Revised january 30, 2009 a tangled web

. The Jewish police arrested several hundred Jewish fugitives near the entrance to the Wilno ghetto and notified the Gestapo, who took them to be executed in Ponary. See Lazar, Destruction and Resistance, 84. A tunnel dug out of the HKP labor camp in Wilno was betrayed by a Jewish policeman to the Germans, who killed all those inside, thereby bringing escapes from that camp to a halt. See Levin, Fighting Back, 115. The Germans employed a Jewish woman whom they had apprehended with false papers as a confidante to seek out other Jews hiding on the Aryan side in Wilno. See Grynberg and Kotowska, eds., Życie i zagłada Żydów polskich 1939–1945, 540. The activities of a Jewish Gestapo agent named Goldin operating among the Jewish partisans in the Wilno area are referred to in Kowalski, A Secret Press in Nazi Europe, 310–11. The Bielski partisans executed a number of Jews who had been dispatched by the Germans to infiltrate this detachment. See Kuszelewicz, Un Juif de Biélorussie de Lida à Karaganda, 83–84. For Jewish policemen who collaborated with the Gestapo in Kaunas see Faitelson, Heroism & Bravery in Lithuania, 1941–1945, 235, 291–95, 346. In Lida, a group of Jews was apprehended for robbing Jewish property left for safekeeping with a local priest, a trusted friend of the Jews. The priest had been badly wounded with brass knuckles to the head. When the Jewish Council refused to intercede to obtain their release from prison, the Jewish detainees told the German authorities about the residence permits the council had arranged for Jewish refugees from Wilno by paying off Polish municipal clerks, thereby endangering the lives of all involved. Local Jews were coopted to identify all those who came from Wilno. As a result, 75 or 80 Jews were arrested and were executed by the Germans together with the members of the Jewish council. See Spector, Lost Jewish Worlds, 212; Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, 235–36, 610. A Jew by the name of Białobroda who had worked as an informer for the Belorussian police in the Lida ghetto was eventually executed by the Bielski unit for plotting against Tuvia Bielski. See Tec, Defiance, 177–78. A Jew by the name of Lansman (Haim Lantzman), who worked in the Nowogródek ghetto as a Gestapo agent and was responsible for the deaths of many Jews, was executed by the Bielski unit when he was sent to the forest as an informer. (Allegedly his wife had been imprisoned by the Germans and he agreed to find the partisan base and betray its location). See Tec, Defiance, 176–77; Kagan and Cohen, Surviving the Holocaust with the Russian Jewish Partisans, 69–70; Smilovitskii, Katastrofa evreev v Belorussii 1941–1944 gg., 299–300. Another Jew who was planted in the Jewish camp in Nowogródek was executed by the leaders of the underground by beheading in February 1943. Kagan and Cohen, Surviving the Holocaust with the Russian Jewish Partisans, 170. See The German Sicherheitsdienst (security services) “kept installing agents among the Jewish population in the ghetto” of Słonim: one of them was a refugee from Warsaw named Mariampol; another informer was Sarah, the daughter of a poor old Jewish woman whom she renounced, who “gave the Germans much useful information.” See Alpert, The Destruction of Slonim Jewry, 144–45, 152, 241, 339. Oswald Rufeisen was betrayed by a Jewish collaborator in Mir named Stanisławski. See Sutin, Jack and Rochelle, 59–60. A Jew named Schulzinger, from the town of Szczuczyn, informed on Jews who were planning to break out of the forced labour camp in Wilejka Stara near Mołodeczno; all those left in the camp were killed, except for a small group who managed to flee. See Yehuda Bauer, “Jewish Baranowicze in the Holocaust,” Yad Vashem Studies, vol. 31 (2003): 121. Witnesses report on “traitors and enemy agents” in the ghetto in Baranowicze. The Germans became aware of the existence of a well-armed underground in that ghetto and “were employing Jewish spies to acquire information about it.” The planned revolt in the ghetto was foiled. Ibid., 136, 148. An escape of Jews from a Luftwaffe base in or near Baranowicze was betrayed by a Jewish teenager from Łódź who worked there and informed the German commander about the underground group. Ibid., 136. Jewish collaborators were also a source of danger for the Polish underground. Jerzy Ripper, the chief of the Sicherheitsdienst intelligence service in Lida, was responsible for the arrest of many members of the Home Army. See Cezary Chlebowski, Gdy las był domem (Łódź: Wydawnictwo Łódzkie, 1972), 173–79; Cezary Chlebowski, Cztery z tysiąca (Warsaw: Krajowa Agencja Wydawnicza, 1983), 186–92; Krajewski, Na Ziemi Nowogródzkiej, 89, 239. According to another source, Ripper’s father was Austrian. Ripper fortuitously escaped death at the hands of a Home Army execution squad but was seriously wounded; he resurfaced after the war as an employee of the security office in Ełk before fleeing to West Germany. See Władysław Naruszewicz, Wspomnienia lidzianina (Warsaw: Bellona, 2001), 63. The transition from Nazi collaborator to Communist collaborator, and vice versa, was not unusual. Ludwik Kalkstein, the most notorious renegade in the ranks of the Home Army who betrayed the underground leader General Stefan Rowecki (“Grot”), became an SS-man who fought against Polish insurgents in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, and then an agent for the state security office in Communist Poland. He was eventually tried and convicted (to a life sentence) by the Communist authorities in 1954, released in 1965, and allowed to emigrate in 1982. See Waldemar Grabowski, “Kalkstein i Kaczorowska w świetle akt UB,” Biuletyn Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej, no. 8–9 (August–September 2004).

499 German field reports from the Wilno area indicate that Polish partisans, who came from the ranks of the local population, were a disciplined group who enjoyed widespread popular support. They requisitioned only the most needed food provisions, for which they issued receipts, or were provided food willingly by the Polish population to whom they offered protection from marauding groups. See Jarosław Wołkonowski, “Rozmowy polsko-niemieckie w lutym 1944 roku w świetle nowych dokumentów niemieckich,” in Wołkonowski, ed., Sympozjum historyczne “Rok 1944 na Wileńszczyźnie,” 98. Disciplinary transgressions were infrequent and were punished very by the Home Army. In some cases, its own members were known to have been executed for robbery and other crimes including those directed at non-Poles (such as Jews and Lithuanians). Ibid., 244; Boradyn, “Stosunki Armii Krajowej z partyzantką sowiecką na Nowogródczyźnie,” in Boradyn, ed., Armia Krajowa na Nowogródczyźnie i Wileńszczyźnie (1941–1945), 90; Krajewski, Na Ziemi Nowogródzkiej, 88 (for banditry directed at civilians and a Jew); Boradyn, Niemen–rzeka niezgody, 46; Borodziewicz, Szósta Wileńska Brygada AK, 189 (for theft of a kerchief from a Lithuanian woman); Kiersnowski, Tam i wtedy, 92; Sten, 47 (a memoir of a Jew cited earlier). In the early stages, when relations between Polish and Soviet partisans were still civil, Polish partisans were also punished for transgressions against Soviet partisans. See Boradyn, ed., Armia Krajowa na Nowogródczyźnie i Wileńszczyźnie (1942–1944) w świetle dokumentów sowieckich, 111. Of course, there were exceptions. One villager describes how members of the Home Army, employing violence, demanded provisions in Kul, near Rubieżewicze, a village that was in the Soviet zone. That same village was also plundered by Jewish partisans. See Kazimierz Bondarewicz, “Mój Kul,” in Jasiewicz, ed., Europa nieprowincjonalna, 890, 893; Boradyn, Niemen–rzeka niezgody, 206.

500 The Bielski and Zorin units, which consisted for the most part of family camps, were not part of the regular Soviet partisans and did not generally engage in military operations, so it is questionable whether they can properly be called partisan units. To the limited extent that some of their armed members were involved in military operations, those activities occurred under the command of Soviet partisan leaders. See Boradyn, “Stosunki Armii Krajowej z partyzantką sowiecką na Nowogródczyźnie,” in Boradyn, ed., Armia Krajowa na Nowogródczyźnie i Wileńszczyźnie (1941–1945), 115; Boradyn, Niemen–rzeka niezgody, 74, 84. Of Bielski’s group Nechama Tec writes: “the burden of feeding the people fell upon the young male fighters who devoted most of their energies to gathering provisions. Food expeditions were exhausting and dangerous, sometimes ending in the death of the participants.” See Nechama Tec, “Jewish Resistance in Belorussian Forests: Fighting and the Rescue of Jews by Jews,” in Rohrlich, ed., Resisting the Holocaust, 84.

501 Tec, Defiance, 80, 83.

502 Quoted in ibid., 48–49.

503 Tec, Defiance, 82.

504 Gdaliyau Dudman, “Vishnevo during the War,” in Abramson, ed., Wiszniew, As It Was and Is No More, 125 ff.

505 That is why, as noted earlier, in negotiations with the Soviet partisans, the Polish side often complained specifically about the activities of Jewish marauders.

506 See, for example, the account of Moses Meierson: “Many of our younger men … stole arms and escaped to the forest. Weapons were cached in secret hiding places in the ghetto. Within four weeks, the first contingent made off, fully armed.” See Leo W. Schwarz, The Root and the Bough: The Epic of an Enduring People (New York: Rinehard & Company, 1949), 95. In Głębokie, “While we were in the ghetto, we warned everyone we could to distrust the Germans and try to get out as soon as possible. We advised the young people to search for arms and come to the partisans in the forests to fight the Germans. We gave them directions on how to find us and other partisan groups. (Later, many of these same young people came with rifles to join our group.)” See Aron, Fallen Leaves, 84. In Lida, the Jewish underground, many of whose members later fled to the forests, was able to obtain arms from the storerooms in the former Polish military barracks; Jewish labouers sometimes managed to steal arms and spare parts and smuggle them into the ghetto. Some of the arms were acquired from non-Jews. See Spector, Lost Jewish Worlds, 214. In Baranowicze, teenaged Jewish girls who cleaned the German garrison, which housed a stockpile of abandoned Soviet military hardware, smuggled out parts of rifles stolen and dismantled by young Jewish men working there. See Berk, Destined to Live, 76. A Christian farmer helped to smuggle weapons out of the ghetto for Jews from Krasne who escaped to the forest and joined the partisans. See the account of Moshe Baran in Anita Brostoff and Sheila Chamovitz, eds., Flares of Memory: Stories of Childhood during the Holocaust (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 185. For a description of weapon gathering activities in Kurzeniec see the account of Zalman Uri Gurevitz in Meyerowitz, ed., The Scroll of Kurzeniac. Nachum Katz from Meszajgoła, who was imprisoned in a camp outside of Wilno, managed to procure arms (revolvers, grenades) for the ghetto via contacts he established with the Home Army. One of the liaison men betrayed him and the Jewish ghetto police handed him over to the Gestapo, but fortunately Katz was released and survived the war. See the account of Rut Leisner in Turski, ed., Losy żydowskie, vol. 2, 211–13.

507 The Bielski brothers, for example, acquired their first weapons from Christian acquaintances; another group used the services of a Jewish “go-between” who had his own suppliers; yet another group purchased weapons directly from peasants. See Tec, Defiance, 34, 59, 71. Tec’s book provides copious details of expeditions to gather food and other supplies the Bielski group engaged in, often with the use of force. Ibid., 37, 39, 41, 46, 68, 72–73, 86, 101, 105, 107, 110, 115, 140–41, 142–43, 148, 151, 161, 178, 179, 193.

508 “A Child Partisan from Voronova,” in Kowalski, ed., Anthology on Armed Jewish Resistance, 1939–1945, vol. 2 (1985), 613. This account may refer to the so-called “Todros” or “Todras” group led by Elka Ariovitz based in Nacza forest.

509 Boris Kozinitz, “A Partisan’s Story,” in Shtokfish, ed., Book in Memory of Dokshitz-Parafianow, Chapter 4.

510 Account of Aida Brydbord (Chaja Czerczewska), in “Women of Valor: Partisans and Resistance Fighters,” www.interlog.com/~mighty/valor/aida.htm, originally published in the Journal of the Center for Holocaust Studies, vol. 6, no. 4 (spring 1990). This brazen raid came to the attention of the Germans, who retaliated by attacking the Jews and killing twelve of them. “We were afraid to show our faces in any village,” Brydbord recalled. Instead, they pillaged the supplies that the peasants had stored for the winter in straw and dirt-covered piles.

511 Account of Meyshe Kaganovitsh in Kaganovich, ed., In Memory of the Jewish Community of Ivye.

512 Account of Shimon Zimmerman in Meyerowitz, ed., The Scroll of Kurzeniac.

513 Account of Zalman Uri Gurevitz in Meyerowitz, ed., The Scroll of Kurzeniac.

514 Account of Yitzhak Zimerman in Meyerowitz, ed., The Scroll of Kurzeniac.

515 Shepetinski, Jacob’s Ladder, 49–50. For descriptions of weapon gathering in the Słonim ghetto see Alpert, The Destruction of Slonim Jewry, 142, 146–48, 151–53, 198–201.

516 Gdaliyau Dudman, “Vishnevo during the War,” in Abramson, ed., Wiszniew, As It Was and Is No More, 125 ff.

517 Abram, The Light After the Dark, 16.

518 Alpert, The Destruction of Slonim Jewry 350–51.

519 Account of Evelyn Kahn in “Women of Valor: Partisans and Resistance Fighters,” www.interlog.com/~mighty/valor/evelyn.htm, originally published in the Journal of the Center for Holocaust Studies, vol. 6, no. 4 (Spring 1990).

520 Shlomo Rogovin, “Vishnevo Stories,” posted on the Internet at: