Aron Bielski

Origins and early life

Aron Bielski was born on 21 July 1927 at Stankiewicze near Nowogródek, the youngest of twelve children and the youngest of the four brothers. He was thirteen when the Germans murdered his parents and two of his brothers in the Nowogródek ghetto, on 8 December 1941, and he went into the forest with Tuvia, Asael and Zus.

Work and career

Being a boy was itself the use: small and unremarkable enough to pass, he slipped back into the ghettos to tell the Jews there was somewhere to run to, and guided them out to the camp. Tuvia wrote of him that it was Aron who brought life into the community, who found other survivors and brought them into the district. The camp in the Naliboki forest grew from about thirty people to more than a thousand, with a mill, a bakery, a bathhouse, a clinic, a school, a synagogue and workshops that repaired weapons for the Soviet units around it, and in the summer of 1944 some twelve hundred people walked out of it alive.

Aron reached Palestine, fought in the war of 1948, made his life in the United States from 1954 and took the name Aron Bell; he outlived his three brothers and lived to see Edward Zwick put the camp on film in 2008.

Later years

He died at Palm Beach, in Florida, on 22 September 2025, at ninety-eight, survived by his wife Henryka, by children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, eighty-four years after the night in the ghetto that sent four brothers into the woods.