Interviews from the Underground producer Phillip Alloy first became aware of Russia’s World War II Jewish resistance movement while conducting genealogical research in the former Soviet republic of Belarus.

	Almost immediately mass executions began. The Nazis murdered thousands of Jewish men, women and children. Rather than face certain death many Jews chose to fight back. Some formed an underground reistance group within the ghetto. Others escaped the city and organized Jewish partisan forces in the forests surrounding Minsk.