Fighting Back: Lithuanian Jewry's Armed Resistance to the Nazis, 1941-1945

by Dov Levin

English, Hebrew (translation)

314 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1985

Reviews

[Michael Lewyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book (by my father's first cousin) is about two types of Lithuanian Jewish armed resisters. The first half of the book focuses on Lithuanian Jews who escaped to the Soviet Union as soon as the Nazis took over Lithuania; about 15,000 did so, and maybe a third of these fought in the Red Army's Lithuanian division. It seems that there was not an overwhelming amount of anti-Semitism in the Red Army; however, casualties were quite high. The second half focuses on Jews who stayed in the ghettos of Vilna, Kovno, and smaller towns; only a few thousand of these Jews were able to escape to Lithuanian forests and join anti-Nazi guerilla groups. This strategy was not without danger, because some anti-Nazi groups were also anti-Semitic; however, it seems that on balance people who escaped to the forests were still more likely to survive the Holocaust than those who did not.