Asael Bielski

Origins and early life

Asael Bielski was born in 1908 at Stankiewicze, near Nowogródek in what is now Belarus, the second of the four brothers of a family of twelve children. After the Germans murdered his parents and two of his brothers in the Nowogródek ghetto on 8 December 1941, he went into the forest with Tuvia, Zus and Aron, and in the spring of 1942 the four of them and thirteen neighbours formed the nucleus of a partisan unit.

Work and career

Tuvia set the policy and Zus led the fighting; Asael was the field commander, the one who held the camp together day by day as it grew from about thirty people to more than a thousand Jews in the Naliboki forest. He ran the guard, the moves and the discipline through the German sweeps: in August 1943 more than twenty thousand men were sent into the forest under the name Operation Hermann to clear it, and the camp survived by going deeper into the marshes.

He married Chaja, who had taught him bookkeeping, shortly before the end of the war. When the Soviets took the region he was drafted into the Red Army, and six months later, in February 1945, he was killed at the battle of Königsberg.

Later years

He never saw his daughter Assaela, who was born after his death; Chaja lived until 2017, and Assaela married the Israeli violin maker Amnon Weinstein, who restores the instruments Jews played before and during the Shoah.