“In each and every generation they rise up against us to destroy us.
And the Holy One, blessed be He, rescues us from their hands.”
~Passover Haggadah
Yehuda Bielski never cooked. Except every year on Passover and Hanukkah. Food he remembered from his life in Belarus a long time ago.
The night before he would assemble on the kitchen table the ingredients he needed and checked the refrigerator to make certain some additional items were still there. The next day, with classical music playing on the radio, he cooked. My job was to set the dining room table on the white tablecloth he preferred.
Yehuda had come a long way from Belarus (formerly known as Byelorussia) to his home in Manhattan near Lincoln Center. Born in the large town of Novogrudok where his family had lived for hundreds of years, he attended the Tarbut Zionist school; lessons were taught in Hebrew. He learned to play the violin and guitar, and became a noted ballroom dancer; he spoke Yiddish, Russian, Polish, and Hebrew. Years later he would master English. Elegant and soft-spoken, he was a very private person.
Poland occupied western Belarus from 1927-1939 and Yehuda was drafted into the Polish army where he was commissioned a lieutenant. On December 1, 1939 Germany attacked Poland. Now married and working as a school athletics coach, he was called up by the army.
Badly wounded in the ferocious fighting and with the overwhelmed Polish army in retreat, he limped his way to a Warsaw hospital. Within days the SS swept the hospital looking for Polish officers and Jews. Though barely recovered, the nuns helped him escape and he managed to return to Novogrudok where the Russians were now in control (Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact).
On June 22, 1941 Germany launched a surprise blitzkrieg attack on the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa with the largest invading force in history – more than three million German soldiers and another half million German-allied troops, including 3,600 tanks, 600,000 motor vehicles, 700,000 field guns plus additional artillery, and 2,700 aircraft (more than half of the German air force). The Russian army collapsed.
Belarus was the tip of the spear. By August 1941 all of Belarus was occupied by the Germans. Novogrudok was surrounded by lush forests full of lakes, streams and marshes where wolves, boars and bison roam. The area was the hunting ground of European aristocrats. It was also an important and well-known center of Jews since the 15th century.
The Germans bombed Novogrudok. The Wehrmacht quickly entered the town followed by the Einsatzgruppen extermination squads. Two well-guarded ghettos were created at both ends of the town surrounded by fences and barbed wire. Violent assaults, killing and looting began immediately aided by the Germans’ enthusiastic and sadistic Lithuanian collaborators.
Yehuda survived two selections to the pre-dug massacre pits which became mass graves in the dense forest surrounding the town. He planned an escape. Just then a Christian friend delivered a letter from his older first cousin, Tuvia Bielski, who had escaped from his village to the forest with his wife, three brothers, sister, and some relatives – about 20 people in all. He urged Yehuda to join him “so we can build something together.” He needed Yehuda’s military expertise.
On a dark night Yehuda led his wife and eight potential fighters to the ghetto fence. They removed the boards, cut the barbed wire and escaped into the forest. He joined his cousins and nominated Tuvia to command the Bielski detachment which now included non-relatives. A military wing was created. “Revenge and revenge again on the murderers,” Yehuda declared. Armed resistance was his answer. Belarusian friends supplied them with some arms; the Russians airdropped them many more arms and ammunition.
First named Forest Jerusalem, as their numbers grew the detachment became known as the Bielski Partisans.
The military wing of the family partisan camp was extremely effective. According to the Russian archives, the Bielski Partisan fighters derailed German trains with manpower and equipment, blew up tracks, rail and highway bridges, plus German vehicles. They assassinated hundreds of German soldiers and officers, the collaborating Belarusian auxiliary police, and local farmers who identified and murdered Jews. “If someone is coming to kill you,” said Yehuda quoting the book of Deuteronomy, “rise against him and kill him first.”
In the summer of 1944 the massive Russian army was on its way to victory in Berlin. They cleared the area of Germans. For the Bielski Partisans the war was over. About 1,250 men women and children walked out of the forest. Over 800,000 Jews were killed in a Holocaust by bullets in Belarus.
From Novogrudok and its surrounding region had come the largest detachment of Jewish fighters in German-occupied Europe during World War II. Belarus also had the largest partisan (374,000) and anti-Nazi underground movement (70,000) in Europe during World War II. Loss of life was in the millions.
The Germans and their collaborators brutally killed the families of those who helped Jews escape from ghettos and tunnels or hid them in their homes. “We must know…these good people who helped Jews during the Holocaust,” said Elie Weisel, “and in gratitude and hope we must remember them.” In Jerusalem 676 extraordinary Belarusians are honored and memorialized at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Remembrance Center as “Righteous Among the Nations.”
Tragically, Yehuda’s wife was killed in a forest ambush. He eventually befriended Lola Hudes who had fled from Lodz, Poland, east of the Russian sector. She joined the Bielski Partisans, her fourth partisan group, after escaping under barbed wire and search lights from the Stolpce ghetto in Belarus. They married. From Bari, Italy, they sailed on a crammed, dilapidated vessel across the Mediterranean to British-occupied Palestine, avoiding the Royal Navy patrols and blockade.
Yehuda joined the Irgun, the underground army formed to defend Jews from Arab terrorism and pressure the British colonial power out of Palestine. The British, who had fought so bravely against the Germans, had severely limited the entry of Jews into Palestine (White Paper) in order to appease the Arab world which violently opposed such a Jewish homeland.
In 1948 Yehuda was commissioned a lieutenant in the IDF. He fought in the War of Independence when five Arab armies attacked Israel – Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq –with contingents from Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Yemen, and Morocco. Again, he was wounded in battle. Israel was reborn. Yehuda and his family immigrated to America where he became a businessman; Lola became an artist.
“Why do you only cook on these two holidays?” I asked him.
“Because they celebrate the fight for freedom against tyrants and the strongest powers of the time,” he explained. After all, Yehuda Bielski knew something about Jews fighting formidable powers and winning against all odds.
Sometimes he would sing:
Let this song go like a signal through the years…
Beneath our feet the earth shall thunder, “We are here!”
From Zog Nit Keinmol (Never Say), Yiddish partisan anthem of the Holocaust by Hirsh Glick (1922-1944).
