Zus Bielski
Zus Bielski · Heroes of Israel
One of the four Bielski brothers whose partisan group in the Belarusian forests sheltered some 1,200 Jews — the largest armed rescue of Jews by Jews in the war.
19 October 1912, Stankiewicze, near Nowogródek, Russian Empire (now Belarus) — 18 August 1995, Brooklyn, New York, United States
Naliboki forest · Israel · New York
Zus Bielski is recognized among Israeli contributors to Heroes of Israel — One of the four Bielski brothers whose partisan group in the Belarusian forests sheltered some 1,200 Jews — the largest armed rescue of Jews by Jews in the war.
Origins and early life
Alexander Zeisal Bielski, called Zus, was born on 19 October 1912 at Stankiewicze near Nowogródek, the third of the four brothers. The Germans murdered his parents and two of his brothers in the Nowogródek ghetto on 8 December 1941, and they murdered his first wife, Cyrl Borowski, and their infant daughter.
Work and career
He was the fighter of the four: where Tuvia held that the unit existed to keep Jews alive, Zus pressed for combat, and it was he who led the armed missions, the raids for food and weapons, the sabotage of rail and telephone lines, the reprisals against informers. The brothers quarrelled over it and never quite settled it, but the two halves held each other up: Zus's fighters were what let Tuvia's thousand non-combatants be fed and defended.
In the spring of 1942 the four of them and thirteen neighbours from the ghetto had formed the nucleus of the unit; by the summer of 1944 some twelve hundred people walked out of the Naliboki forest alive. Zus served a few months in the Red Army, went to Israel, and came to New York in 1956, where he built a fleet of taxicabs and a trucking company.
Later years
He died in Brooklyn on 18 August 1995, at eighty-two; of the four brothers only Aron, a boy of thirteen when the family took to the forest, was still living, and he died in 2025 at ninety-eight.
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Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zus_Bielski
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One of the four Bielski brothers whose partisan group in the Belarusian forests sheltered some 1,200 Jews — the largest armed rescue of Jews by Jews in the war.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zus_Bielski
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