The only Jewish family in Stankiewicze
Tuvia Bielski was born on May 8, 1906, in Stankiewicze, a small village between the towns of Lida and Nowogródek (Navahrudak) in what was then the Russian Empire, later north-eastern Poland, and today western Belarus. His parents, David and Beila Bielski, were millers and farmers and the only Jewish family in the village. They had twelve children, ten sons and two daughters; Tuvia was the third eldest.
Growing up among Belarusian and Polish peasants, the Bielski boys learned the land intimately, the farms, the roads and the vast forests around them. That knowledge of the countryside, and the network of non-Jewish acquaintances that came with it, would later make the difference between life and death for hundreds of people.
Soldier, miller, shopkeeper
In 1927 Bielski was drafted into the Polish Army, where he rose to the rank of corporal in the 30th Infantry Battalion. Back home, he tried to add to the family’s modest income by renting a second mill. In 1929, at twenty-three, he married an older woman named Rifka, who owned a general store and a large house in the nearby town of Subotniki, and he went to live there.
When the Soviet Union occupied eastern Poland in September 1939, Bielski feared arrest by the NKVD as a “bourgeois” shopkeeper and moved to Lida. Rifka refused to come with him. In Lida he fell in love with Sonia Warshavsky, and late in 1939 he and Rifka divorced; he and Sonia lived as husband and wife, though wartime conditions prevented a formal marriage.
Into the forest
When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Tuvia and his brothers Asael and Zus were called up to their army units, which were scattered by German bombing; their commander told them they were on their own. They made their way back to Stankiewicze. The Germans soon herded the Jews of the district into a ghetto in Nowogródek, and the brothers, refusing to go, slipped into the woods. On December 8, 1941, the Germans and their collaborators murdered thousands of Jews from the Nowogródek ghetto. Among them were the Bielskis’ parents, two of their brothers, Tuvia’s former wife Rifka, and Zus’s wife and child.
In the spring of 1942 Tuvia, Asael, Zus and their younger brother Aron, then about twelve, gathered surviving relatives into a forest encampment. Hearing rumours of partisans, Tuvia concluded that Jews needed weapons and their own fighting units. By May 1942 he was commanding a small armed group, and he soon made the decision that defined him: the group would admit any Jew who reached it, not only young men with guns, but women, children and the elderly.
A different kind of partisan
Other partisan leaders, Jewish and Soviet, often turned away people who could not fight. Bielski believed that rescue mattered more than revenge. His priority, in the words often attributed to him, was to save an old Jewish woman rather than to kill German soldiers. The brothers sent guides into the ghettos to lead Jews out to the forest, often with the help of non-Jewish allies such as the farmer Konstantin Kozlovski, who sheltered escapees and helped bring hundreds more out of the Nowogródek ghetto.
The group grew from about one hundred people in the autumn of 1942 to nearly 800 by the spring of 1943. Armed members raided for food, killed local collaborators who had betrayed Jews, burned crops the Germans meant to requisition, and joined Soviet partisan units in attacks on German forces, convoys, railways and bridges. In October 1942 a mixed squad of Bielski and Soviet fighters ambushed a German supply convoy. In all, the Bielski fighters are credited with killing hundreds of German soldiers and collaborators, though always as the shield of a community rather than as an end in itself.
A town in the Naliboki forest
In June 1943 a German offensive struck the region; on June 9 ten members of the camp were killed. Bielski led his people deeper into the swamps and thickets of the Naliboki forest, where they survived a sweep lasting more than a week while losing only one partisan. In October and November 1943 they built a permanent base that the inhabitants came to call “Jerusalem.”
It was a functioning town hidden in the woods. There was a kitchen and bakery, a bathhouse, a horse-powered mill, a blacksmith’s forge, a gunsmith’s shop, a tailoring workshop with eighteen tailors, butchers, a soap factory, a hospital, a jail and a school for about sixty children; musicians played at festivities. The workshops repaired weapons and made clothing for Soviet partisan units, which in return supplied food and arms and tolerated the camp’s existence. Tuvia ruled firmly, and the camp’s survival depended on discipline as much as courage.
At its peak the community numbered 1,236 people, about 70 per cent of them women, children and the elderly; roughly 150 carried out armed operations. A tannery built to supply the cobblers became a makeshift synagogue, because several of the tanners were devout Hasidim. The Germans, aware of the camp, dropped leaflets in early 1943 offering 50,000 Reichsmarks for help in capturing Tuvia Bielski, later doubling the reward to 100,000, leaflets that, reaching Jews in the ghettos, only encouraged more of them to try to escape to him.
Personal loss and new love
The war tore through Bielski’s private life. Sonia was killed while sheltering with others in a peasant’s house. In 1943 he married Lilka (Lila) Tiktin, a young woman of seventeen whom he had known before the war. They remained together for the rest of his life, forty-four years.
When the Red Army swept through Belarus in the summer of 1944, the Bielski unit emerged from the forest. About 1,200 Jews walked out alive, by most accounts the largest number saved by any Jewish partisan group in Nazi-occupied Europe, and the majority of them women, children and older people who could never have survived alone. Asael Bielski was conscripted into the Soviet army and killed in battle before the war’s end.
Hard choices and controversy
Survival in the forest was brutal, and the Bielski record is not without shadows. Like other Soviet-affiliated partisans, the unit lived largely by forcibly requisitioning food from local peasants, some of whom were treated violently, and the group killed collaborators who had betrayed Jews, in one case about a dozen members of a Belarusian family. As the unit came under Soviet partisan command in 1943, it was drawn into the Soviet campaign against the Polish Home Army: in December 1943 Bielski fighters took part in a Soviet operation to disarm a Home Army unit, and in March 1944 Zus’s detachment joined Soviet forces in an attack that killed 47 Polish fighters. Polish historians such as Kazimierz Krajewski have also argued that the unit’s claimed combat figures were inflated.
Inside the camp, Tuvia’s leadership was authoritarian, and he faced repeated challenges, including accusations sent to Soviet commanders that he was hoarding valuables. Some survivors also recalled inequality between better-off members and the poorest refugees. These criticisms are part of the historical record, alongside the central fact on which all accounts agree: that under his command more than a thousand Jews who would otherwise almost certainly have been murdered survived the war.
Israel and New York
After the war Tuvia and Lilka, together with Zus and his wife, made their way through Romania to Palestine, and lived in the new State of Israel. In 1956 they emigrated to the United States, joining their elder brother Walter, who had settled in New York before the war. There Tuvia and Zus ran a small trucking business for some thirty years; Tuvia lived in Brooklyn and drove a truck himself. He and Lilka had three children, sons Michael and Robert and daughter Ruth, and ten grandchildren.
The man who had commanded a forest kingdom lived quietly and modestly, and for decades his story was known mostly to the survivors who owed him their lives and to their families. He wrote about the war in Yiddish; a memoir manuscript was later found among his papers at the YIVO Institute in New York, and historians including Nechama Tec and Peter Duffy drew on it. According to the Jewish Virtual Library, he told Lilka before his death that he would be famous when he was dead.
Death and legacy
Tuvia Bielski died in New York on June 12, 1987, at the age of eighty-one, nearly penniless. He was first buried on Long Island. A year later his remains were exhumed and flown to Jerusalem, where in 1988 he received a state funeral with full military honours and was reburied at Har HaMenuchot.
Bielski’s Jewish identity was the reason he was hunted and the reason he fought. He had grown up as the one Jewish family in a Gentile village, lost his parents, brothers and former wife to the Nazi genocide, and chose to spend the war not merely surviving but keeping as many Jews alive as he could. Among Holocaust survivors his name became synonymous with armed Jewish self-rescue.
The sociologist and Holocaust survivor Nechama Tec told the brothers’ story in Defiance: The Bielski Partisans (1993), and the 2008 film Defiance, with Daniel Craig as Tuvia and Liev Schreiber as Zus, brought it to a worldwide audience. His granddaughter Sharon Rennert made the documentary In Our Hands: The Legacy of the Bielski Partisans.
The film drew criticism in Poland for its sympathetic portrayal of Soviet partisans, who were responsible for a massacre of Polish civilians in the village of Naliboki in May 1943. An investigation by Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance found no conclusive evidence linking the Bielski unit to that crime. Historians today regard the Bielski group as one of the most remarkable rescue efforts of the Holocaust, a community of refugees who, under Tuvia Bielski’s leadership, refused both to die and to abandon the weakest among them.
Sources & further reading
Tuvia Bielski, Wikipedia · Tuvia Bielski, Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation · Holocaust Resistance: Tuvia Bielski, Jewish Virtual Library · Tuvia Bielski, Silent Heroes Memorial Center, Berlin · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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