— Bronya Gofman
Even before my interpreter could translate these words from Russian to English, it was apparent from the speaker’s tone that their meaning was ominous. Seated across from Bronya Gofman in her neat apartment, I could have been chatting with someone’s kindly, white-haired grandmother. Instead, I was listening to Gofman’s recollections of her three years in the Jewish partisan movement during the Nazi occupation of Russia.
Accompanied by my 16-year-old daughter, Sara, I had traveled to Minsk, capital city of the former
Soviet republic of Belarus, to research the part played by Russia’s Jewish citizens
in resisting the World War II German invasion. I spoke with Bronya Gofman in August 1999. She was one of 15 Belarusian Jews I interviewed as part of a University of Toledo Sullivan Fellowship project I was researching.
A circuitous path led me to Gofman’s flat.
Four years before, I spent a month traveling through what are now Russia, Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus in an attempt to visit the villages where my grandparents once lived — a 2,000-mile journey into my past. I held no expectations that I would find any evidence of my grandparent’s lives. After all, it had been nearly a century since they had left, a time during which the Russian Revolution and two world wars had taken place and the Jews had endured 50 years of government-sponsored anti-Semitism. And, of course, the Holocaust.
After arriving in Minsk, I asked to meet a member of the city’s Jewish community. There, I contacted a man who would change my life.Felicks Lipsky was more than just a local Jew; he was a Holocaust survivor and a participant in the Jewish resistance movement organized against the German occupation.
Jewish resistance movement? Hadn’t the Nazis simply invaded Russia, as they had Europe, exterminating millions of Jews as part of their so-called final solution? I was unaware that Jews had organized any opposition to their German oppressors. Like many, I thought that, with the exception of the ill-fated Warsaw revolt in Poland, Jews for the most part had died offering little organized opposition to the Germans. How wrong I was.
Lipsky, a short, energetic man with square-rimmed glasses, arrived early in the morning, ready to guide my tour.
I was still starting the day with my host family, enjoying the customary breakfast of hot tea, cheeses, bread, and pastries, when Lipsky rang the bell on the ground floor. Leaving the large apartment, I descended in a creaky elevator and left the building through a heavy steel door. With Lipsky as my guide, I spent the remainder of the morning touring the area where Minsk’s Jewish ghetto once stood. From the start, the Nazis had planned Minsk as an extermination ghetto. Of 100,000 people confined there in 1941, fewer than 10,000 were alive a year later. In the Warsaw ghetto in Poland, starvation and disease felled thousands. In Minsk, the agents of death were gas vans and machine guns.
Minsk, a city the size of Detroit, and the Jewish ghetto had all but been destroyed during three years of German occupation. Now, only fragments and memories of the Jewish ghetto remained.
Fluent in English, Lipsky spoke in measured words, detailing each site we visited, showing old photos of now non-existent buildings, offering me a vision of the horror of what had been. Standing in a parking lot of a McDonald’s Restaurant, Lipsky pointed to where the ghetto’s gate once stood; a place where all who entered or exited were subject to search. If found with contraband (a loaf of bread or extra clothing, for instance), they were subject to immediate execution. At another location, I saw where the monsters Eichmann and Himmler watched as hundreds of Jews were shot for their “approval.
I was taken to a large, open field, once the site of Minsk’s Jewish cemetery. During one of the great waves of killings that overtook the ghetto, the Nazis, needing a location for the mass murders, dug huge trenches and used this place as a killing ground for the city’s Jewish citizens. After the killings, the murderers would use soil from the Jews’ own cemetery to cover the bodies. Although thousands were shot, many did not die from the gunfire. The wounded were covered with dirt, buried alive. The ground would pitch and heave for hours as the buried struggled in their vain attempt to escape the mass grave.
The green grass growing on the warm summer day I visited belied the fact that just under my feet were the remains of thousands of victims of the fascist invaders. Felix Lipsky gave me a history lesson made real, no longer in the realm of printed books and black-and-white films. I touched the same ground that once ran red with the blood of the Holocaust.
How had Lipsky survived? He told me that, during the war, his mother was an organizer of the Jewish ghetto underground. Just before the final destruction of the ghetto, he and his mother were rescued by partisans and taken to the forests surrounding Minsk. There, they lived in the camps of Jewish partisans, waging guerrilla warfare against the Germans until the liberation of Minsk in July 1944. Finally, Felix Lipsky told me that, as a witness to the horrors of the Holocaust, he had spent 50 years passing his memories to others so that what he had seen would always be remembered. The same way he had witnessed for those many years, he said, it was now my turn to pass on what I had seen and heard. He charged me with telling others what he had shown me.
I returned from my time in Russia a different person. I was determined to learn more of the Jewish resistance and to pass on the information. As a student at the University of Toledo, I decided to use this opportunity as part of my course of study. In the spring of 1999, I applied for the Honors Program Sullivan Fellowship. I proposed returning to Minsk and videotaping interviews with Jewish survivors of the resistance movement. I expressed that timeliness of research was critical, since many of the potential interviewees were now in their 70s and 80s.
My proposal for the Sullivan Fellowship was accepted and, in August 1999, I returned to Minsk to research the part Jews had played in the resistance movement.
While in Minsk, I interviewed 15 men and women involved in the resistance. They were then, as now, common citizens, ordinary people trapped by extraordinary events. Elderly now, they were teen-agers or in their early 20s when the war started. I did not interview famous people, military heroes, party officials, prominent sports or theatrical figures — just everyday people.
All welcomed me into their homes, knowing that, perhaps for the first time since the break-up of the Soviet Union, they were free to tell their stories to an outsider, who would, as Felix Lipsky proposed, relay their tales to others. They allowed me to videotape them as they shared their past, answered
my questions, and offered memories and historical infor- mation on their
experiences of that terrible time.
One man, Mikhail Treister, told me how, as a 14-year-old boy, he had slipped under the barbed wire, es-caped from the ghetto, and made his way to the partisan camps in the forests. Living in tents during the summer and in camouflaged holes dug into the ground in winter, the partisans moved frequently to escape detection by the German army. Still, they were able to organize to fight against the invaders and to support others who had managed to escape the ghetto.
We were not only saving lives, but we were a work center. We had tailors, bakers and shoemakers. We had people who ground wheat to flour. We provided medical aid and a hospital. We even had a school,” said Treister. Bronya Gofman helped organize the ghetto’s underground newspaper. Discovered by the Germans, she was hunted throughout Minsk for weeks by the Gestapo until rescued by the partisans. Her companion, captured by the Germans, was executed.
As a 16-year-old student when the Germans arrived in Minsk, Mikhail Kantorovich was also his school’s champion marksman. Escaping from the ghetto after the Germans killed his father, Kantorovich found his way to the partisans. “I took up arms and shot many Germans who had done so many bad things,” he told me.
