Tämä artikkeli on kuin vastaus usein toistuneeseen pohdintaani, kuinka on mahdollisita että niin suuri määrä juutalaisia on voitu surmata ilman että nousee tehokasta vastarintaa. Bielskin partisaanit on ryhmä, joka edustaa Israelin valtion ydinsiementä ja oman valtion välttämättömyyttä. Tästä on You Tube sarja 6 lyhyttä filmiä.
The story of Rae Kushner and the Belsiki partisan group during the
Second World War is not just one episode of Jewish resistance, but in
fact signifies the very spirit that Israel still harbors today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HK4qqCbv1P4
Cold,
scared and innocent Rae Kushner, along with her younger sister went
hungry during the 10 days between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur.
Despite
the fact that they entered the new year barely alive, they were glad
to have escaped the ghetto of Novogrodek, which had been their home for
close to two years. Kushner’s story, although one of many, is a perfect
example of a small narrative of Jewish resistance amid the sea of
melancholic causality which seems to continue to persevere in the study
of the Shoah.
Born in Novogrodek, Poland, Rae’s life changed
completely when Soviet troops invaded the eastern half of the country
as a result of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of 1939. The Soviets took
her parents’ business away which led to unthinkable poverty. Yet, in
her own words she believed that the Russian occupation was “bearable”
compared to when Nazi forces arrived in 1941, after the launch of
Operation Barbarossa.
After weeks of gossip of massacres in the
west, reality struck home when the Wehrmacht and SS Einsatzgruppen
arrived in her small town, where about 6,000 Jews lived, constituting
half of the population.
Hundreds were killed, and the rest were
placed in a makeshift ghetto in a small part of the town, where living
conditions were again ludicrous. The weekly massacres that the Nazis
inflicted on the ghetto for their own amusement finally led to her own
mother being murdered. Most could not take the pain of hunger, and
death that surrounded them, and planned an escape.
“They digged,
digged and digged” said Kushner in one of her emotional interviews
before her death, referring to the hundreds of women, men and children
who participated in digging a long tunnel that stretched from the
courthouse in which her family lived in along with dozens of others, to
a nearby forest. They used homemade tools and even their hands to dig a
tunnel big enough for one person to crawl through at a time. When they
finally escaped, out of the 600 that went through, only 250 made it.
Many of those were later murdered by Nazi guards outside Novogrodek.
After
wandering endlessly through the woods with her sister, brothers and
father they found hope in a man they came across, named Tuvia Bielski,
the famous leader of the Bielski partisan group which at one point
enrolled a 1,000-strong Jewish force that fought the Nazis in Poland
and Belarus on the Eastern Front. “Bielski saved us” said Kushner. Yet
they were not the only ones whom he helped as Bielski took in hundreds
of Jews who escaped from surrounding villages, and hid them in
concealed camps in various forests.
Rae took up arms to serve
with the men and women in the partisan group not because she had no
option, rather she wanted to save lives.
When she did not fight,
Rae guarded the camp, and mostly cooked potato soup as potatoes were
the only thing that they could find in the forests of Poland. Yet, the
quality of their food was truly the last thing on the mind of the
partisans. For the course of the war Rae, Bielsky and hundreds of other
fought to cripple German supply lines, and rescue Jews from being sent
to their deaths.
After the war both Rae and those like her
spent the rest of their days with the ability to celebrate Rosh Hashana
peacefully, never again having to feel hunger, or the unbearable sight
of seeing those they loved killed around them.
Yet, there is
more to this story than just Jewish resistance, agency, and the
improbability of defying death. No. This is about Israel, as it was
Israel that was being built in those forests.
Eretz Yisrael was
first conceived decades before Rae’s time, in the minds of men and
women through the diffusion of ideas, yet it was in Poland, and Europe
as a whole, that it became much more than just an idea. It became a
necessity.
It was in the fighting spirit of those such as Tuvia
Bielski that the first stones of a nation began to be molded. It was in
the spirit of struggle, and defiance against tremendous odds, that the
very cornerstones of a country for a people that have remained without
a home for far too long were founded.
It was in those forests,
and in those moments of pain and hunger, and when those men and women
were digging for their lives, that it became evident that it was either
Israel, or nothing.
The author, a native of Jassy, Romania, is a writer, historian, and the senior editor of The Art of Polemics magazine. He is currently working on a book on The Jassy Pogrom of 1941.
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