Tuvia Bielski

Origins and early life

Tuvia Bielski was born on 8 May 1906 at Stankiewicze, a hamlet near Nowogródek in what was then the Russian empire and is now Belarus, the son of David and Beila Bielski, and served as a corporal of the Polish army from 1927. On 8 December 1941 the Germans murdered his parents and two of his brothers in the Nowogródek ghetto; Tuvia, Asael, Zus and Aron took to the forest, and in the spring of 1942, with thirteen neighbours from the ghetto, they formed the nucleus of a partisan unit.

Work and career

He commanded it on a principle other partisan leaders thought a liability: the purpose was not to kill Germans but to keep Jews alive, and he took in whoever came, the old, the sick, women, children, anyone who could not fight. Asked afterwards why he had taken on people who could not carry a rifle, he said he would rather save one old Jewish woman than kill ten German soldiers. The camp in the Naliboki forest became a village: a mill, a bakery, a bathhouse, a tannery, a clinic and a quarantine hut, a school, a synagogue, a court and a jail, and workshops where more than a hundred tailors, cobblers, carpenters, gunsmiths and watchmakers worked, for the camp and for the Soviet partisan units around it.

The Germans offered fifty thousand Reichsmarks for him at the start of 1943 and then doubled it, and in August of that year sent more than twenty thousand men into Operation Hermann to clear the forest; the camp went deeper into the marshes and held. When the Red Army came in the summer of 1944, some twelve hundred people walked out of the forest, seven in ten of them women, children and the old.

Later years

Bielski went to Palestine, fought in the war of 1948, moved to New York in 1956 and ran a small trucking firm there for thirty years; the sociologist Nechama Tec interviewed him shortly before he died in New York on 12 June 1987, and he was reburied the next year on Har HaMenuchot in Jerusalem with full military honours.