Revised january 30, 2009 a tangled web
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- The Spiral Begins
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Soviet Designs
The Soviet partisan command adopted a similar strategy in relation to the Polish underground and the civilian population. In January 1943, General Ponomarenko outlined the following course of action: It is imperative that we ignite partisan warfare in Poland. Apart from military results, it will result in justifiable losses among the Polish population in the struggle against the German occupier and will prevent them from saving up all their forces for later.101 Directives aimed at provoking German attacks against the Polish underground were formulated at a meeting of the Central Committee Bureau of the Communist Party of Belorussia on June 24, 1943. General Ponomarenko urged that, while continuing to engage in talks with Polish delegations about joint operations against the Germans, Concurrently … we must direct our partisan units and party organizations to use whatever means to detect and expose to assaults by the German occupiers all local Polish organizations and groups that emerge. The Germans won’t hesitate to shoot them if they find out that they are organizers of Polish partisan groups or other combat organizations. … Don’t be constrained by any scruples in choosing your means. These measures should be undertaken on a broad scale and organized in such a way that it all proceeds smoothly.102 The Soviets unleashed what historian Marek Jan Chodakiewicz has aptly called “revolutionary banditry.”103 Moreover, their goal—which was cast in a duplicitous web—was to eliminate any independent Polish underground in the area. In fact, the Soviets would not even tolerate the existence of Polish units within the Soviet partisan structures. The various secret directives issued by the Soviet leadership thus show that Polish fears were not based on paranoia or blind hatred of foreigners on their soil, as some commentators argue, but grounded in a brutal reality—one the Poles had experienced on a daily basis since the Soviet invasion of Poland on September 17, 1939. Their suspicion and mistrust of the Soviets was therefore fully justified and spilled over naturally to the Soviet partisan forces and their allies. Behind-the-scenes collaboration between the Gestapo and the NKVD was nothing new and had started well before the war. These two agencies established close contacts in Danzig (Gdańsk) as early as 1935 and together plotted the dismemberment of Poland,104 which was formally sanctioned under the terms of a Secret Supplementary Protocol to the German-Soviet Frontier and Friendship Treaty of September 28, 1939. Contacts between the two organizations intensified and meetings were called to discuss how best to combat Polish resistance and eradicate Polish national existence. A joint instructional centre for officers of the NKVD and the Gestapo was opened at Zakopane in December 1939. Nor did the Soviets did not shun cooperation with the Gestapo, when it suited their purpose, after being turned on by their erstwhile Nazi allies. By the end of 1941, the Soviets were parachuting agents—such as Paweł (Pinkus) Finder, who was appointed First Secretary of the Soviet-controlled Polish Workers’ Party, and Stanisław (Solomon) Kurland—into German-occupied Poland to destabilize the Home Army. One way of doing this was by denouncing Home Army members to the Nazis.105 The Communist underground infiltrated the archives of the Warsaw office of the Polish government in exile’s delegate and turned over secret files to the Gestapo. In February 1942, the Gestapo together with operatives from the Communist underground raided the delegate’s premises, seizing more than a dozen people who were later killed. The documents found there were divided between the Gestapo and Communist underground.106 On occasion the over-zealousness of the Soviet operatives backfired. Mistaking it for a Home Army operation, in March 1943, Communist agents betrayed a printing house of an underground Communist newspaper on Grzybowska Street in Warsaw. As a result, two of its workers were executed and three were deported to Auschwitz.107 Yet when the citizens of Warsaw rose up against the German occupiers in August 1944, the Soviet Army, who had reached the suburb of Praga across the Vistula River, refused pleas for help as 200,000 Poles perished during the 63-day onslaught. Their local proxies—the Polish Workers’ Party and the People’s Army—laid plans (as yet premature) to eliminate the leadership and “uncooperative” elements of the valiant Home Army, with Soviet help.108 Characteristically, German Communists were the most privileged group of prisoners in Nazi concentration camps and were notorious for collaborating with the camp authorities.109 This long tradition of collaboration survived the defeat of Nazi Germany. It was not out of keeping that Heinrich Kassner (Jan Kaszubowski), a former Gestapo agent who had infiltrated the Home Army in Pomerania, became an NKVD agent and joined the security office after the war110; that Izydor Reisler (Jerzy Sawicki) sat on the Lawyer’s Council in Soviet-occupied Lwów, where he persecuted its Polish members, then became a Gestapo agent in the Lwów ghetto, and finally emerged as a prosecutor of the Supreme National Tribunal and Supreme Court in Stalinist Poland, where he oversaw the prosecution of war criminals111; or that Danek Redlich followed the same path as, successively, a Bolshevik agent in Soviet-occupied Lwów, a Gestapo agent in German-occupied Kraków, where he denounced Stanisław Taubenschlag, a scion of a prominent Jewish family (his father, Rafał Taubenschlag, was dean of the Jagiellonian University), while on a mission for the Polish underground, and as an employee of the security office in Stalinist Poland.112 From the outset, the Soviet partisans operating in northeastern Poland, especially those with direct links to the NKVD, had as their task the undermining and destruction of the non-Communist underground in that area. To accomplish this they resorted to passing on to the Germans lists of members of the Polish underground and engaged in other forms of behind-the-scenes collaboration with the Gestapo, German gendarmerie and local police.113 A special unit of the Kirov Brigade operating in the Wołożyn area, posing as a Belorussian self-defence organization, provided to the Gebietskommissar in Lida a list of 33 Home Army members in the fall of 1943. Their aim was twofold: to denounce Polish activists and to incite animosity between Poles and Belorussians.114 Soviet partisans in northeastern Poland proved not to be an ally in the fight against the Germans, but an enemy whose real and increasingly overt aim was the destruction of the Polish independentist underground and the renewed takeover of these lands. This reality was not lost on those who, for whatever reason and sometimes for want of any other option, aligned themselves with the Soviets. Indeed, many Jews—former Polish citizens who had witnessed the wholesale destruction of Jewish communal life and institutions during the first Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland in 1939–1941—became intensely loyal to the Soviet Union, even if they were not personally committed to the Communist ideology. Tuvia Bielski, for example, vividly recalled a speech he delivered to Jewish partisans as commander of the Zhukov unit: “Moreover, if you are a true Soviet citizen you must know that our Motherland requires that we struggle together against the German-fascist enemy.”115 They should not, therefore, feign surprise that they found themselves on a collision course with the Polish population and its underground authorities who remained loyal to Poland’s government in exile.
Already in mid–1942, Soviet partisans were sporadically murdering members of the Polish elite, including the landed gentry and intelligentsia. The scale of these murders grew to include Home Army delegates sent to meet with the Soviets as well as hundreds of family members of Home Army men and women.116 Ordinary civilians also fell victim to atrocities and deceitful tactics at the hands of Soviet partisans, as demonstrated by the following characteristic cases described by Jewish partisans. After escaping to the Naliboki forest, Abraham Meyer Shmulivitz joined the Stalin Brigade. The leader of his detachment and the sergeant who was second in command were Russian POWs who had escaped from a German prison camp. One night in January or February 1943, they went to dynamite a railway junction near Iwie (Iwje) but found it heavily guarded by Germans. The leader said he knew of a nearby Polish farmer with two beautiful daughters and took his troop there. While the detachment waited outside the farm house, the leader and sergeant spent an hour raping the farmer’s daughters. The detachment then moved to another farm to wait until they could mount their attack on the junction again. They left footprints in the snow but didn’t worry because the girls had been warned they would be killed if they told the Germans. One of the girls did not heed this warning and, quite understandably, reported what had happened. Equipped with skis and white camouflage, the Germans pursued the partisan detachment, caught up with them and killed most of them. The remnants made their way back to the partisan base where the leader reported that a farmer had betrayed them, without disclosing why. The partisan command ordered that the family be killed in reprisal for betraying the partisans. And so the Soviet partisans murdered the entire family of “collaborators” and burned down their farmhouse.117 Moshe Yudewitz (later Moris Sorid), the deputy commander of the Malenkov otriad of the Chapayev Brigade which was active near Kobryń, in Polesie (Polesia), recalled the fear that ordinary villagers felt when their villages were raided by Soviet partisans. The boys began their work of gathering items of needed food, and I entered the house where Pauk’s aunt lived with her family. The woman was scared to death, when she saw three armed partisans. Although the farmers were always afraid of the Germans, they were sometimes afraid of the partisans, too. In many cases, … partisans didn’t behave politely. They could be brutal, not only demanding food or clothes, but also misbehaving sexually and abusively.118 Harold Zissman (Hersh Cukierman) belonged to a Soviet partisan unit that forayed south of Grodno masquerading as the Home Army. Their plan was to rob the farmers and thereby incite them against the Polish underground. We would be impersonating White Poles, and to that end we were outfitted in Polish Army uniforms. … Each group was also to “bomb” the farm of a local collaborator [sic]—that is, raid his house for clothing and other supplies for the entire group. … I was with Sergey, Valodya, the two local Jewish fighters, and a few other local men. … When carrying out “bombings,” we impersonated Polish Underground fighters, the point being to discredit the White Poles with the farmers. From the farms, besides food and clothing, we took naphtha, saws, and axes—the farmers would miss these things most of all.119
There is no question that there were many Jews among the large Soviet forces that attacked Naliboki. A Soviet document (dated June 2, 1943) states that Iosif Shimanovich (Szymonowicz), who hailed from the town of Naliboki, was to lead a group of partisans from the Dzerzhinsky detachment of the Stalin Brigade to the town for the assault.121 The following account, which mentions members of the Stalin and Chapaev battalions, indicates, falsely, that Germans came to the rescue of the civilians killed in Naliboki. A group of partisan Jews and non-Jews, among them David Lipshitz [from Korelicze], and his friend Moyshke Funt from Ivenitz [Iwieniec] took over the town of Nalibocki [Naliboki]. Their goal was to take over the police station. The Germans from Ivenitz were tipped off and surrounded Nalibocki. The partisans fortified themselves in the church. They fought heroically to the last bullet, and did not surrender to the Germans. David Lipshitz and Moyshke Funt fell in battle.122 What is in dispute is whether members of the Bielski group were among the assailants. Confusion about this matter is unavoidable in the circumstances. A number of Jewish fugitives from Naliboki had joined the Soviet partisans, among them: Boris Rubin or Rubizhewski, Israel Kesler, Iosif Shimanovich (Szymonowicz), Akiva or Kiva Szymonowicz, Michel Makhlis (Michal Mechlis), Abraham Viner (Avram Wajner), Avram Kibovich, Chaim Szlusberg, and Pnina Szlusberg Szmidt.123 However, it is not always clear which detachment they belonged to at any given time, though almost all of them eventually became part of the Bielski group. Moreover, it is understandable that the residents of the town, who often survived the massacre by hiding, could not identify the assailants by name when questioned sixty years after the event. After all, the assailants not leave calling cards. According to Wacław Nowicki, who lived through those events, the formations that did most of the pillaging and murdering were the “Pobeda” detachment124 and the Bielski partisans, who later established their base and family camp, known as “Jerusalem,” in Naliboki forest. It was 4:30, perhaps five at night. I was awoken by a powerful boom. A long burst of shots from an automatic rifle blanketed the cottage. Bullets pierced the beams through and flew above our beds. A bullet lodged in the wall a few centimetres above my head. I heard screams. We barricaded ourselves in the house, but the assailants ran further towards the centre of Naliboki. … What we saw when the partisans left was beyond human comprehension. Burned down buildings. Piles of corpses. Mostly rifle-shot wounds, smashed heads, lifeless eyes staring in horror. Among those killed I noticed a schoolmate. … Jews who lived among us before the war stood out among the assailants. They knew perfectly well where everyone lived and who was who. … This was a group of degenerate bandits, and not any partisans. Their main occupation was robbery and murder. Often they also committed rapes. They raped one of my neighbours. Her father, whom they forced to watch this at gunpoint, was told: “Don’t worry, after the war we will come and get married.” During an assault they shot Antoni Korżenko, my godfather’s brother, when he did not want to hand over his horses.125 Everyone was in tears. The plunderers did not omit a single homestead. Something was taken from everyone. Because he resisted, they killed the father of my schoolmate and cousin, Marysia Grygorcewicz. The “soldiers of Pobeda” and “Jerusalemites” took with them the pigs and chickens which they shot, flour, as well as other provisions. They wanted to live! But they took the lives of others. They did not come to fight. … In the space of almost two hours, 128 innocent people died, the majority of them, as eyewitnesses later testified, at the hands of the Bielski and “Pobeda” assassins.126 Residents of Naliboki who survived the attack make it clear that the assailants did not simply target the organizers of the local self-defence, who were few in number, but also the civilian population and burned down half the town in the process. Wacław Chilicki states: “They followed their noses and burst into cottages. Everyone they came across along the way they killed in cold blood. No one was shown mercy.” Bolesław Chmara, then 15 years old, recalled: “They summoned my brother, who was three years older than me, out to the porch. He came out. There was a woman among them. She raised her rifle and shot him right in the chest. It was a dumdum bullet that ripped his entire arm off. She shrugged her shoulders, turned around on her heel, and they moved on. They robbed what they could and reduced the cottage to ashes.”127 The presence of women is a strong indication that there were Jews among the assailants, since there were very few non-Jewish women in the Soviet partisan movement in this area. Maria Chilicka (née Grygorcewicz) described the events as follows: Neither my father nor our tenant nor our neighbours were organizers [of the self-defence]. They robbed us first. They told my father to harness his horse to his wagon and then told him to load onto it whatever was in the granary: flour, buckwheat, lard, smoked and raw meat. While my father was loading the wagon one of them struck him with the butt of a gun so that he would load faster. When the wagon was loaded they told my father to stand by the wall of the granary and they wanted to shoot him. We started to plead with them. At this time our tenant came out of the house so they told my father to remove his shoes. They led our tenant, Albert Farbatka, from the courtyard to the street and shot him near the gate. The bullet did not go through his forehead but pierced his cheeks and he fell to the ground. I can’t say exactly why they didn’t finish him off since I ran to rescue our cows because our cowshed was already on fire. Our pigsty with our pigs was burning down completely. When I was chasing the cows into the field one of the men with a torch went to set fire to the barn, and afterwards set fire to the granary and houses. They also killed our neighbour and burned his property. His body was also charred because there was no one to pull him away from his house. He left behind six children between the ages of twelve and one. The bandits just kept yelling “kill the belak [White Pole] and let him rot,” and they didn’t spare anyone. … Before the self-defence group [was formed] armed intruders would enter homes in broad daylight and take clothing as well. A female intruder told my sister to open her wardrobe and took whatever she wanted. … If anyone would try not to give it to them then they would take what they wanted and destroy the rest so that nothing remained. They spared no one and nothing. … I do not know why they exacted such revenge on us. Perhaps because we fed them? Our family helped to hide a Jew from Mir named Kaplan. He didn’t stay in our house, but we provided him with food. … After they burned us down and we ourselves had nothing to eat, he went to the partisans. … Another Jew, a dentist who used to work in our hospital, stayed with us for three months. … Once the Germans came to us and demanded a bicycle and started to search our buildings. My mother was really afraid that they would enter our house and asked him to leave the house for a while. But he didn’t leave, and simply moved from one end of the house to the other … When my mother saw him she got upset and told him to leave a little more abruptly. He left right away. When the Germans left he came and took his documents and left … If they had found him in our house they would’ve shot all eight of us … They [the Soviet partisans] came mostly to the farmers to rob. The worst was when they came or rather assaulted us accompanied by women, then they plundered everything, and when there wasn’t what she wanted, they smashed dishes, mirrors, and broke whatever came into their hands. Only once did a Russian come from the forest and not take [things] himself but told us to give him clean undergarments and food. … Not only did they rob but they also killed … Not one of our buildings remained. They took our horse and wagon. … Every family buried their victims. … They killed my 16-year-old cousin Jan Łukaszewicz in 1942 while he was watching his cows … Some Jews took another of my cousins from his home on May 8, 1943 and killed him. They also killed my cousin’s husband. They would have killed my father too had our tenant not come out of the house … The Germans came during the day and carried out round-ups for labour in Germany. … In July there were many Germans and the partisans were afraid of them. They hid deep in the forest. They [the partisans] were heroes [when dealing] with the defenceless population. The Germans deported us on August 6, 1943. … They took us to camps like bandits because the real bandits had hidden in the forest.128 The head of the Soviet partisans in the Baranowicze district, Vasilii Chernyshev or Chernyshov, known by his nom de guerre Major General Platon,129 dispatched the following report after the assault on Naliboki, in which he grossly exaggerated the accomplishments of the Soviet partisans: On the night of May 8, 1943, the partisan detachments “Dzerzhinskii” (commander Shashkin, commissar comrade Lakhov), “Bolshevik” (commander Makaev, commissar comrade Khmelevskii), “Suvorov” (commander Surkev, commissar comrade Klevko) under the command of comrade Gulevich, the commander of the “Stalin” Brigade, and its commissar comrade Muratov as well as the representative of the Iwieniec interregional peace centre, comrade Vasilevich, by surprise destroyed the German garrison of the “self-defence” of the small town of Naliboki. As a result of two-and-a-half hours of fighting 250 members of the self-defence [referred to by its Belorussian name of “samookhova”, actually spelled samaakhova in Belorussian—M.P.] group were killed. We took 4 heavy machine-guns, 15 light machine guns, 4 mortars, 10 automatic pistols, 13 rifles, and more than 20,000 rounds of ammunition (for rifles), and a lot of mines and grenades. We burned down the electrical station, sawmill, barracks, and county office. We took 100 cows and 78 horses. … I order the leaders of the brigade and partisan detachments to present those distinguished in this battle for state awards. In this battle our units lost six dead and six wounded. Praise to our brave partisans—patriots of the Fatherland.130
Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance arrived at the following preliminary findings after launching an investigation into these events: Despite a concluded agreement [of mutual cooperation], in the early morning of May 8, 1943 the Soviet partisans attacked [the town of] Naliboki. They pulled out of houses men who were actual members of the self-defence as well as those who were suspected of belonging to that formation, and shot them near their homes individually or in groups of several or a dozen or more. A portion of the buildings was set on fire and practically everything was taken from the houses—clothing, boots, food—and from the farms—horses and cattle. They [the Soviet partisans] also burned down the church, along with the parish records, school, county seat, post office, and coach house. The attack lasted two to three hours. In total 128 people were killed, mostly men, but the victims also included three women, a teenage boy, and a ten-year-old child. Those killed were buried in the local cemetery. Some members of the self-defence, who were taken by surprise by the attack, attempted to fight and killed a few Soviet partisans, but seeing no chance of success withdrew into the forest. It must be especially underscored that the vast majority of the victims were killed in executions, deliberately and with premeditation, and not by accident. … Soviet partisans from the Second Concentration of the Iwieniec zone, commanded by Grigorii Sidoruk [nom de guerre General] “Dubov,” were active in the region of the Naliboki forest. That concentration formed part of the Baranowicze Partisan Concentration. Soviet partisans from the following detachments took part in the assault on Naliboki: “Dzerzhinskii,” “Bolshevik,” and “Suvorov,” commanded by Pavel Gulevich, the commander of the Stalin Brigade, and Major Rafail Vasilevich. Jewish partisans from the unit commanded by Tuvia Bielski were among the assailants.132 Oddly, these exploits are missing from almost all memoirs of the Bielski group and almost of the academic and poplar writings about them.133 The only Jewish accounts that describe these events, though in manner that is almost beyond recognition, are those of Sulia and Boris Rubin (Rubizhewski). The Rubins claim that it was Boris Rubin’s group, under the command of Israel Kesler, who actually masterminded the assault on what appears to be Naliboki, as there was no other comparable massacre in the area, in rather bizarre circumstances.134 At that time Kesler’s group was part of Tuvia Bielski’s much larger forest group, and also included Boris’s brother Izaak (or Itsek) Rubizhewski. Both Boris Rubin and Israel Kesler (about whom there is more in Part Three) were natives of Naliboki.135 Thus the participation of the Kesler group in the assault on Naliboki would be consistent with Polish eyewitness accounts, which mention that Jewish residents of Naliboki took part in the assault. Israeli historian Shalom Cholawsky, a former partisan with the Zhukov battalion, states that a Jewish unit made up of fugitives from the Nowogródek ghetto who joined the Bielski group was tasked with taking the police headquarters during the assault on Naliboki. However, the Belorussian police outpost in that town had been closed in August 1942. Moreover, the reason given for their lack of success is highly dubious. In the partisan attack on Naliboky [Naliboki], in which the Jewish unit was given the task of taking the police headquarters, all its members fell in battle because they received no assistance or support from the other units participating in the battle.136 Ironically, a few months after the Naliboki massacre, from July 13 to August 8, 1943, as part of a massive anti-partisan sweep known as Operation Hermann, some 60,000 German troops, with the assistance of various auxiliary forces (Lithuanian, Latvian, and Ukrainian) and the Belorussian police, rounded up the population of scores of villages within a 15-kilometre radius of Naliboki forest suspected of supporting the partisans and burned down their homesteads. In total, 60 villages were razed and more than 20,000 villagers were deported to the Reich for slave labour. Hundreds of partisans and thousands of villagers were killed as a result of this operation.137 Among the civilian victims there were a number of Catholic priests who were executed for the crime of aiding partisans and Jews: Rev. Józef Bajko and Rev. Józef Baradyn of Naliboki, Rev. Paweł Dołżyk of Derewno (or Derewna), and Rev. Leopold Aulich and Rev. Kazimierz Rybałtowski of Kamień.138 This operation is vividly recalled by Tuvia Bielski and other Jewish partisans. One night I sent Akiva [Shimanovich] and several others to the village of Kletishtza [Kleciszcze], thinking they might be able to get a little food. When they neared the village, they clearly saw several German military units. The village was ablaze with the bright headlights of military cars. Akiva returned empty-handed, but the news he brought was important. Later, the farmers told us that that night there were thousands of Germans in that village. … The news came back to us that the Germans had gathered together all the farmers in the neighborhood of the village of Kletishtza, had taken them to safety in cars, and then had set the village afire. The farmers were finally taken to Germany; only a few dozen escaped. The cattle that the Germans couldn’t take with them, they shot; any left behind were lost, of course, in the fire. Thus the Germans burned to the ground 17 villages and hundreds of farmhouses and estates. The city of Naliboki was also consumed by fire. The intention of the Germans, as our agents explained to us later, was to destroy the villages that were close to the forest, so that the Partisans could not use them as a source of food or find shelter in them.139 However, as Tuvia Bielski recalls, the hardship of the villagers did not end there. One of the tall men said he could see a woman in the distance walking around among the trees. The guards caught her, and sent to ask me what, according to the rules and regulations, should be done with her. We investigated to find out what she was doing. “I’m searching for my family, they ran away from Kletishtza [Kleciszcze],” (a border village about six kilometers away) [that had been razed by the Germans]. She was soaking wet. I was sure that she was a spy and knew what she was doing; but then again it could be that she would give us away without knowing she was going it. The farmers knew that Partisans were using the forests for cover and they were forbidden to come near them. Both the Russian Partisans and ourselves were forced for security reasons to kill any suspicious person, and so it was that this woman also had to be shot.140 Paradoxically, Operation Hermann turned out to be a godsend for the Jewish partisans, who returned to Naliboki forest after the operation and were now free to strip the homes of the depopulated villages of their contents without hindrance: … they could seize the food and supplies that the Germans were unable to cart away. And it was quite a bounty. In the ruined towns the partisans found chickens, pigs, and cows ambling everywhere. They raided beehives for honeycombs and rooted through cellars for potatoes. They discovered vegetables in the gardens ripe for picking and wheat in the fields ready for harvesting. Wagons, sewing machines, cobbler’s tools, and threshing machines were theirs for the taking. … Over the course of several days, everything was taken …141
The Jews who lived in the Bielski family camp in Naliboki forest led rather mundane existences. They did not engage in any true partisan or military activity despite the fact that they were well armed. Occasionally, the Jews in the much smaller partisan detachment, under the command of a Soviet commander and, informally, Zus Bielski, were called on for various tasks of a military nature. The only “face to face” confrontations with the Germans that Tuvia Bielski describes in his memoirs (published in 1946) occurred in September or October 1942, near Nowogródek, and were undertaken together with a Soviet partisan detachment led by Lieutenant Viktor Panchenkov. The first incident was an ambush on a truck carrying provisions requisitioned in the village of Radziuki; the second, a failed attempt to destroy a small train station in Jacuki.147 In the first incident, twenty-five men from the Bielski group armed with rifles and an equal number from the Soviet group fired at the supply truck and brought it to a halt. Some of the eight Germans and Belorussian policemen who alighted from the truck were hit by bullets as they fled. The partisans confiscated some weapons including two machine guns and four rifles, ammunition, and food provisions. They then fired bullets into the gas tank of the vehicle and it exploded.148 According to a Soviet report on the Ordzhonikidze detachment, allegedly “many Germans were killed” in this incident.149 Over time, the second incident grew over time into a bloody battle. According to Tuvia Bielski’s report of September 16, 1944, four Germans were killed and seven wounded.150 In his postwar memoirs, he claims that seven to eight Germans were killed.151 According to one candid participant, however, there were no casualties, either German or Soviet. Pinchas Boldo, a partisan from the Bielski group, stated: “The enemy had realized that they were being attacked and they opened fire on us … not one German was killed … None of us died. But we did not succeed.”152 Dov Zalmanovicz, one of a group of twenty-four escapees from the Nowogródek ghetto who joined the Belski group, recalled:
The first question was whether we had any money in our possession in order to buy weapons, because the custom was that each person bought his own weapon, with his own money. We had no money, of course, but after a few months, the situation changed altogether. Planes appeared in the sky and dropped weapons in large quantities, to a point where an ordinary revolver no longer had any value because we were using automatic weapons. The two of us also received a weapon. I remained all the time with the friend who had escaped with me from the ghetto. We did not take part in real combat per se, but we went to the neighboring villages to get food. Sometimes, we ran into bandits and robbers, and we simply killed them.153
The complaints about these alleged transgressions sound disingenuous, coming as they do from the Soviet sources. The Soviet-allied guerrillas routinely engaged in plundering peasants. Documents show that partisan activity often amounted to banditry, rape, pillage, and murder. Occasionally individual transgressors were punished. On the whole, however, the leadership of the Soviet irregular forces considered robbery to be a legitimate modus operandi. Since they largely lacked popular support, the Soviet guerrillas raided villages and manors for supplies. As a top Soviet commander put it, “Most partisan units feed, clothe, and arm themselves at the expense of the local population and not by capturing booty in the struggle against fascism. That arouses in the people a feeling of hostility, and they say, ‘The Germans take everything away and one must also give something to the partisans.’”155 As we shall see, raids on the civilian population took precedence over military activities. Yüklə 1,68 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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