questions and interviews with them and the aging veterans of the Belsky detachment allowed the journalist to plunge into the little-known history of Jewish resistance to the Nazis. But the journalist did not stop there. He discovered that there were published and unpublished memoirs. However, they were written in Hebrew, which Peter did not know. They were transferred to him. Then he went to Belarus. I visited the places where the Belsky brothers were born, lived, and fought, and visited the remains of the former underground camp. Peter worked in the Belarusian archives for about a month, then went to Israel and found in the archives of the Yad Vashem Institute additional information. From all this material, a most interesting and exciting book was then born.
It begins with the history of the Belsky family, whose ancestors in the 19th century settled in the small village of Stankevichi, located between the cities of Lida and Novogrudok, not far from the famous Nalibokskaya Pushcha. They were the only Jewish family in this village and belonged to a small part of the Belarusian Jewish peasants. Since in Tsarist Russia Jews did not have the right to own land, they rented small plots from their neighbors. But the income from this farm could not provide the most modest existence, and the Belskys built a water mill. They conducted their business honestly and earned the respect of others. When, at the end of the 19th century, the tsarist government banned Jews from owning any enterprises in the villages, the Belskys found a man who was legally listed as the owner of the mill. Many people knew about this, but there were no informers.
The beginning of the twentieth century brought many changes to the life of the Belsky family. During the First World War they survived the German occupation, then the area went to Poland. In the fall of 1939, after the division of Poland between Stalin and Hitler, the Bielskis became citizens of the USSR. The Soviet government, of course, nationalized the mill.
In the family of David and Bailey Belsky, the eldest son Tuvya stood out noticeably. He was born in 1906. He received his Jewish education in a cheder in a neighboring village, then studied at a Polish school. Like everyone else who lived in this area, he knew Russian, Belarusian and Polish languages, not to mention Yiddish. He also knew Hebrew. (In 1946, his memoirs “Forest Jews” were published in Jerusalem in Hebrew - I.K.). During the First World War, he also mastered German. In their village, a small unit of German soldiers was stationed in an empty house. They liked this nimble boy who reminded them of their children. Tuvya spent days and nights among his new acquaintances, and after they left it turned out that he knew German perfectly. He completed active military service in the Polish army. From a private he rose to a non-commissioned officer. He returned home and got married. As his wife's dowry, he received a small store.
After Western Belarus joined the USSR, two younger Belskys - Asael and Zus - were drafted into the Red Army. Shortly before Germany attacked the USSR, the NKVD began an action to identify bourgeois elements and expel them to Siberia. Tuvya, as a shop owner, also fit into this category. After the store was nationalized, he realized that his turn would soon come, and he left the small town where he had previously lived and took a job elsewhere as an assistant accountant.
Soon after the German attack on the USSR, the Germans occupied this entire area. Anti-Jewish actions immediately began: ghettos, and then the extermination of Jews. Tuvya did not obey German laws, did not register, and did not wear a yellow six-pointed star. A large number of friends among the local population, knowledge of the German language, and appearance atypical for a Jew saved him from many checks. Executions of the Jewish population began. Tuvya's father told him to go into the forest. His two brothers also left with him and, having escaped the encirclement, managed to get home. By this time, collaborators had been found who reported the Belsky brothers to the German authorities. The parents were arrested and tortured to make them confess where their three adult sons had gone, but they said nothing, and soon the Germans shot their father, mother and younger sister. Twelve-year-old Aron miraculously escaped execution and soon joined his older brothers. At first, the Belskys hid with peasant friends, but soon realized that their salvation lay in the dense forests of the Nalibokskaya Pushcha. They knew these forests from early childhood.
Partisans of Belsky's detachment in Nalibokskaya Pushcha, 1944
First of all, Tuvya decided to save all his immediate relatives, urging them to join them. Then, when Gestapo Einsatz teams arrived in the area for the “final solution of the Jewish question” (under this euphemism the Nazis hid the complete extermination of the Jewish population), he and his brothers began to make their way into the ghettos of Lida, Novogrudok, and other cities and towns, calling for escape from them. So gradually, from a small group of several dozen people, a detachment was born that began to fight the Nazis. It was very bad with weapons. Tuvya came into contact with several small partisan detachments, led by former Red Army commanders. But they had the same difficulties. Weapons had to be obtained in battles with the invaders and their accomplices. Tuvya considered his main task to be saving as many Jews as possible. Having organized the escape of a group of ghetto prisoners from Lida, he addressed them with the following words: “Friends, this is one of the most happy days in my life. These are the moments I live for: look how many people managed to get out of the ghetto! I can't guarantee you anything. We are trying to survive, but we could all die. And we will try to preserve as much as possible more lives. We accept everyone and refuse no one, neither the elderly, nor children, nor women. There are many dangers that await us, but if we are to die, at least we will die as human beings."
Soldiers of the Belsky brothers detachment
Tuvya's detachment grew and joined the general partisan movement in the occupied territory. Soon his detachment was given the name Ordzhonikidze and he became part of the Kirov partisan brigade. The commander of the detachment was Tuvya, Asael became his deputy, and Zus commanded intelligence and counterintelligence. It became easier with weapons - they were now supplied to the partisans from the “mainland”. It became possible to send the seriously wounded there by plane. Tuvya’s detachment, together with others, began to be on duty and guard the partisan airfield. Soon Tuvya was invited to a meeting by the commander of all partisan formations in the region, General Platon. This was the pseudonym of the secretary of the Baranovichi underground regional party committee, Vasily Chernyshev. Tuvya, in addition to the ability to command, also turned out to be an experienced diplomat. He made a good impression, and Chernyshev subsequently helped the detachment in many ways. Not all partisan commanders treated the Jewish partisan detachment well. After all, only a quarter of Tuvya’s detachment consisted of armed fighters. Most of them consisted of women, old people and children. And many believed that energy and resources should not be spent on protecting and guarding this family camp. Chernyshev decided to visit the detachment himself. He saw well-equipped and camouflaged underground dugouts, in which not only people lived, but also various workshops were located: shoemaking, sewing, weapons, leather, as well as an underground hospital. The general was presented with leather uniforms and boots made in the workshops of the camp. He learned that there were 60 cows and 30 horses in the camp, and that people here were not only self-sufficient, but also helping others. After visiting the Belsky detachment, Chernyshev stopped all talk about liquidating the family camp.
The partisan detachment of the Belsky brothers successfully participated in battles with German troops during anti-partisan operations; the detachment's demolitionists derailed German trains, burned and blew up bridges, and damaged communication lines. The Germans decided to destroy the detachment about which there were legends. Specially trained German units began the largest blockade of the entire war. There seemed to be no way out, but there was one. Tuvya and his people really knew the surrounding forests as if they were their own. own house, and a detachment of about a thousand people moved into the depths of the forest. They knew that there was a small island among the swamps. At night they reached a swamp, which they had to cross at times in chest-deep water. They walked in silence, even the children did not cry. The dense forests on this island provided reliable shelter from enemy aircraft. In the summer of 1944, as a result of Operation Bagration, the German group in Belarus was surrounded and defeated. And in July 1944, the surrounding residents were surprised to see how an almost kilometer-long procession of Tuvya Belsky’s detachment appeared from the depths of the Pushcha. Well-armed partisans walked ahead, many of them wearing leather jackets made in the camp. And behind them are the rest of the squad. National composition he was left in no doubt. And this after German propaganda claimed that Belarus was “Judenfrei,” that is, completely cleared of Jews. In the morning, the Germans reached the empty camp, followed the fugitives and, approaching the swamp, tried to pass through it, but could not. For three days they stood around this swamp, trying to find passages to the island, and then left the forest. “Look how many there are,” the peasants said to each other in surprise, “and how they managed to survive...”
Soon Tuvya was called to Minsk, where he compiled a full report on the activities of his detachment. Peter Duffy found this report in the archives of the Republic of Belarus and quotes its most significant parts in the book. He also got acquainted with the personal file of Tuvya Belsky. One of the brothers, Asael, was drafted into the Red Army and died shortly before the Victory. Tuvya and Zus began to work in Soviet institutions. Tuvya soon realized that they might remember his “bourgeois” past. At that time, former Polish citizens were allowed to repatriate to Poland. The brothers and their families went to Vilnius, filled out the relevant documents and returned to Poland. But the hostile attitude of the local population forced them to move to Palestine.
Jews from the family unit of the Belsky brothers
Soon after the creation of the State of Israel, they took part in wars with neighboring Arab countries who sought to destroy the Jewish state. In the mid-50s, Tuvya and Zus with their families, as well as Aron, moved to the United States. In Israel, Tuvya Belsky did not feel entirely comfortable. What did the Israeli politicians of that time care about the former commander of a partisan detachment in the distant Belarusian forests?! Many members of Tuvya’s detachment, who moved to Palestine after the war, were shocked when they saw their combat commander behind the wheel of a taxi. So he had to earn his daily bread.
And it was not easy in America. They settled in Brooklyn, and Tuvya became a truck driver, the second brother Zus became the owner of several taxis. The children grew up, grandchildren appeared, Tuvya grew old and sick. His former subordinates, who emigrated to the United States, decided to celebrate the 80th birthday of their commander. A few months before Tuvia’s death, in the summer of 1986, the people he saved rented a luxurious banquet hall at the Hilton Hotel in New York. When Tuvya Belsky appeared before the crowd in a tailcoat with a rose in his buttonhole, 600 people in the crowded hall stood up and greeted him with thunderous applause. It was with difficulty that the hall was calmed down; one after another, people began to climb up to the podium and talk about the heroic deeds of the hero of the day. For the first time, many of them saw tears in the eyes of the seemingly iron Tuvya. He died in December 1986. Zus died in 1995. Aron now lives in Miami. Tuvya Belsky was buried in a Jewish cemetery on Long Island, but a year later, at the urgent request of the association of partisans, underground fighters and participants in the ghetto uprisings, he was reburied with military honors in Jerusalem at the Givat Shaul cemetery.
Peter Duffy's book dedicated to the Belsky brothers is not the only one and not the first. Ten years ago, Nechama Teck, a professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut, published the book "Defiance. The Bielski Partisans." The difference between Duffy’s book and Tek’s book is that the first mainly bases his book on documentary data, and the second mainly on the memories of the partisans of this detachment and the Belsky relatives. Tek writes that she has repeatedly appealed to the Belarusian authorities with a request to allow her to work in the archives or to send copies of the materials she needs, but has not received any answers. But both books organically complement each other and resurrect the little-known story of the heroic resistance of Jews during the Second World War. The books are a worthy monument to those who did not kneel before the enemy and defended their lives, honor and dignity with arms in hand, as well as to those who gave their lives to save others.
Ilya Kuksin
Mishpokha
The history of the Jewish Resistance, with few exceptions, is little known. This is natural and was explained at different times by different historical and political reasons. In the official historiography of the Soviet Union, not only the Resistance, but also the tragedy of the Jews during the Nazi occupation was kept silent. Few steles installed in places of mass executions of Jews spoke of tortured “Soviet citizens,” and there were only a few such memorial signs. It was all the more incredible in those years to publish the true history of sometimes hundreds of armed detachments, united by ethnic origin and a common threat, combined (for many) with true, but by no means communist, patriotism and ardent anti-fascism.
Oddly enough, in other, freer countries, the ideological and historical conjuncture “corrected” the history of the Resistance in a broader sense, and not least in everything related to the Jewish tragedy. Only now is a rethinking of the history and role of the Spanish, French and Italian partisans beginning, recognized heroes and yesterday's traitors appear in a new light. Many occupied governments, anti-fascist allies and even partisans have something to reproach themselves with in relation to millions of people whose deaths could have been delayed or even prevented if it had been more... let's say, a priority! Israel, which carefully treats all the evidence of the Holocaust, was not protected from the ideological choice of the degree of coverage of its more or less “suitable” facets.
The heroic, almost unbelievable story of the family camp and partisan detachment of the Belsky brothers, who saved, together with their comrades-in-arms, more than 1,200 captive Jews and inflicted significant damage on the occupiers of the land that they considered theirs, is sad proof of yet another historical injustice. The Soviet archives, containing documents confiscated by the NKVD of the historiographer of this “forest Jerusalem” Shmuel Amarant, who worked on the chronicle of the exodus to Nalibokskaya Pushcha, are still not ready to reveal their secrets...
The story discussed below does not end with the liberation of the occupied zones and the salvation of the inhabitants of “forest Jerusalem”. It continues with the escape of the two surviving Belsky forest commanders and their families from imminent arrest: many of the Soviet commissars remembered the time when the Belsky forest base fed and clothed Soviet partisans and soldiers. It continues further - wandering around post-war Europe, where the Polish Home Army, a long-time enemy of the Belarusian Jewish partisans who fought under the red flags, still poses a real danger to them... It continues with the arrival in Palestine, engulfed in “their” war, where the legendary heroes Belarusian Pushcha were never able to take a worthy place or even just make ends meet and were forced to leave for America, where their long life ended almost at the end of the century.
Two books describe this stunning, action-packed epic. The author of one of them, Nechama Tek, a professor of sociology, herself survived the Holocaust, and her book “Challenge. Bielski Partisans” is a harmonious part of the history of her people and her personally. The author of another book, American journalist Peter Duffy, accidentally came across a mention of the Jewish Belsky partisans on the Internet and, shocked, spent two years collecting information, which allowed him to write the chronicle “The Belsky Brothers. The true story of three men who fought Nazism, saved 1,200 Jews and built a village in the forest." Both of these books are almost the only (and even more valuable) monument to those who heroically defended not only their own lives and the lives of loved ones, but also the honor and dignity of their people, their country, to those who risked everything they had achieved in order to save and save others.
Miller David Belsky, his wife Beile and their many children were the only Jewish family in the Belarusian village of Stankevichi near Novogrudok, which changed owners several times. A small piece of land on which the Belskys, who led a typical peasant lifestyle, successfully worked, constantly passed from hand to hand, and its inhabitants, both Jewish, Polish and Belarusian, quickly learned to adjust to the constantly changing decrees and laws of Lithuanian and Polish , Russian, German authorities. After the outbreak of the First World War, the change of power began to resemble a rotating kaleidoscope. For the Belskys and the Jews who inhabited Novogrudok and Lida, the authorities differed only in the degree of anti-Semitism that was always present and, accordingly, in the tricks that had to be resorted to in order to continue such a seemingly non-political activity as cultivating the land and producing flour. 
The Belsky mill served the entire district, they were well known by neighbors of all nationalities, and, unlike the Jewish families inhabiting Novogrudok and Lida, they all spoke fluent Belarusian, Polish and Russian. The elder brother, Tuvya, mastered German well during the first German occupation, and after serving for two years under the Polish banner, he mastered the basics of military science...
Soviet power came to Stankiewicz in 1939, replacing the extremely anti-Semitic regime of Pilsudski and the Second Polish Republic. The arrival of the Bolsheviks caused euphoria among the Jewish population, but their short-lived rule was manifested in the expropriation of relatively prosperous enterprises and shops from Jews, the closure of synagogues and places of worship, and the activities of NKVD representatives who quickly arrived on the scene, mainly interested in Zionists and Bundists, popular among the poor... Almost all segments of the Jewish population found themselves in the ranks of enemies, class and political.
David, the father of the family, proceeded from the principle that it was necessary to maintain friendly relations with everyone, and never entered into conflict. Three brothers - Tuvya, Asael and Zus - had a completely different temperament and quickly became famous in the area for their intransigence towards scoffers and anti-Semites, as well as those who, taking advantage of the pogrom mood of the population, tried to profit from the intimidated local Jews. After several showdowns with pitchforks in their hands, the Belsky farm was left alone.
Meanwhile, the 11 Belsky children grew up, and their lives settled down very differently: one became a rabbi, another emigrated to America, the third joined the communist local council... Asael gradually took over the business of the mill from his father. Tuvya settled in Lida and worked as an accountant.
After the outbreak of World War II, the brothers Asael and Zus, whose posts in communist structures were immediately reported to the occupiers by their neighbors, were forced to hide with friendly neighbors and in the forest near the farm. The two youngest, Yakov and Abram, were shot dead after their arrest. Tuvya, using excellent knowledge different languages and disguised as a peasant, continued to hide in the vicinity of Lida, separated from his wife Sonya, who remained in the ghetto in Lida.
The situation changed for the worse when Sturmbannführer Wilhelm Traub, appointed by the Nazis as Commissar of Novogrudok, took a professional approach to the “Jewish question.” In December 1941, the younger Belsky, Aron, returning from the forest after meeting with his brothers, saw a Nazi van taking his parents away from the farm. He managed to warn his older brothers, who, without waiting to continue, took Taibe’s sister, her husband, child and mother-in-law into the forest from another farm. On December 7, the Bielski parents, as well as Sila (wife Zusya) and her newborn daughter, were shot along with 4 thousand other local Jews in the first large-scale operation of the extermination that began.
After wandering for months on the brink of death, the older brothers Tuvya, Asael, Zus and the teenager Aron gathered all their surviving relatives in the forest. In June 1942, Tuvya brought his wife Sonya and her family out of the Lida ghetto. Not stopping there, they infiltrated neighboring ghettos and took out more distant relatives. Their arsenal by that time consisted of one poorly functioning pistol, a gift from a faithful friend. However, thanks to the operation carried out jointly with Soviet soldiers encountered in the forest, who had lagged behind their units, their dream of defending their lives and those of their loved ones with arms in hand became more realistic. After this, Asael, who had long been in love with the girl Haya, snuck into the Polish house where she and her parents were hiding, and with ritual words in Hebrew, which usually accompany a marriage proposal, handed her... a Mauser. Thus, “according to the laws of war,” in the presence of the taken aback Poles and the bride’s parents, the marriage of the third forest brother was formalized. The wedding night took place in a makeshift shooting range, where Asael taught his young wife how to shoot: there was no time to waste. 
Gradually, they led the surviving relatives out of the ghetto into the forest and dug dugouts. A detachment of more than 20 people - blood relatives - was formed. Sister Taibe’s newborn daughter was baptized and left with her Polish neighbors. The rest began a long forest odyssey.
Tuvya stood at the head of the detachment. In 1941 he turned 36 years old, and thanks to his military service in the Polish army, charismatic personality and rich life experience, his authority was not in doubt. The need to obtain food led them to expropriate food from local peasants and Germans, and soon their cold-blooded and daring raids earned them an attitude that mixed hatred, fear, and admiration. The detachment, most of which were family members who were not able to fight, needed fighters. In response to his cherished desire - to save as many Jews as possible from death, Tuvya decides to penetrate the surrounding ghettos and encourage people to go into the forests. However, the inhabitants, still hoping for a successful outcome, were in no hurry to make this decision. The forest was scary. And Tuvya had little to offer.
It was then that Tuvya made a decision that determined the further fate of the detachment: to save everyone, and not just combat-ready Jews. Take old people, newborns, disabled people into the forest - all those who not only complicated the group’s life in the forest, but also, in the opinion of many, often jeopardized its very existence. Tuvya, however, declared that it was more important for him “to save one old Jewish woman from death than to kill ten Germans,” and this clearly formulated principle remained his credo until the end of the war, despite harsh criticism of other partisan detachments, a number of which were completely hopeless, at first look, situations and discord within the squad itself. Listening to Soviet radio with its anti-fascist pathos and hoping for strong allies, Tuvya designates his squad as communist and gives it the name Georgy Zhukov, whom he often hears about in radio broadcasts.
The rumor about the Belsky brothers spread more and more widely, and the inhabitants of various ghettos left at their own peril and risk to look for the forest detachment alone or in groups. The turning point for the detachment was the meeting with the Soviet partisan Viktor Panchenkov, who believed both Tuvier himself and his noble task of saving his people and joined forces with him to fight the Nazis.
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The expanded detachment was preparing to face the winter of 1942–43. It was decided to make two bases near Stankevichi: one in the forest near Perelaz, the other near Zabelovo. The bases consisted of perfectly camouflaged dugout barracks with a separate kitchen and hospital. But due to the approach of German detachments, who were trying to expel all groups of partisans from the forest, the bases were abandoned and the detachment began an exhausting wandering through the surrounding forests. No one felt safe for a minute; enemies were constantly following in their tracks. Some weakened people at times came out of the forest and hid with local residents who sympathized with them. So on January 5, 1943, two groups from the Belsky detachment were discovered and shot. On this day, Tuvia’s wife, Sonya, died. The detachment, numbering just over a hundred people, was also subject to the threat of internal split, since some of the young and strong people demanded the separation of the “old and small” from the combat-ready members of the commune.
However, the group continued to fight for their own survival and for the freedom of their region. The “forest Jews,” as they called themselves, had ever greater strength, carried out acts of sabotage, attacked military convoys, and dealt with traitors and policemen. In February 1943, the group was exposed to a terrible risk due to an unfortunate mistake: blood dripping from the carcass of a slaughtered steer led the German detachment directly to the forest base. The detachment scattered through the forest, and most of the people miraculously escaped, but the barely habitable place again had to be abandoned and cold winter settle into the new parking lot.
Gradually, the forests were increasingly filled with groups of partisans, and the Soviet leadership did not want to put up with their somewhat chaotic existence. Special communist emissaries were sent to the region, who defined a strict hierarchy, introduced unquestionable rules and had the broadest powers, including carrying out death sentences for those who did not want to comply. The sectors where certain groups could look for food were clearly divided, the groups were reorganized and subordinated to new political commissars and military leaders. Political bureaus and even Komsomol cells were created in the groups. The ethnic character of the Belsky group did not inspire confidence among their political superiors, not to mention the fact that anti-Semitism was widespread among Soviet partisans. Skillfully playing on the internal contradictions of the detachment and the rejection of the Jewish group by the rest of the partisans, the communist leadership tried several times to disband the detachment, and only Tuvya’s constant diplomatic efforts saved his charges, who obviously would not have survived if cut off from the large group.
After a series of attacks by the Germans and subsequent wanderings through the forest, Tuvya decides to take the detachment from the forests he knows well into the unknown thickets of the Nalibokskaya Pushcha. Laughingly comparing himself to Moses, Tuvya led his forest people on a long journey on foot. They walked at night and hid during the day. The column stretched for many tens of meters. They carried very little provisions, which led to the rapid exhaustion from hunger of many participants in the new exodus. In addition, the forest became deeper and deeper, the wolves came closer and closer to the travelers, few knew the road, and they knew it very mediocrely. After arriving on the shores of Lake Kroman, where the detachment decided to stop, Tuvya was summoned to the headquarters of General Platon (military pseudonym of Vasil Chernyshev), who controlled the forces of local partisans, who gave the detachment the name Ordzhonikidze and subordinated it to the brigade named after. Kirov under the command of Belsky's old friend Viktor Panchenkov. General Platon warned Tuvya that the Germans were gathering forces for a gigantic attack on Nalibokskaya Pushcha. Operation Hermann united an SS squadron notorious for atrocities, consisting of freed criminals under the command of Dirlewanger, the 2nd SS unit, an SS artillery brigade, several rifle squads, a group of German gendarmes, a unit of Polish elite riflemen, a Lithuanian police squad and a group of Luftwaffe bombers . On July 15, all these combined forces moved to Nalibokskaya Pushcha. Tuvya Belsky realized that in the hope of leading his squad to a safer place, he had led them into a deadly trap.
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Russian detachments scattered through the forest, some of them felled trees and prepared for a heroic and doomed defense. The position of Tuvya's detachment, burdened by sick old people, children and having a relatively small number of fighters, was especially difficult. The Pushcha was completely surrounded, Luftwaffe planes dropped bombs, and the combined forces of the Nazis cleared a road in the forest that opened the way for tanks. Two people from Tuvya’s detachment suggested trying to find the island of Krasnaya Gorka, lost in the depths of the swamps, where the wanderers could try to hide. The chances of getting there undetected (and the detachment already numbered 800 people) were slim, but the noise of approaching tanks was already heard at the base, and there was no time to think. The last of the kilometer-long chain of forest Jews moving in complete silence left the base a few minutes before the first groups of fascists entered there. In the forest, voices were heard through loudspeakers, calling on partisans of different detachments in three languages to surrender. Bullets and shells rained down, the voices of the pursuers were heard from right and left. However, after long hours of grueling march through the swamps, the party managed to reach this tiny piece of land in the impassable swamps, and only one person died along the way. They remained there for two weeks, without food and with little drinking water. Two weeks later, unable to bear the hunger any longer, small groups of Jewish partisans began to emerge from the swamps in desperation. Only then did they learn that a few days earlier the blockade of the Pushcha had been lifted. The incredible happened - 800 people were saved in the very center of the cordon of the united Nazi forces. Moreover, the Nazis, who had unleashed their anger on the surrounding villages and destroyed the farms around the Pushcha, left the places they had devastated, leaving the Bielski detachment much greater freedom of action than before.
Then there were grueling movements; The detachment was nevertheless divided into family and combat units. The family camp, which at that time included approximately 700 people and was called the “detachment named after Kalinin,” finally settled in Nalibokskaya Pushcha; Tuvya commanded them. The fighters under the command of Zusya (but subordinate to the Soviet underground) - the “Ordzhonikidze detachment” - returned to the Stankevichi area. Asael was called to the headquarters of the Kirov brigade to manage the intelligence department. The decision to separate these three inseparable destinies was probably dictated by the increased influence of the three brothers and their small state within the state: this was unacceptable to the Soviet leadership even in enemy-occupied territories.
But the Belskys had no choice. The three brothers each went to their own battle post.
When the secretary of the Baranovichi underground regional party committee, General Platon-Chernyshev, visited Tuvya’s family camp a few months later, he saw a large village consisting of well-equipped and camouflaged underground dugouts. People lived in some of them, while others housed a bathhouse, kitchens and various workshops: shoemakers, tailors, gunsmiths, tanneries, as well as an underground hospital. There was even a guardhouse not far from the camp, and on the central square in front of the headquarters, in which typewriter The secretary printed endless reports and reports, concerts and performances of a special theater troupe were organized. At the headquarters there hung a portrait of Stalin, drawn in charcoal by a refugee girl. When the visitor asked why Comrade Stalin had one cheek strangely swollen, the girl resourcefully clarified that Stalin was puffing out his cheeks with joy that he would “soon drive the Germans away.” In the armory, the most spacious workshop, the religious inhabitants of the camp gathered for prayer. This un-Soviet behavior also attracted the officer’s attention, and Tuvya responded with a joke that in a different situation might have cost him his life: “Let’s not bother them, they are teaching a course on the history of the party,” he said, dragging General Platon along with him.
The camp also kept 60 cows, 30 horses, its people fed many surrounding detachments, supplied them with clothes, boots, leather goods, and repaired weapons. At the same time, the Zusya detachment, not burdened by family groups, along with communist partisans, participated in battles with German troops, derailed enemy trains, burned and blew up bridges, and damaged communication lines.
After some time, Asael, unable to bear the life of the staff, without permission and without warning anyone, went to the camp with Tuvia, for which he was sentenced to death penalty like a deserter. Only thanks to the rare resourcefulness and prompt intervention of Tuvya, who knew how to win over people of even the highest ranks, Asael was saved this time.
On April 17, 1944, in a report sent to his superiors, Tuvya provides a list of 941 inhabitants of the base. Zus had 149 more fighters in his squad. About a hundred more people left the base before that. In total, the Belsky brothers gathered around them more than 1,200 people doomed to death.
Meanwhile, the number of enemies of the Forest Jews grew, despite the approaching end of the war. In the region, detachments of extremely anti-Semitic Cossacks, who received broad powers and weapons from the Nazis, operated; ultranationalist groups of the Polish Home Army were moving, one of their goals was the destruction of the Jewish “red” detachments; groups of Red partisans sometimes attacked them in order to take away weapons unnecessary to the “Jews”... The political instructors of the pro-Moscow resistance did not take their very friendly gaze off the group of either religious or Zionist conspirators who fought not for Stalin, but “for the Jews.” Of course, the German troops did not abandon them with their attention. Already retreating through the forests with all its might, Hitler’s army, with the same cruelty, sought to inflict maximum damage on the partisans. One of the two doctors who worked in the camp mentions a characteristic detail. He repeatedly had to perform abortions in difficult forest conditions: who could decide to give life if everyone, despite the colossal successes of the detachment, considered it obviously doomed?
The value of the Bielski detachment for the entire Resistance movement, however, was obvious. In addition to the already mentioned supplies to the remaining units, the military successes of the fighters were very significant.
On July 9, 1944, the camp suffered the worst attack of its existence. Retreating German troops attacked it and even temporarily captured it, dozens of people were wounded, and nine people died. The next day, July 10, Soviet troops, as a result of Operation Bagration, entered the region abandoned by the Nazis, which was now considered liberated from the occupiers... 
The Soviet leadership demanded that the camp be completely destroyed so that it could not serve as a base for “anti-Soviet elements.” And the surrounding residents were surprised to see how Tuvya Belsky’s detachment, stretching for more than a kilometer, appeared from the depths of the forest. Old men, women, children and still armed men walked along the roads and devastated villages, and peasants poured out to look at them, and many tried, according to witnesses, to touch them to make sure that they were not ghosts. After all, Belarus had long been considered completely “Judenfrei”; there should have been no living Jews in it. The appearance of thousands of them from the forest seemed, and indeed it happened, a real miracle.
The return to civilian life was difficult. Most of these people had no property left, most of their loved ones died. Other people lived in their houses and were not going to give them back. Moreover, the leadership of “forest Jerusalem” began to increasingly attract the attention of the NKVD.
Tuvya and Zusya began to be invited to “conversations.” After Tuvya once found an unspoken search being carried out in his room in his absence, and at night he was lifted out of bed for a “document check,” the need for another escape became obvious. Without waiting for the morning, Tuvya and Lilka, who became his wife in Nalibokskaya Pushcha, Zus, his fighting friend and younger brother Aron, hid in a passing train and through Vilnius were able to get into Poland using forged documents made by one of their former comrades.
Asael, perhaps on the initiative of commander Vasiliev, who once sentenced him to death for desertion, was forcibly sent into the army even before that. He was killed on the Western Front at the very end of the war. His wife Chaya, who had been so romantically betrothed to him by the Mauser in the early days of the Bielski epic, was in her last month of pregnancy when the terrible news reached her. A few months later, hiding with her newborn daughter in a pig car whose grunting drowned out the baby's cries, she also fled the Soviet Union.
All of them, after exhausting wanderings through a hostile and devastated Europe, found themselves together again in Palestine. Tuvya soon ended up in the army, fought, and was listed as missing for some time. Peaceful life did not work out, there was a chronic shortage of money, health was seriously compromised, and the young state did not have much opportunity for treatment. In the mid-50s, Tuvya and Zus with their families, as well as Aron, moved to the United States. They settled in Brooklyn, and Tuvya became a truck driver, and Zus eventually founded a transport company. Only shortly before his death, in the summer of 1986, the glimmer of military glory again illuminated Tuvya: the people he saved rented a banquet hall in New York for honor. When 80-year-old Tuvya Belsky appeared before the crowd, 600 people greeted him with thunderous applause. A few months later he was gone, and a year later he was reburied with military honors in Jerusalem in the cemetery where the heroes of the Jewish Resistance are buried. Zus died in 1995. Only the younger brother, Aron, is still alive.
Half a century later, the incredible story of the Belsky brothers begins to make its way into greater History.
sources- mishpoha.org/ n17/17a23.html http://www.lechaim.ru/ARHIV/152/kuksin.htm
Alexander Stupnikov made a sensational film on a Jewish theme
The famous journalist Alexander STUPNIKOV made a documentary about the Second World War. The film has not yet been released widely, but has already made a lot of noise and promises to be scandalous. The author addressed a topic that has never been discussed before. About the Jewish partisan movement in Europe; about how it originated and how it survived; how not only the Nazis, but also local residents dealt with Jews.
The events of those days are told by eyewitnesses whom Stupnikov found in Belarus, Lithuania, Poland, Slovenia...
Sasha, how did the idea for the film come about?
It happened quite simply, like everything in this life. I started preparing a completely different project, one that was interesting to me, unusual, and even commercially attractive. But suddenly he came up with the topic of the partisan movement during the war. Everything turned out to be far from being as simple as we were told in Soviet times. On the other hand, anti-fascists and patriots are now being painted one-sidedly too. Freedom of speech where one is not ready for it also means freedom of stupidity and superficiality... I have heard about Jewish partisan detachments before. And suddenly this topic came up. It turned out that it had not been studied at all, moreover, it had always been kept silent. Even in the West, no one has filmed anything about Jewish partisans for more than half a century. And very little has been written. Everything is just a universal cry about the Holocaust! In communist countries, the topic was even less common. Moreover, it turned out that for some reason the Jewish establishment “prefers” to talk only about victims and only in passing about heroism and struggle. I had a question: "Why?"
Over time, these “whys” became more and more numerous, and I began to work.
At first only in Belarus. I was looking for answers to the questions: how did Jewish partisan detachments appear, how did they survive the Holocaust, why were there an overwhelming majority of such detachments in Belarus, under what conditions were they created, what difficulties did they encounter? But then I realized that the Jewish partisans here are part of the general Resistance, the Jewish Resistance of all Europe. And the topic came up not even of the Holocaust, without which it is impossible to talk about the Jewish Resistance, but of collaborationists. So off we go...
Is that why the film is called "Cast Away"?
The name came already during the work on the materials. I suddenly saw - based on what I heard and collected - a completely different approach to this topic. During the war, the Jews actually unexpectedly found themselves alone - face to face with death and injustice.
The war came and the Nazis came. And some neighbors began to kill Jews, as in the Baltics. Others looked and turned away. And in order to justify themselves, they accused the Jews of communism and all mortal sins. Still others calmly took their property and moved into their houses. The fourth did not kill themselves, but gathered the Jews into trains and deported them. Or they acted like the Bulgarians, who did not give up their Jews - fifty thousand people - to Hitler, but, being his ally, occupied Macedonia and Northern Greece and “presented” all the Jews there to the Germans. And so on... 
As a result, it was as if millions of people were not on this earth. In Belarus alone, 800 thousand Jews died. More than three million of them lived in Poland before the war. And today - about six thousand. Those Jews who were lucky to survive, who were underground or joined the partisans, often found themselves alone there too. And among the partisans there was anti-Semitism, and they did not want to accept Jewish refugees, and they believed the rumors of the Germans that refugees from the ghetto were sent agents. Anything has happened. But what happened in Ukraine, Poland, Baltic countries- just a nightmare. For example, I have previously come across information that, say, Jews were not loved in Poland. That's not news. But the fact that in Lithuania and Belarus Jewish partisans died not only at the hands of the Germans or policemen, but also at the hands of Polish partisans surprised me. And these were not isolated cases. Otherwise I would not have fallen for such facts...
Or, for example, I learned for the first time that of all the countries of Eastern Europe, only in Belarus the Germans were unable to rouse the local population to pogroms against Jews and therefore began the extermination themselves. With the help of punishers brought here from neighboring countries. I didn’t know, for example, that when German Jews were taken to Minsk (and to Riga), they had their own ghetto within the ghetto, their own checkpoint, rations, and their own police. Although they destroyed everyone equally. That is, the Holocaust, which is usually blamed only on the Germans, is not the “merit” of individual degenerates, but, in essence, the same collective guilt (with the exception of Belarus). That’s why they try not to talk about it, that’s why anti-Semitism is alive and smoldering. Until your new hour.
But why have the Jews themselves been silent about this for so many years?
Those who were killed in the thousands during the war also thought (and this is stated in the film) that “such a thing” could not happen. It turned out that anything is possible. All the blame for the genocide was placed on the Germans... But look: even in Western civilized countries, when Jews were taken “for resettlement” to extermination camps, the vast majority of their neighbors breathed a sigh of relief. The property and houses remained. There is a place to live and sleep! And you can hang your sign above your bench or workshop. Jews, even among the partisans, were often outcasts, and only the communist underground accepted them. Although not without problems, the Soviet partisans still accepted them. Who in the West will like this?
Today, for a literate person, Nazi propaganda, copied from the Russian Black Hundreds, almost causes laughter. In the film, a young Nazi tells me that Bolshevism is international Judaism. And he’s not the only one who thinks so! And when the strong came, when it seemed that they had won, that these were the new masters new Europe, many people also began to think the same. And destroy, grab, pretend that nothing is happening.
I left this guy in the film only because today he says out loud what others think or say at home not so rarely...
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In general, I just fell in love with those I worked with. For their openness. For their courage. For their will to live. It was humanly great for me to meet both these people and honest historians. I know I can't change anything. So what? This is not an argument to remain silent and watch as the old infection crawls again under various other sauces.
What difficulties did you encounter during your work? Have there been any obstacles?
There were no obstacles anywhere. Neither in Belarus, nor in the Baltic countries, nor in Central Europe. A purely technical problem arose when I realized that I had to shoot in different countries: I could no longer manage only on my own. Hotels, gasoline, current travel expenses. It started to feel overwhelming. TV filming is primarily about money and expenses. And considerable ones. Then I carefully contacted three reputable Jewish offices. For example, to the wealthy Euro-Asian Jewish Congress or, following the advice of friends, to the co-owner of the large Latvian Parex Bank. Not even for funding, so as not to strain me, but for “assistance” - I asked to “cover” at least several trips to Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine, Poland... To the same Slovakia, where I found the last living commander of a Jewish partisan detachment. The project just took more out of my pocket than I expected. And I didn’t have time to “plow” the fees to invest them in it. The third “correspondent” gave an excellent answer on this matter - the chairman of the board of directors of a Baltic bank and also a great Jewish activist.
Where will I be in this film? - he asked.
Were you also a member of the partisans? - I asked.
But if I'm not there, then what's the point? - he explained logically and refused...
And then I felt better. I realized that, just like my heroes (living and dead), I simply had to do what I had in mind. Just like them - in spite of it. Despite the money, the indifference of the “money cattle”, the average person rushing between the kitchen, the store and the toilet. Despite the fact that someone will not like something. Contrary to the confusion I saw among viewers after several viewings.
What episode, in your opinion, was the most striking in the film? 
There are many such episodes. I simply fell in love with the partisan Fanya Brantsovskaya from Lithuania. She was recently sent to the Lithuanian prosecutor's office because her detachment defeated the self-defense in the village of Konyukai (Grooms). The Germans armed themselves with this self-defense against the partisans. During the battle, civilians also died there. These are, in today's language, families of policemen. So, you couldn’t touch them. It was necessary, like the Germans, to arrange a selection. Guerrilla genocide happened.
It really struck me how an elderly, intelligent man who survived the Riga ghetto said sincerely that all his life he could not forgive himself for not going with his mother to be shot. In Riga, in the ghetto, all the women, old people and children were first shot, the men were left to work.
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For some reason, people were sincere in front of the camera... One of the interviewees recalled that among the paratroopers - partisans sent from Moscow - he especially noticed Siberians. Very bright, originally Russian people were completely devoid of even a hint of anti-Semitism. Or a purebred Jewish intelligence officer in the German Wehrmacht, when he said that he was close to suicide because it seemed to him that he was doing little for the Motherland. Or the commander of a Slovak Jewish detachment of almost three hundred people talked about the Slovak uprising, how it happened, how they were friends, how there was a company of Orthodox Jews...
Sasha, where will this film be shown? Will Belarusian viewers be able to watch it? Didn't you offer it, for example, to Belarusian Television? 
Russian-language TV today, in my opinion, as in previous times, lives by political and historical myths and feeds these myths to the viewer. There is a lot of distortion or manipulation of this or that concept. And the fact that these concepts and ideas are not united, as before, does not help, but only creates a jumble in the head of an unprepared person. The snatched or selected facts and facts seem to say something, and everything seems to be solid, but still about myths. I didn't make this film to order. I told him what I had learned. And since there were many little-known facts, I did not string them together with some kind of pro or con concept. I just tried to understand through the Holocaust, collaboration and partisans, what was happening then to both the Jews and their neighbors.
There is something in the film that someone in the Baltic countries, in Poland, in Ukraine will not like. There is a lot that is not customary to talk about. I deliberately did not intensify the scandalousness of any facts or moments. Something had to be chewed up, because in the West they actually don’t know much about that war. And this is not surprising. People have short memories. Otherwise, the same thing would not be repeated for centuries. In Israel, very little or almost no one even knows about the very fact of the existence of Jewish partisans.
I made this film as I saw it. I did it the way I wanted to show it to my children. I made it as a gift to those wonderful people I met while I was working on it. I'm not proving anything to anyone with this film except myself.
There is an ancient Jewish truth: “If you’re not for yourself, then who? But if you’re only for yourself, then why are you?”
So I needed it. Could there be a more serious incentive to live and respect yourself?
Alexander Stupnikov "Outlaws"
The fate of one person can determine, “direct the fate of an entire nation or even of all mankind,” wrote Stefan Zweig. It seems that at the moments of the highest dramatic tension of history there are many personalities influencing it. These certainly include Vladimir Kotelnikov, an outstanding scientist whose work in the field of cryptography made a huge contribution to our victory in the Great Patriotic War.
In preparing the material, fragments from an essay by the scientist’s daughter, which is being prepared for publication, were used Natalia Kotelnikova"The fate that spanned the century."
STRF Help:
Kotelnikov Vladimir Alexandrovich(1908-2005), academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences, one of the founders of domestic radiophysics, radio engineering, radio electronics, radio astronomy and cryptography, engineer, teacher and organizer. His pioneering work also influenced the development of computer science and digital signal transmission, statistical and space radiophysics, planetary radar and large-scale space exploration.
Vladimir Kotelnikov: “I heard that all sorts of codes are being declassified. I decided to figure out whether it was possible to make a completely undecipherable cipher. Well, I figured it out. Proved that it is possible. But the cipher must be random and used only once." Vladimir Kotelnikov formulated the idea of an “undecipherable cipher” shortly before the war:
I heard that all sorts of ciphers are being declassified. I decided to find out if it was possible to make a completely undecipherable cipher. Well figured it out. Proved that it is possible. But for this, the cipher must be random and used only once, - this is how the scientist talked about the “one-time key condition” he discovered.
Vladimir Kotelnikov submitted the closed report “Basic provisions of automatic encryption”, where for the first time a strict justification was presented that encryption systems with one-time keys are absolutely strong, three days before the start of the Great Patriotic War. Not " figure it out“It is then unknown whether Sobol-II would have been created, whether reliable closed communication between Headquarters and the front would have been possible during the turning point Battle of Stalingrad, whether those who managed to survive would have remained alive?
Before the war
Back in 1935, Soviet scientists were faced with the problem of developing anti-eavesdropping systems for high-frequency communications (HF communications) used at that time for government and military communications. Since mid-1936, several laboratories have been involved in the creation of special radiotelegraph and telephone equipment for these purposes, the research of which was based primarily on the principle of simple inversion of the spectrum of the transmitted signal. As a result of their activities, samples of “masking” type encryption equipment appeared, which made “amateur” eavesdropping impossible, but did not save them from special interception. In parallel, Vladimir Kotelnikov and his colleagues from the Central Scientific Research Institute of Communications (TsNIIS), where he headed the laboratory, solved the same problem. Scientists tried to ensure the confidentiality of information transfer using the unique multi-channel telephone and telegraph radio communication equipment they created, installed on the Moscow-Khabarovsk highway.
At first we simply “flipped the spectrum” (inverted), but quickly realized that this was easy to figure out. Then they began to break speech into certain “segments” according to frequency with spectrum inversion, and “confuse” them.
Under the leadership of Vladimir Kotelnikov, the first telephone encoder was developed, combining frequency transformations of a speech signal with permutations of its time segments. The transformations he implemented were dynamic, that is, they periodically changed according to the law of distribution of random variables, and therefore their opening presented a very serious task even for qualified specialists.
By the beginning of the war, Kotelnikov’s laboratory had developed the most advanced radiotelephony security system at that time - a mosaic-type encryption system
In order to make it more difficult to decipher the transmitted speech, it was important to make the “segments” into which we divided it as short as possible. And this is a problem because then the quality of the transmitted speech deteriorates, recalled Vladimir Aleksandrovich. “I began to think about how to convey not the entire speech, but somehow compress its spectrum. I started looking at the spectrum of sounds to understand which frequencies were decisive... At that time, a link to an article caught my eye Homer Dudley, published in October 1940, which stated that he had made a speech converter - the Vocoder. I rushed to look, but it turned out that nothing specific was written there. But still, it was very useful: he had the same idea, which means we are on the right track. In general, we started making our own “vocoder”. And just before the war, we already had a prototype working with us. True, while he was still “speaking” poorly, “in a trembling voice.”
This was the first vocoder in the USSR. In addition to him, in the process of “overcoming difficulties” many other inventions appeared; but Kotelnikov and his colleagues did not publish or patent them, firstly, because of the secrecy of the developments, and, secondly, scientists simply “didn’t have time” for this.
Especially patenting is a terrible bagpipe. I once did this several times before the war, but then gave up, - this is how Vladimir Kotelnikov commented on a very relevant topic for today’s scientists.
Before the war, employees of Kotelnikov's laboratory developed the most advanced radiotelephony security system at that time - a mosaic-type encryption system. When hostilities began, scientists were given an urgent task - to make equipment for secret government communications.
War
In the middle of the summer of 1941, the situation at the front became threatening; the Germans were advancing towards Moscow. The evacuation of the city population, and later of enterprises, began.
The families of most of the laboratory employees, including Nyusya (Vladimir Alexandrovich’s wife - Anna Ivanovna Bogatskaya. - hereinafter approx. auto.) with one-year-old Shurik (son), were evacuated. This happened exactly on the day of the first bombing of Moscow. I brought them to the station, and they boarded the train. While boarding was in progress, an air raid alert began, the train started moving and drove off somewhere from the station... Then it was not clear what happened to them, were they left unharmed? Only later did I find out that, fortunately, their train remained unharmed, and when the bombing ended, I set off for Ufa.
And in Moscow, tense working days and anxious nights awaited Vladimir Alexandrovich:
Sometimes, in order not to interrupt work, we took turns going home at night. When I returned to my apartment, in case of bombing I had to run not to the bomb shelter, like all the residents of the house, but to keep watch in the attic and roof. The Germans dropped heavy explosive bombs and incendiary bombs on the city (they were called “lighters”), which were small and did not destroy the house with an explosion, but pierced the roof and usually got stuck in the attic or on upper floors, where they caught fire. And then it was necessary to grab them with such large tongs and extinguish them, putting them in a box with sand prepared specially for this. If they didn’t have time, then they had to put out the fire that had already started.
According to Soviet intelligence, for one cryptographer capable of “breaking” the system of classifying transmitted information created by Kotelnikov, Hitler was ready to give three elite divisions
In October, the enemy came close to Moscow. An urgent evacuation of those enterprises that had not yet left the city began. An order was received to dissolve the TsNIIS. “All employees were fired. For some reason, only my laboratory was left. Then it was not clear why they left us,” recalled Vladimir Kotelnikov. The fact is that at the very beginning of the war, the General Staff of the People's Commissariat of Defense sent to the institute a directive signed by Georgy Zhukov, informing that in the event of mobilization, employees of Vladimir Kotelnikov's laboratory would be exempt from conscription due to the importance of the developments they were carrying out for the defense of the country. . Here is what the scientist wrote about these days:
We were ordered to receive money and pay all the dismissed employees of the institute. My guys went to the bank and brought two bags of money. There were no cars, since they had all already been mobilized, so they trudged on foot with bags on their shoulders without any security. It's good that the crooks didn't know what was in those bags! They paid the employees money, and then all the fired people scattered in all directions. As for my laboratory, we were busy packing our equipment for evacuation, burning documents so that the Germans would not get it, leaving only the most necessary. Demolitionists also came to us and instructed us how to blow up the institute building if the Germans entered the city, so that they, like Napoleon, would not get anything. It wasn’t clear where we had to “go” then, but at work we had new people standing by the stove at the ready ski boots, and in the corner there are skis. There was no need to run away, but the soles of the shoes crumbled into pieces - they were dry.
There was no need to flee, but the laboratory had to be evacuated to Ufa and remain there until the spring of 1943.
In Ufa, we continued work on “closed radiotelephony” equipment that began in Moscow. But they were greatly complicated by the fact that, by order, a significant part of the design documentation was destroyed before leaving. A lot was reconstructed from memory.
Despite all the difficulties, by the autumn of 1942, employees of Kotelnikov’s laboratory had produced several samples of equipment for secret HF radiotelephony under the designation “Sobol-II”. This was the most sophisticated equipment for classifying transmitted information developed in the country, which had no analogues in the world. The first devices were immediately sent to Stalingrad to connect the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command with the headquarters of the Transcaucasian Front, which was destroyed during the battles. (At that time, the army used mainly wired telephone lines for communications of this level. Soboli-II made it possible to establish communication via a radio channel.)
By the beginning of 1943, production of an improved series of Sobol-II devices was launched. Complex mechanical components of unique encryptors developed in Kotelnikov’s laboratory were manufactured at one of the Leningrad factories. To finalize the encryptors, Vladimir Aleksandrovich regularly flew to the besieged city, and was repeatedly subjected to enemy shelling. The finished devices were urgently sent to the front. As veterans of the Great Patriotic War recalled, the use of Kotelnikov’s coders during the decisive battles on Kursk Bulge largely determined the successful outcome of the battle. They provided a speech encoding system for closed-circuit radio communications that was virtually unbreakable; even the Wehrmacht's best codebreakers were unable to handle it. According to Soviet intelligence, Hitler stated that for one cryptographer capable of “breaking” it, he would not spare three elite divisions.
For the creation of encryptors, Kotelnikov and his laboratory colleagues received the Stalin Prize, 1st degree, in March 1943. They donated the money “for the needs of the front.” In particular, a tank was built for the prize received by Vladimir Kotelnikov.
After the war
Work on improving encryption equipment continued until last days the war and even after its end. For further developments in this area, Vladimir Kotelnikov was awarded the second Stalin Prize, 1st degree, in 1946.
The strong encryption equipment developed in his laboratory laid the foundation for the development of a whole class of domestic speech encryption systems, which for their time reliably protected telephone conversations from information leakage. These systems were widely used in the USSR on various communication lines and networks, and until the early 70s there were no effective algorithms for decrypting messages encoded using the most complex systems of this type. However, they were still not suitable for “absolutely reliable” protection of communications.
The post-war works of Vladimir Kotelnikov largely determined the face of the era of global informatization and the conquest of outer space
To replace encryption, which is conventionally called analog, it's arrived discrete. Kotelnikov described the possibility of creating equipment for strong secrecy of telephone conversations based on a vocoder and an encoder. To do this, the compressed speech spectrum (using a vocoder) must be converted into a sequence of discrete pulses (according to Kotelnikov’s sampling theorem) and classified using the telegraph encryption model (in accordance with another theorem formulated and strictly proven by Kotelnikov - about one-time keys). The development of such equipment began at the Marfinsky laboratory, created for these purposes in 1948. Its core consisted of employees of Kotelnikov’s former laboratory, so their research was carried out in fact in line with the pre-war work of Kotelnikov’s laboratory, interrupted by the outbreak of the war.
The works of Vladimir Aleksandrovich, already in peacetime, largely determined the face of the era of global informatization and the conquest of outer space.
His research in the field of radiophysics, which resulted in the already mentioned reference theorem (“Kotelnikov’s Theorem”), as well as the theory of potential instability and a number of others, laid the foundation for information theory, the development of digital messaging systems, control, coding and information processing - almost the entire modern communication theory. Vladimir Kotelnikov made a significant contribution to the creation of computers, digital radio electronics, satellite and space communications, and modern radio telescopes.
Under his leadership, the world's first missile trajectory control system and a unique telemetry system were developed, and a new direction in radio astronomy was opened - planetary radar. As a result of unique experiments carried out by Kotelnikov and his collaborators on the radar of Venus (1961-1964), Mercury (1962), Mars (1963), Jupiter (1963), the value of the astronomical unit was determined with high accuracy, a new theory was created and experimentally confirmed movements of the inner planets of the solar system - Venus and Mercury. These studies, based on the relativistic equations of celestial mechanics, as well as the general theory of relativity, made it possible to increase the accuracy of measuring the size of the Solar System by more than 100 times. The ideas of Vladimir Kotelnikov influenced the further development of all space programs, they are still used to this day in creating control and motion control systems for spacecraft.
In August 1942, thanks to those who came from the Novogrudok ghetto, the detachment grew to 250 people. In the fall of 1942, the Belsky detachment began combat activities and gained authority among the partisans. established himself as a decisive and experienced commander. All this played a big role in the official recognition of the Belsky detachment by the leaders of the Soviet partisan movement. In February 1943, the Belsky detachment was included in the partisan detachment “October” of the Lenin Brigade.
Activities of the detachment
The command of the detachment had the following structure:
Friends, this is one of the happiest days of my life. These are the moments I live for: look how many people managed to get out of the ghetto! I can't guarantee you anything. We are trying to survive, but we could all die. And we will try to save as many lives as possible. We accept everyone and refuse no one, neither the elderly, nor children, nor women. There are many dangers awaiting us, but if we are destined to die, at least we will die as people.
The detachment was a whole village, which was called “Forest Jerusalem”. The detachment had a bakery, a forge, a tannery, a bathhouse, a hospital and a school. The detachment included cattlemen and musicians, potters, cooks and tailors. The detachment even played weddings conducted by Rabbi David Brook.
Members of the detachment lived in dugouts. Those who were not engaged in combat operations repaired weapons, sewed clothing and provided other services to the Soviet partisans, receiving ammunition, food and medicine in return. The demolitions of the Belsky detachment were considered the best saboteurs and were highly respected among the partisans.
After the detachment's strength grew to 750 people in the spring of 1943, it was given the name Ordzhonikidze and became part of the Kirov partisan brigade. Relations with the partisans did not always develop in the best way, but they did not risk offending the members of Belsky’s detachment - the brothers could immediately put more than a hundred fighters under arms, ready to protect their own from any attacks
The support of the detachment from the secretary of the Baranovichi underground regional committee of the Communist Party of Belarus, Vasily Chernyshev (“General Platon”), played a significant role.
The main problem was obtaining food for a huge number of people. The peasants began to cooperate with the partisans after they realized that the Belskis were not an object for hunting. When a local peasant betrayed a group of Jews to the Nazis, a team of avengers from the Belsky detachment destroyed him along with his entire family - they burned the informer’s house. Subsequently, Belsky’s detachment was known, among other things, for actively punishing collaborators.
Other partisan units were reluctant to accept Jews fleeing the ghetto, and there were cases where they were sent back to certain death or even shot. The detachment was the salvation for the Jews.
The Germans attacked the camp several times, the detachment retreated, but put up tough armed resistance. During the largest anti-partisan operation, Operation Hermann, which began on July 15, 1943, the detachment moved to a small island in the middle of a swamp, where the Germans were unable to reach them.
After this, the detachment was still divided into family and combat units. The family camp, which at that time included approximately 700 people and was called the “detachment named after Kalinin,” settled in Nalibokskaya Pushcha; commanded him. The soldiers under the command of Zusya - the “Ordzhonikidze detachment” - returned to the Stankevichi area. Asael headed the intelligence department at the headquarters of the Kirov brigade.
The detachment withstood the most brutal attack on the eve of the liberation of Belarus. On July 9, 1944, retreating German units attacked the partisans, dozens of people were wounded, and nine people were killed. The next day, the Red Army entered the area of Nalibokskaya Pushcha.
results
The Belskys managed to save 1,230 Jews from extermination. All brothers survived the occupation and waited for the liberation of Belarus by the Red Army. Soon Tuvya was called to Minsk, where he compiled a full report on the activities of his detachment.
As Doctor of Historical Sciences David Meltzer writes, the detachment “derailed 6 enemy echelons going to the front, blew up 20 railway and highway bridges, carried out 12 open battles and ambushes, destroyed 16 vehicles with manpower, and in total more than 250 German soldiers and officers." Zus Belsky personally destroyed 47 Nazis and collaborators. The Germans placed a reward of 100 thousand Reichsmarks on Tuvia's head.
After the war
In 1944, after the liberation of Belarus, Asael, along with part of the detachment, joined the Red Army and died in Germany shortly before the end of the war. His wife Khaya, with whom he married in the detachment, was in her last month of pregnancy at that time.
According to some reports, after the end of the war, Tuvya and Zus were persecuted by the NKVD and therefore fled to Poland. But the Poles were hostile to Jews after the war, and the brothers moved to Palestine, living in Ramat Gan and Holon. After the creation of the State of Israel, Tuvia and Zus took part in the War of Independence.
After the war in Israel, they struggled to make ends meet, and in 1955, Zus and Tuvya moved to the United States with their families and Aron. They settled in Brooklyn (New York). Tuvya became a truck driver, and Zus became the owner of several taxis.
In the summer of 1986, people rescued by the Belsky brothers organized a banquet in their honor at the Hilton Hotel in New York. 600 people stood and applauded the 80-year-old. Tuvya died in December of the same year. He was initially buried in a Jewish cemetery on Long Island, but a year later he was reburied with military honors on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. English translation memoirs written in Yiddish (394 pages) were prepared for publication in 2011. Zus Belsky died in 1995. Aron lives in Miami, and in 2007 he and his wife were accused of fraud.
The Belsky brothers did not receive any official awards. Of the people saved by the Belskys, 29 people were alive at the end of 2008. The descendants of those saved number tens of thousands of people. Tuvia’s son, Robert Belsky, spoke about his father:
When he attended a wedding or bar mitzvah, he felt the satisfaction of seeing the children and grandchildren of those who survived - the restoration of families that had no chance of surviving.
Descendants of the Belskys
Tuvia Belsky has two sons living in the USA - Robert and Miki, their children and grandchildren. Zusya Bielski's two sons came to Israel from the United States in October 1973 and participated in the Yom Kippur War. Asael left a daughter who was born after his death.
Zusya’s grandson, Ilan Belsky, graduated from a university in the USA in 2008, moved to Israel and enlisted in the paratroopers. Two other grandchildren of Zusya Belsky also serve in the Israel Defense Forces, another grandson is a reservist.
War crimes allegations
In 2001, the Polish Institute of National Remembrance accused some members of Bielski's detachment of a massacre in the town of Naliboki, located 120 kilometers from Minsk. As a result of the partisan attack on this village on May 8, 1943, 128 people were killed, including three women, several teenagers and a ten-year-old child.
It was established that among the attackers there were several fighters from Belsky’s detachment. However, Tuvya’s son Robert and some surviving partisans argued that the Belsky detachment had nothing to do with this incident, since on that day it was 100 km from the town. They are sure that Belsky’s detachment appeared in the Nalibok area only in August 1943.
In addition, the report of the Soviet partisans indicated that the German self-defense garrison was defeated in the battle in the village. It was also established that the self-defense forces in Naliboki, in the form of an armed cell of the Regional Army, acted under the control of the occupation authorities and collaborated with them. According to the memoirs of Minsk ghetto prisoner and partisan Leonid Okun in 1943, “a lot of partisans died at the hands of these Akovites, and a war began with them.”
The Belsky brothers in literature and cinema
Several books have been written about the fate of the Belsky brothers:
in 1949, he published his memoirs, translated into Hebrew, in Jerusalem, entitled “The Jews of the Forest.” Full text memoir in Yiddish (394 pp.) was discovered in the archives of the YIVO Jewish Research Institute in New York, an English edition is being prepared for publication in 2011.
In 1994, Nechama Teck, a professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut, published The Challenge. The Bielski Partisans (English: Defiance. The Bielski Partisans).
In 1998, Alan Levine published the book Fugitives of the Forest: The Heroic Story of Jewish Resistance and Survival during the Second World War. It was republished in October 2008 by Lyons Press, ISBN 978-1-59921-496-2 and in 2010 , ISBN 978-1-59921-968-4.
in 2001, the daughter of Asael Belsky published a book about her father and the Belsky partisan detachment.
in 2003, journalist Peter Duffy wrote the book The Bielski Brothers. Edition in Russian: Peter Duffy. Belsky brothers. M., Text, 2011.
Nechama Tek's book is based on the memoirs of members of the partisan detachment and relatives of the Belskys, and Peter Duffy's book is based on documentary data that he collected in Belarus, Israel and the United States. Nechama Tek writes that she has repeatedly appealed to the Belarusian authorities with a request to allow her to work in the archives or to send copies of the materials she needs, but has not received any answers.
Three films were made about the Belsky brothers:
The first documentary film “The Bielski Brothers” was released in 1993 in the UK.
In 2006, the documentary film “The Bielski Brothers: Jerusalem in the Woods” was released in the USA on the History channel.
In 2008, Edward Zwick's Hollywood feature film Defiance, starring Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber and Jamie Bell, was released worldwide. The film is based on the book by Nechama Tek.
Perpetuation of memory
Silence in official historiography
In the post-war Soviet years in Belarus, the activities of Jewish partisans were hushed up. In particular, in the official reference book “Partisan formations of Belarus during the Great Patriotic War (June 1941 - July 1944)”, published by the Institute of History of the Communist Party in 1983, there is no mention of either the Belsky brothers or their detachment. The participation of Jews in the partisan movement was hidden behind the phrase “other nationalities.” Although at least 1,650 fighters fought in the 14 Jewish partisan detachments and groups of Belarus alone, in total there were from 10 to 15 thousand Jews in the partisan detachments of Belarus. The Belsky detachment is also not mentioned in the one-volume encyclopedic book “Belarus in the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945),” published in 1995.
Exhibitions in museums
Permanent exhibitions and archival materials dedicated to the activities of the partisan detachment of the Belsky brothers exist in a number of museums, in particular in the Holocaust Memorial Museum (Washington), the Memorial of Holocaust and Heroism (Jerusalem), the Museum of the Novogrudok Ghetto (Museum of Jewish Resistance in Novogrudok), in the “Museum of History and Culture of the Jews of Belarus” (Minsk) and others.
An exhibition dedicated to the Belsky brothers opened in November 2008 at the Florida Holocaust Museum.
Here is a photo of three of the four brothers. Tuvia Belsky, far left.
Tuvia Bielski in the Polish army, late 1920s
And this is a group photo of the squad members.
A talented guy from a Belarusian village
Tuvya was the eldest of 11 children of the Belsky family. The Belskys' ancestors settled in the village of Stankevichi in the 19th century, located between the Belarusian cities of Lida and Novogrudok, not far from Nalibokskaya Pushcha. In this village, the Belskys were the only Jewish family. Since Jews in Tsarist Russia did not have the right to own land, they rented small plots from their neighbors. In addition, the Belskys built a water mill. When, at the end of the 19th century, the tsarist government banned Jews from owning any enterprises in the villages, the Belskys found a man who was legally listed as the owner of the mill.
During the First World War, a small unit of German occupation forces was stationed in an empty house in the village, and Tuvya, a lively boy who reminded the German soldiers of their children, often interacted with them. After the Germans left, it turned out that Tuvya had learned German quite well. So, to his Belarusian language and Jewish education, received in a cheder in a neighboring village, German was also added. After the war, the area went to Poland, Tuvya studied at a Polish school, then served in the Polish army, where he rose from a private to a non-commissioned officer. Returning from the army, he got married, receiving a small store as a dowry. After Western Belarus joined the USSR in 1939, Tuvier inevitably had to improve his knowledge of the Russian language, and as a result he spoke six languages: Russian, Belarusian, Polish, German, Yiddish and Hebrew.
Shortly before Germany attacked the USSR, the Soviet authorities began to carry out an action to identify bourgeois elements in the annexed regions and expel them to Siberia. Tuvya's store was nationalized, and he, fearing reprisals, left the small town where he had previously lived, settling in the city of Lida as an assistant accountant.
However, soon after Germany attacked the USSR, the Germans occupied this entire area. Anti-Jewish actions immediately began: ghettos, and then the extermination of Jews. Tuvya did not obey German orders: he did not register, did not wear a yellow six-pointed star. A large number of friends among the local population, knowledge of the German language, and atypical appearance for a Jew saved him from many checks. But the executions of the Jewish population began, Tuvya’s two brothers, Yakov and Abram, died. Tuvya's father told his son to go into the forest. Two more of his brothers left with him - Asael and Zus, who were drafted into the Red Army even before the start of the war, and then, having escaped the encirclement, managed to get home.
Partisan detachment in Nalibokskaya Pushcha
Over time, traitors were found who reported the Belskys to the German authorities. The parents were arrested and tortured to make them confess where their three adult sons had gone, but they said nothing, and soon, on December 7, 1941, the Nazis shot the father, mother, younger sister and wife Zusya with their newborn daughter. 4,000 local Jews died that day. Twelve-year-old Aron miraculously escaped execution and soon joined his older brothers. At first, the Belskys hid with peasant friends, but soon realized that their salvation lay in the dense forests of the Nalibokskaya Pushcha.
The brothers managed to bring some of their relatives into the forest, who formed the backbone of the future detachment. In December 1941, it consisted of 17 people, the weapon was one pistol with an incomplete clip. Tuvya Belsky was elected commander.
Tuvya Belsky considered his main task to be the salvation of as many Jews as possible. For all their hatred of the Nazis, the Bielski brothers proceeded from the principle: it is better to save one old Jewish woman than to kill ten German soldiers. The brothers acted as follows. They made their way into the Jewish ghettos of Lida, Novogrudok, and other cities and towns and persuaded Jews to flee into the forest, helping them in this. Most often, Tuvya himself was involved in such actions. Getting out of the ghetto was difficult and dangerous; many died along the way. Those who survived were often not accepted into other partisan detachments, citing the refusal as their lack of weapons. Women, children and the elderly, who were considered a burden, especially often found themselves in difficult situations. But no one was expelled from the Belsky brothers’ detachment. To those who arrived, Tuvya said: “I can’t guarantee you anything. We are trying to survive, but we could all die. And we will try to save as many lives as possible. We accept everyone and refuse no one, neither the elderly, nor children, nor women. There are many dangers awaiting us, but if we are destined to die, at least we will die as people.”
Forward, into battle!
By August 1942, the Belsky detachment had grown to 250 people and began to represent a serious fighting force. Everyone was forced to take it into account: both the Germans and the Soviet partisans in the surrounding areas, and at first the detachment’s main source of food was the surrounding population, who called the detachment nothing more than “forest Jews” and who began to fear collaborating with the invaders in view of the inevitable punishment from Jewish partisans, of which there were examples.
In the Belsky detachment, one of Tuvya’s brothers became his deputy and led the armed defense, the other was responsible for intelligence and counterintelligence, and the third - the younger Aron - was a liaison with other partisan detachments, the ghetto and those who helped the Jews escape from the ghetto and reach the partisans. Weapons were obtained in battles with the occupiers and their accomplices.
The Belsky detachment began its combat activities in the fall of 1942 and established itself so well that it soon received official recognition from the leaders of the Soviet partisan movement. In February 1943, the Belsky detachment was included in the partisan detachment “October”.
The “Forest Jews” lived in dugouts, forming an entire village called “Forest Jerusalem.” The detachment had a bakery, a forge, a tannery, a bathhouse, a hospital and a school. Cattlemen and shoemakers, potters, cooks and tailors worked here. The mill, bakery, and sausage factory were constantly working. The detachment even played weddings conducted by Rabbi David Brook, fortunately they had their own musicians. Believers could go to a makeshift synagogue where Jewish holidays were celebrated. Those who were not involved in combat operations repaired weapons and provided a lot of services to the Soviet partisans, receiving ammunition, food and medicine in return. But the partisans themselves largely provided themselves with food - for example, 8 hectares of wheat and barley were sown, and there was a huge potato field.
The demolitions of the Belsky detachment were considered the best saboteurs and were highly respected among the partisans. But relations with the partisans were not always the best, because other partisan units were reluctant to accept Jews fleeing the ghetto. There were cases when they were sent back to certain death. However, no one risked offending the members of Tuvya Belsky’s detachment - the brothers could immediately put more than a hundred fighters under arms, ready to protect their own from any attacks.
After the size of the Belsky detachment grew to 750 people in the spring of 1943, it was given the name Ordzhonikidze, and it became part of the Kirov partisan brigade. It became easier with weapons - they were now supplied to the partisans from the “mainland”, and it became possible to send the seriously wounded there by plane. Tuvya’s detachment, together with others, began to be on duty and guard the partisan airfield. Thanks to the establishment of connections with the “mainland,” the inhabitants of “Forest Jerusalem” were able to transfer 5,321 rubles, 1,356 German marks, 50 dollars, more than 250 foreign gold and silver coins, and 46 pieces of scrap gold to the country’s defense fund.
The Germans attacked their camp several times. The detachment retreated, but always put up tough armed resistance. The “forest Jews” withstood the most brutal attack on the eve of the liberation of Belarus: on July 9, 1944, retreating German units attacked the partisans, dozens of people were wounded, and nine people died. The next day, the Red Army entered the area of Nalibokskaya Pushcha.
Soon Tuvya was called to Minsk, where he compiled a full report on the activities of his detachment. Asael, along with part of the detachment, joined the Red Army and died in Germany shortly before the end of the war. His wife Khaya, whom he met in the detachment, was in her last month of pregnancy at that time.
Instead of a heroic title - emigration
After the war, Tuvya and Zus began working in Soviet institutions. But Tuvya soon felt that he was about to be reminded of his “bourgeois” past. At that time, former Polish citizens were allowed to repatriate to Poland. That's what the brothers did. But the hostile attitude of the local population forced them to move to Palestine, they lived in Ramat Gan and Holon. After the creation of the State of Israel, Tuvia and Zus took part in the War of Independence.
But even in Israel, Tuvya Belsky did not feel entirely comfortable. He worked as a taxi driver, barely earning a living. Therefore, in the mid-50s, Tuvya and Zus with their families, as well as Aron, decided to move to the USA.
The children grew up, grandchildren appeared, and Tuvya himself grew old in obscurity. But his former subordinates, those whom he once saved from certain death, remembered his heroic past. In gratitude to Touvier, in the year of his 80th birthday, they held a banquet in one of the fashionable hotels in New York. 600 people stood and applauded his appearance in the main hall - in a tailcoat with a rose in his buttonhole. When those present congratulated the hero of the day, remembering his heroic past, tears were seen for the first time in the eyes of the seemingly iron Tuvia.
In December 1986, at the age of 81, Tuvya Belsky died. At first he was buried in a Jewish cemetery on Long Island, but then, at the urgent request of the association of partisans, underground fighters and participants in the ghetto uprisings, the ashes of Tuvya Bielsky were transported to Jerusalem.
Zus died in 1995. Aron may still live in Miami.
The memory of heroes cannot be erased
In the post-war Soviet years in Belarus, the activities of Jewish partisans were hushed up, and the name of Tuvya Belsky, the commander of the largest Jewish partisan detachment, was consigned to oblivion. Thus, in the official directory “Partisan formations of Belarus during the Great Patriotic War (June 1941 - July 1944),” published in 1983, there is no mention of either the Belsky brothers or their detachment. The participation of Jews in the partisan movement was hidden behind the phrase “other nationalities.” Although at least 1,650 fighters fought in the 14 Jewish partisan detachments and groups of Belarus alone, in total there were from 10 to 15 thousand Jews in the partisan detachments of Belarus, while more than 130 Jews were commanders, chiefs of staff, and commissars of partisan detachments and brigades. The Belsky detachment is not mentioned in the one-volume encyclopedic book “Belarus in the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945),” published in 1995. However, outside the USSR they knew about the Belski detachment. Many books have been written about their fate, including the memoirs of Tuvya Belsky entitled “The Jews of the Forest,” published in Jerusalem in 1949, translated into Hebrew. Three films were also made about the Belsky brothers - two documentaries (UK, USA) and a feature film (Hollywood).
Permanent exhibitions dedicated to the activities of the partisan detachment of the Bielski brothers exist in a number of museums, in particular at the Holocaust Memorial Museum (Washington), at the Florida Holocaust Museum, at Yad Vashem, and more recently at the Museum of History and Culture Jews of Belarus" (Minsk).
Of the people saved by the Belskys, 29 people were alive at the end of 2008. The descendants of those saved number tens of thousands of people. They now live in Belarus, the USA, Israel, Great Britain, Brazil, and Australia.
There is practically no information from official government agencies in the post-Soviet space about this Jewish partisan detachment during the Great Patriotic War - as if it did not exist at all in the history of World War II.
But there was a detachment. He does not have such large-scale operations as, say, the formations of Saburov and Kovpak (both famous commanders, by the way, had Jewish partisan groups in their units). But the Belskys, who had many of their relatives shot, mainly sought to save as many Jews as possible from the Nazis - including those with weapons in their hands.
How the squad was created
Before the war, the family of David and Bela Belsky had 11 children; the eldest son Tuvya fought in the First World War in the Polish army (then Western Belarus was not part of the USSR), rose to the rank of non-commissioned officer. He spoke six languages, including German. This was an ordinary Jewish family engaged in peasant farming and trade.
When in 1939 the territory where the Belskys lived went to Soviet Union, two Belsky brothers, Asael and Zus, were drafted into the Red Army.
With the outbreak of World War II and the German occupation of Belarus, mass executions of Jews began. The Nazis killed two Belsky brothers, Yakov and Abram, and among the 4 thousand executed Jews exterminated in the area where this family lived were the brothers’ parents, David and Bela Belsky, their younger sister and wife Zusya Sila with their newborn daughter.
In December 1941, the Belsky brothers, under the leadership of Tuvya, created a partisan detachment in the forests in the Niliboki Forest. At first, it consisted of a little more than one and a half dozen people - the surviving relatives of the Belskys, the brothers Asael and Zus, who had previously left the encirclement, and their youngest, 12-year-old Aron. Only in 1942, the detachment was replenished with 250 Jews who fled from the Novogrudok ghetto. Having combat experience, Tuvya Belsky, as the commander of this unit, gained the trust of the leaders of the partisan movement of the region, and the Jewish partisan detachment soon received official recognition - in 1943, the group was attached to the partisan detachment "October", belonging to the Lenin Brigade (operated in the Baranovichi region).
Actions of the Jewish partisan unit
They saved the Jews of the area as best they could - Tuvya, thanks to his knowledge of languages and non-Jewish appearance, often made forays into the ghetto and convinced his fellow tribesmen to go into the forest with him. Women, children, old people - there was a place for everyone. Actually, this was the main task of the detachment - to lead them away from the Nazis and save as many Jews as possible.
At the same time, the Belsky detachment was considered a serious fighting force - everyone had heard about it - the fascists, other partisans, and civilians. The partisans of World War II did not always turn out to be the same as we are used to seeing them - they often reluctantly took the same Jews into their detachments, and sometimes even shot them. The detachment of the Belsky brothers fought the Germans in the same way as other similar formations - they carried out sabotage, destroyed enemy personnel and equipment.
They mercilessly exterminated traitorous collaborators and harshly repelled fascist attacks on their “Forest Jerusalem.” In the summer of 1943, over a thousand members of the Jewish partisan detachment, escaping the German encirclement, spent several days in the swamps, and they were not found there - the Nazis decided that all the Jews had drowned in the quagmire.
According to the calculations of Jewish historians, based on the data of the surviving members of the detachment, the formation of the Belsky brothers from 1941 to 1944, before the liberation of Belarus by Soviet troops, took part in 12 battles and ambushes, destroyed over 250 Nazis and more than a dozen enemy combat vehicles, 6 German trains with troops and equipment, the partisans blew up two dozen bridges. The Germans valued the head of Tuvia Belsky at 100 thousand Reichsmarks.
What happened to them after the war?
After the Victory, the Poles tried to accuse the partisan unit of the Bielski brothers of atrocities against civilians committed in Naliboki (120 km from Minsk) in May 1943. This fact was not confirmed. Moreover, it was established that the Home Army soldiers in that place themselves collaborated with the Germans and fought against the partisans.
Asael Belsky died in Germany in 1945. Tuvya, Zus and Aron emigrated. Tuvya Belsky was greatly revered by Jewish emigrants - many of those rescued by the partisans also ended up abroad after the war.
Systematized official data on the actions of the Belsky detachment in their homeland has not yet been published; basically, the memory of the Jewish partisan unit is kept abroad - in America and Israel. Scattered information about the actions of the Belsky partisans is available in Belarusian museums, but it is often quite superficial and is not given due importance.
In the West, 2 documentaries have been made about the detachment of the Belsky brothers and one feature film, “The Challenge”, where Tuvya Belsky was played by the famous James Bond Daniel Craig. This war drama, according to the surviving witnesses of those events, is a very schematic and far from reality reproduction of the history of the Jewish partisan unit.
Jared Kushner, son-in-law elected president The USA of Donald Trump is proud that his ancestors fought in the detachment of the Belsky brothers.