Jewish partisans in the Second World War

Who were the Jewish partisans?

A partisan is a fighter in an irregular armed group that operates behind enemy lines. In German-occupied eastern Europe, partisans fought from bases in forests and swamps, attacking German forces, derailing trains and killing collaborators. Among them were Soviet prisoners of war who had escaped, Polish Jews who had fled east, and Jews who escaped from the ghettos.

Jewish partisans fought in two ways. Some joined general partisan units, most often Soviet ones. Others formed Jewish units, such as the Bielski partisans in western Belorussia and the units of the FPO from the Vilna ghetto in the Rudniki and Naroch forests. Many of the fighters had first belonged to ghetto undergrounds formed by Zionist youth movements, communists and others.

The Hebrew site explains the term in more detail on the page What is a partisan.

How many Jewish partisans were there?

There is no exact count, and sources give different figures:

• English Wikipedia, citing the Jewish Virtual Library, says Jewish partisans numbered between 20,000 and 30,000.
• The USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia says that as many as 20,000 Jews fought the Germans in the forests of eastern Europe.
• JewishGen's list of Jewish partisans in Belarus alone, compiled by Dr. Inna Gerasimova in Minsk, has 8,451 records.
• According to English Wikipedia, released Soviet archive data suggest that Jews made up 5.2 percent of the partisans in Ukraine, and 4,572 Jews were listed as partisans in Yugoslavia.

The numbers differ partly because they count different things: forest fighters only, or also ghetto fighters and members of urban undergrounds. The Hebrew page How many Jewish partisans were there compares the estimates.

Where they fought

In Lithuania, according to English Wikipedia, Jewish partisans killed about 3,000 German soldiers. USHMM writes that a large partisan group near Vilna derailed hundreds of trains and killed over 3,000 German soldiers.

What they faced

Escaping a ghetto was only the first danger. USHMM notes that antisemitism was widespread in eastern Europe, so Jewish partisans found little support among the surrounding population; some villagers feared severe punishment for helping, and informers were a constant danger.

Inside the partisan movement, too, Jews met suspicion. JewishGen's background to its Belarus list says Jews were often seen as cowards and unable to fight, and that even a trusted Jew usually needed his own gun to be accepted. English Wikipedia notes that some Jews in Soviet units were killed, and that many Jewish groups were absorbed into the larger Soviet command structure. The Hebrew site covers this on Soviet partisans and the Jews.

Relations with the Polish underground varied. According to English Wikipedia, the Home Army gave training and weapons to the Jewish Combat Organization in Warsaw and had Jewish units of its own, while JewishGen's background describes attacks on Jews by some Polish nationalist units in western Belarus.

Family camps

Some Jewish units took in not only fighters but anyone who reached them. The best known is the Bielski unit: according to USHMM, over 70 percent of its members were women, elderly people or children, and more than 1,200 Jews survived under its protection. JewishGen lists other family groups in Belarus, among them detachments made up of escapees from the Novy Sverzhen and Nesvizh ghettos, and detachments numbered 106 and 406. See Family camps on the Hebrew site.

Beyond eastern Europe

In France and Belgium, Jewish groups worked with the local resistance. USHMM writes that Jews in units in France and Italy helped the Allies by forging documents, printing anti-Nazi leaflets and killing collaborators. In Yugoslavia, English Wikipedia describes the Rab battalion, formed from hundreds of Jewish inmates freed from the Italian camp on Rab in September 1943.

From Mandatory Palestine, 32 Jewish volunteers trained by the British were parachuted behind German lines (English Wikipedia and USHMM). The best known of them is Hannah Szenes, who crossed into Hungary on 7 June 1944 and was executed in Budapest. The Hebrew site has a page on the parachutists from Palestine.