By Michael Skakun Arutz Sheva August 13, 2003

Title: The Bielski Brothers: The True Story of Three Men Who Defied the Nazis, Saved 1,200 Jews, and Built a Village in the Forest
Author: Peter Duffy
Publisher: HarperCollins. New York.
302 pages. $25.95

The calculus of public recognition is, at best, an inexact science. Even a subject as morally freighted as the Holocaust falls victim to the importunities of time and the socio-economic pressures of official commemoration with the unfortunate consequence that paeans are not meted out evenly or justly. Some partisans-cum-rescuers continue to languish in relative obscurity, despite deeds that should have earned them a fairer share of immortality.

In The Bielski Brothers, the University of Pittsburgh-educated journalist Peter Duffy has righted a historical wrong. He has fully invested one of the most remarkable rescue operations of World War II – the story of how three men defied the Nazis, saved 1,200 Jews and built a village in the forest — with requisite daring, excitement and narrative momentum. He depicts how a band of brothers from the Novogrudek (Navaredok) region of pre-war Poland killed nearly as many enemy soldiers as did the Warsaw Ghetto fighters, yet whose reputation remains far less distinct, even at times imperceptible in the larger sweep of events and amid the vagaries of post-war collective memory. DuffyÆs book is an act of restoration, if not of resurrection, tipping the scale on the side of historical rectitude, shedding a steady light on the formidable story of forest Jews too long hidden in the shadows.

The Bielski brothers — Tuvia, Zus and Asael — were Jewish farmers living the simple peasant life in Stankevich, a village near the provincial capital of Novogrudek, a pre-war bustling Polish town of some 6,000 Jews and a center of mussar, the ethical pietism that invigorated the spiritual life of Litvak Jewry. The brothers and their family ran an old mill, grinding grain into flour and churning rye into meal, surviving the worst of Eastern European poverty and deprivation. But, in essence, they were quintessential outsiders–Jews to the surrounding resentful peasants; rural folk among the more urbanized Jews, a status affording them the added advantage of transcending limited perspectives and of seeing things whole.

As soon as World War II broke out, Novogrudek came under Soviet hegemony, an oppressive rule that pales, however, in comparison with the genocidal battle launched by the Nazis who invaded Russia in 1941. On December 8, 1941, five months after they marched into Novogrudek, the Nazis unleashed the first of their four mass murder campaigns, taking the lives of nearly 5,000 innocent men, women and children, including the Bielski parents. Seven months later, an equally brutal aktion (mass slaughter) took thousands of more Jewish lives.

These enormities prompted the Bielski Brothers to seek refuge in the thick regional forests and initially save their next of kin. But, Tuvia, the eldest and group leader, insisted with the kind of courage and poise that still reverberates 60 years later, “I would rather save one old Jewish woman than kill 10 German soldiers.” And he sought to remain true to his word, forfeiting the relative safety of family aloofness in the forest for the greater good of casting the net of rescue as widely as possibly.

Hundreds of Jews who survived the Einsatzgruppen (the German mobile killing units) and their henchmen found their way to safety in the forest. The Bielski unit even organized rescue missions to the nearby ghettos of Novogrudek and Lida, always keeping one step ahead of the Nazis. But in the latter half of 1943, the Nazis, determined to wipe out the forest Jews among others, launched Operation Hermann, a coordinated anti-partisan attack headed by the notorious SS-Obersturmbannfurher, Oskar Dirlewanger. On July 15, Dirlewanger closed in on the Bielski group of 800 Jews huddled near Lake Kroman in the Naliboki Puscha (primeval forest).

The fast approaching Germans used heavy machinery to push aside down trees blocking the dirt roads leading into the forestÆs heart. But the brothers kept pushing deeper until they reached an island surrounded by swampland. Slowly and silently, hundreds of Jews moved through chest-high marsh waters. Miraculously, the Bielskis and their brigade waded so far into the overgrown swamp as to escape notice by circling Luftwaffe planes ready to dispatch them. Again they had escaped by the skin of their teeth.

Yet in the midst of EuropeÆs charnel house, where millions were being put to death, the Bielskis created a miniature Jewish town in the dense forests of eastern Poland with such rough amenities as living quarters; a main street; workshops for tailors, shoemakers, carpenters and seamstresses; a school; a musical and dramatic theatre; and a tannery doubling as a synagogue — a small-scale harbor of safety allowing more than a thousand Jews to survive.

Although Duffy conveys the thrill and travail of their extraordinary act of defiance, he is not loath to discuss the compromises and peccadilloes, even the acts of moral outrage, the Belskis occasionally committed. He gives us the full chiaroscuro effect, painting both the hues of light and shadow that constitute a picture of heroism in extremis.

He mentions that the brothers were accused at times of being bullies and local Lotharios, drunk on power, vodka (samogonka – moonshine, the “Coca-Cola of the Byelorussia countryside”) and women. He readily admits that “the society created by the Bielskis was by no means a utopian community of enlightened democratic and egalitarian governance.” Perhaps, most disappointingly but not surprisingly, given the insuperable pressures and passions of the time, is the reader`s discovery that Tuvia, the commanding six-foot tall leader customarily bestriding a white horse and famous for his control and self-possession, lost it at the end when, in a fit of rage and pique, he shot and killed one of the Jewish men under his protection.

Shmuel Amarant, the chronicler of forest life and an admirer of the brothers, concedes: “This was a tragic end to an endeavor which fought to save Jewish lives from the clutches of the Nazis. The camp ended its existence with the taking of a Jewish life and the destruction of a family.”

Peter Duffy declares that he came to this wartime story by sheer happenstance. Surfing the net, he stumbled upon a reference to “Forest Jews” which so intrigued his fancy that it led to a three-year research and writing project. But in some ways his discovery is not entirely fortuitous. Born in Syracuse, New York, Duffy is the son of a marine and a martial arts instructor — a black belt in Okinawan goju-ryu — convinced of the purity and discipline of his art; as well as of a journalist mother, who broadened his worldview by acquainting him with the Onondaga, one of the six nations of the Iroquois Indians in upstate New York. Mindboggling as it seems, their chief effectively became young Peter`s baby sitter. If past is prologue, is it any wonder that Peter Duffy was born to tackle the Bielski adventure, an account woven out of the fabric of courage, cunning, discipline and endurance?

Three years ago, Duffy wrote a lengthy piece about the Bielski brothers in the City Section of the Sunday New York Times. His book, a feat of orchestration, develops the melodies and motifs, the harmonies and discords of forest life into full symphonic range. He has recovered for the reader one of the most stirring and improbable stories of heroism to have emerged from the dark pages of World War II — an arresting tale of liberty warring against fatality.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 7th, 2003 and is filed under opinion.