The Jewish Partisans: Resistance in the Forests

One of the most persistent misconceptions about the Holocaust is that European Jews went to their deaths without resistance. The historical record says otherwise. Between 20,000 and 30,000 Jews fought as partisans — irregular fighters operating behind German lines — in the forests, marshes, and mountains of occupied Europe. They blew up troop trains, cut telegraph lines, raided police garrisons, and smuggled people out of ghettos that were days away from liquidation.

Their situation was unlike that of any other resistance movement. A Polish or Soviet partisan who was captured faced execution; a Jewish partisan faced execution and knew that his family, and often the entire community he had come from, was already being destroyed. He had no home village to return to, no population that could reliably shelter him, and frequently no weapon until he took one. He also had, in most cases, no military training whatsoever.

Escaping to the Forest

Almost every Jewish partisan story begins with an escape. Fighters left through sewers, cut through barbed wire, slipped out of labor details, or jumped from deportation trains. Those who made it into the woods lived in zemlyankas — dugouts roofed with logs, branches, and earth, invisible from a few paces away and freezing in winter. Food came from sympathetic peasants, from airdrops when Soviet command considered a unit worth supplying, from raids on German supply caches, and — a fact historians have documented plainly rather than softened — from requisitioning taken by force from villages that were themselves starving. Captured German uniforms were prized: they were warm, and they made future operations possible.

The reprisals were designed to deter escape by punishing everyone left behind. German and collaborator units burned villages suspected of feeding partisans, and "anti-partisan operations" in Belarus and Ukraine were repeatedly used as cover for the mass shooting of Jews. Antisemitism inside the resistance was its own hazard: Jews who reached Soviet partisan formations were sometimes disarmed, denied admission, or killed by the very units they had come to join. Over time, most Jewish groups in the east were absorbed into the Soviet partisan command structure, which brought weapons and orders, and cost many of them their independence.

Vilna: "Let Us Not Go Like Sheep to the Slaughter"

In December 1941, in the Vilna ghetto in Lithuania, a young poet named Abba Kovner drafted a manifesto for the Jewish youth movements. Its central line — "let us not go like sheep to the slaughter" — became the most quoted sentence of the Jewish resistance. Kovner had grasped something few yet believed: that the shootings at Ponary, outside the city, were not a local atrocity but the beginning of a plan to kill every Jew in Europe.

Out of that conviction came the Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye (FPO), the United Partisan Organization, the first armed underground formed inside a ghetto. Its aim was an uprising in Vilna itself. That aim failed. Many in the ghetto feared — correctly — that a revolt would trigger immediate collective slaughter, and the FPO's commander, Yitzhak Wittenberg, was surrendered to the Germans under pressure from within the ghetto and died in their custody. In September 1943, as Vilna was being liquidated, the remaining fighters left through the sewers for the Rudniki forest, where they operated as partisans until the Soviet advance reached Lithuania. In Lithuania as a whole, Jewish partisans are credited with killing roughly 3,000 German soldiers.

Vilna produced the movement's anthem as well. Hirsh Glick, a young poet in the ghetto, wrote Zog Nit Keyn Mol — "Never Say You Are Walking the Final Road" — after hearing of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It is still sung at Holocaust commemorations worldwide. Glick himself escaped to the forests and was killed in 1944.

The Family Camps

The most distinctive Jewish contribution to partisan warfare was not a tactic but a decision: to protect people who could not fight. Most partisan units required a recruit to arrive armed and able to march. Several Jewish commanders refused that condition, and the result was the family camp — forest settlements of the elderly, the sick, and children, defended by a small armed minority.

The largest was led by the Bielski brothers — Tuvia, Asael, Alexander, and Aron — who fled into the woods near Nowogródek, in what is now western Belarus, after their parents were murdered in December 1941. Beginning in the spring of 1942 with a few dozen people, the unit sent couriers into surrounding ghettos to bring Jews out. At its height it sheltered 1,236 people, roughly seventy per cent of them women, children, and the elderly; only about 150 were armed fighters. No one who reached them was turned away.

Their camp in the Naliboki forest functioned as a hidden town: a bakery, a mill, a bathhouse, a clinic, a tannery that doubled as a synagogue, workshops repairing weapons and stitching boots for other partisan units, a school in a dugout. German aircraft dropped leaflets offering 50,000 Reichsmarks for Tuvia Bielski, later doubled to 100,000. The reward reached Jews as well as Christians, and for some it was the news that a Jewish force existed at all. Tuvia Bielski's priorities were explicit: "I would rather save one old Jewish woman than kill ten German soldiers." In August 1943 a large German sweep, Operation Hermann, devastated the Naliboki region; the Bielski group broke into small units, survived, and returned. When the Soviet offensive of summer 1944 liberated the area, roughly 1,200 people marched out of the forest alive. A second Belarusian family camp, Detachment 106 under Sholom Zorin, saved several hundred more.

Across Occupied Europe

Jewish partisan activity was not confined to the east. In the Parczew forests of southeastern Poland, Jewish detachments sheltered fugitives from the surrounding ghettos. In Minsk, the ghetto underground — assisted rather than obstructed by the Jewish council — organized escapes that sent between 6,000 and 8,000 people toward the woods. Jews fought in the French and Belgian resistance, and in Yugoslavia 4,572 served with Tito's partisans, of whom 1,318 were killed and ten received the country's highest decoration. Thirty-two Jewish volunteers from Mandate Palestine, among them the poet Hannah Szenes, were trained by the British and parachuted behind enemy lines; several were captured and executed.

What the Forests Meant

Measured strictly in military terms, the Jewish partisans did not alter the course of the war. Measured in lives, they interrupted the machinery of a genocide that was otherwise almost entirely unopposed. Thousands of people are alive today because a handful of fighters decided that a forest camp full of grandmothers and children was worth defending.

Their record is not a legend, and it should not be told as one. Jewish partisan units raided villages for food, took part in the bitter conflicts between Soviet and Polish forces in the borderlands, and imposed harsh internal discipline; historians in Poland, Israel, and elsewhere continue to argue over particular episodes. Holding those facts alongside the rescue of 1,200 people is not a qualification of the story. It is the story: ordinary people, without training or authority, making decisions under conditions no one should have to face.

Abba Kovner survived to give evidence in Jerusalem. Tuvia Bielski ran a trucking business in New York and sought no recognition. Aron, the youngest Bielski brother, died in 2025 at the age of ninety-eight, the last of the four. What they left is a correction to the record: that among the six million there were also those who fought, and that resistance in the Holocaust was measured not only in enemies killed but in people kept alive.