So what part did the brilliant, "white hot" struggle of the Jews of the Minsk ghetto play in the larger Belorussian resistance? There is some new scholarship on the subject; http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Minsk_ghetto.html?id=WrxtAAAAMAAJ Partisans in Minsk Uniqueness of the Minsk Ghetto | Far Outliers http://www.ucpress.edu/content/chapters/10248.ch01.pdf http://www.amazon.com/Minsk-Ghetto-1941-1943-Resistance-Internationalism/dp/0520242424 For certain Jewish and Red Army escapees were the first to take up arms in the forests-blazing the way for the thousands that were to come afterwards. And for certain the Belorussian insurgency became arguably the most effective of WWII and perhaps all time. It is tragic that 50 years of the orthodox communist line have obscured the truth. It is quite possible that Hersh Smolar should have had a horse next to Zhukov and Rokossovski in the final victory parade. JeffinMNUSA
PS. Some interesting facts from the Smolar book; 1. A goodly number of the early Jewish cadre in the forests were former Partisans from the Revolutionary era. It seems that the White forces launched some pograms against the Jews of Minsk and were resisted from forest strongholds by "the Wild Men of the Forests" of the 1920s. 2. Smolar was the big fish of the Belarussian resistance for better than the first year of the war, but he never had official sanction. MANY ASSUMED HE WAS the voice of the party-but the man was running a successful resistance by the seat of his pants, from the ghetto as the fascist machine guns chattered, without any authority from Moscow (Stalin's men were long gone when the NAZIs entered Minsk). 3. It was not until the Fall of 1942 that Stalin began to take the Resistance seriously and it was about that time that the crushing fist of the great Russian came to be felt. 4. JEwish/Belarussian relations seemed to have been quite good-in contrast with that of the rest of Eastern Europe. The scholars are attributing this to a generation of Federalist Red Rule-but I believe there is more to it than that. There were surprising numbers of Belarussians who spoke Yiddish and just a wild guess here-but I am thinking that the Jews and Belarussians came to view each other as fellow sufferers under the yoke of Moscow. This probably goes back to Czarist times... Whatever...it is a fact that in Belarus NAZI's rampages were not viewed so much as "Oh, they are killing the Jews..." as in most of Eastern Europe, but more like "OH! THEY ARE KILLING OUR FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS!!" Then there was the sympathetic charactorization of Belarussians from Vasily Grossman's secret notebooks. http://www.antonybeevor.com/writer/reviews.htm 5. Smolar's time was done by the time he entered the forest camps and he was left to edit a newspaper while the men from Moscow called the shots. It is probable that he would have been shot for acting without authority if he had not done such a magnificent job of piecing together the origins of a mighty insurgency from nothing without any appreciable help from "the Big Land." The author bemoans the ill usage the two all Jewish brigades were put to and the fact that modern arms were never supplied. Still-the battles of the Zorin Otriad make for some great saber rattling reading. 6. A recurrent refrain you hear from many eyewitness testimonies is how the people of Eastern Europe were expecting the law observant German Army of WWI during the early days of Barbarossa. Their expectations were soon be be dashed. Smolar's secret press did much to expose the NAZIs for what their intentions really were. More on Jewish Partisans and the Partisan movement; http://www.ww2f.com/eto-mto-eastern-front/31872-books-jewish-partisans.html JeffinMNUSA PS. A rousing rendition of Kajtusha by Elena Vaenga; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llS6p4YzsaY&feature=related
