Yet even the Polish journalist who co-authored the original Gazeta Wyborcza story, Piotr Głuchowski, has come to believe the charge is shockingly flimsy. In a December 28, 2008 e-mail message to me, he said he tracked down a Polish war survivor, Wacław Nowicki, who wrote a memoir in 1993 suggesting the Bielski unit was involved in the attack.
The book has been a primary source for Polish anti-Semites wishing to denigrate the brothers’ achievements. “After a two-hour interrogation he said to us that he is not sure that the Bielskis were in Naliboki on May 8, 1943,” he wrote.
Nowicki claimed he was relying on testimony from “Lova from Novogrudek,” whose words were confirmed for him by “Vanya from Lubocz,” wrote Głuchowski in a subsequent article for Gazeta Wyborcza.
Here’s the simple truth: The Jewish unit was not “stationed in the Naliboki dense forest” nor “active in the area” in May 1943 at the time of the Naliboki attack, as the IPN has alleged.
The Bielski brothers, strapping sons of a miller, hailed from Stankevich, a speck on the map in a borderland region that has been part of Lithuania, Poland, and Russia at various points in its history. After the Nazis and their collaborators began conducting mass slaughters of the Jewish population, they slowly built a ragtag community of desperate Jews in the woods where they had tromped as boys. On the day in May 1943 when the Naliboki attack occurred, the brothers’ group was located in a forest called Stara-Huta near Stankevich. It is more than 50 kilometers to the west of Naliboki village.
It is true that since February 1943 the brothers’ unit (then a few hundred strong) had been formally integrated into the Soviet partisan structure, pledging allegiance to a cause that provided cover for its rescue and resistance efforts. At the time of the Naliboki attack, it was officially known as the second company of the October Detachment of the Lenin Brigade in the Lida District. (The official name would change a handful of times over the course of the war.) All of the group’s movements were recorded in Soviet documents that now reside in the archives of the Belarussian branch of the Soviet partisan movement in Minsk and in Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.
According to the IPN, the attack on Naliboki village was not perpetrated by detachments from the Lenin Brigade in the Lida District. Instead, the IPN said it was carried out by three detachments from the Stalin Brigade and “partisans from” the Chkalov Brigade. Both brigades, based in the Naliboki forest, were members of the Ivenets District.
The IPN didn’t respond when I asked if wandering members of the Jewish unit participated in the attack, acting under the orders of someone other than the Bielski brothers and operating outside of their designated brigade structure. It probably doesn’t need to be stated that the Soviets were very serious about adhering to lines of authority. Soviet partisans were executed for violating even the most minor of regulations.
The Bielski partisans eventually did reach the Naliboki forest, which may explain why they have become mixed up in this allegation. They first arrived in August 1943, after it became too dangerous to remain in the area near Stankevich, only to be driven out by German attack. Then in September and October 1943 they returned with nearly a thousand men, women, and children and created a legendary shtetl, an extraordinary place with tailors, shoemakers, blacksmiths, and gunsmiths.
It had a large kitchen, a central square for gatherings, a mill powered by a horse, a main street, a theater troupe, and a tannery that doubled as a synagogue. It was well known to the gentile peasants in surrounding communities like Naliboki village on the forest’s eastern edge. They called it Jerusalem.
It is an outrage that wartime achievements of this magnitude can be so casually denigrated. The Bielski brothers were far from perfect. But what they accomplished in the woods of Belarus deserves the highest of acclaim.