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The Minsk Ghetto 1941-1943: Jewish Resistance and Soviet Internationalism
Drawing from engrossing survivors' accounts, many never before published, The Minsk Ghetto 1941-1943 recounts a heroic yet little-known chapter in Holocaust history. In vivid and moving detail, Barbara Epstein chronicles the history of a Communist-led resistance movement inside the Minsk ghetto, which, through its links to its Belarussian counterpart outside the ghetto and with help from others, enabled thousands of ghetto Jews to flee to the surrounding forests where they joined partisan units fighting the Germans. Telling a story that stands in stark contrast to what transpired across much of Eastern Europe, where Jews found few reliable allies in the face of the Nazi threat, this book captures the texture of life inside and outside the Minsk ghetto, evoking the harsh conditions, the life-threatening situations, and the friendships that helped many escape almost certain death. Epstein also explores how and why this resistance movement, unlike better known movements at places like Warsaw, Vilna, and Kovno, was able to rely on collaboration with those outside ghetto walls. She finds that an internationalist ethos fostered by two decades of Soviet rule, in addition to other factors, made this extraordinary story possible.
373 pages, Hardcover
First published July 28, 2008
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
May 16, 2026
In June 1941, the German army entered Minsk and confined the Jews to a ghetto of twenty blocks, barbed wire, and patrols too thin to prevent crawling under the fence. The Germans conducted mass "pogroms" (the Jews used that old Russian word in preference to the bureaucrats' "Aktion") marching between twelve and thirty thousand people at a time to Tuchinka, an execution field outside the city.
Hersh Smolar, Misha Gebelev, Nahum Feldman, and Chasya Pruslina organized a ghetto underground with a City Committee that united Jewish and Byelorussian Communists across, what both communities called, the border.
The plan was to send Jews into the forests around Minsk, where Soviet partisans operated in the pushcha, the gnarled Byelorussian woodland. The Judenrat's head, Ilya Mushkin, a Communist engineer in dignified clothing whom the Germans had appointed as their man, diverted German-demanded gold toward the partisans. Sonya Kurlandskaya and comrades smuggled a Red Army officer named Ganzenko out of a prisoner-of-war camp in a garbage barrel, straw to breathe through, past the guards; he eventually commanded the Budyonni Brigade and helped create Zorin's Brigade, a forest family camp of 557 Jews who produced shoes and bread and survived the war.
What made Minsk singular among the ghettos of occupied eastern Europe was the breadth of solidarity between Jews and Byelorussians, rooted in two decades of Soviet internationalism that had made interethnic friendship and even marriage ordinary facts of urban life, and in the reality that Germans were equally murderous toward both populations.
Printers, teenagers, nurses, women who hid Jews under long tablecloths, Byelorussian women who invented Tatar identities at police stations, underground members who smeared a forged passport with cemetery blood to convince the Gestapo that Smolar was already dead, all of these people crowd the pages. And then the Soviets came back.
Barbara Epstein was a professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who spent seven years interviewing survivors, learning Yiddish, trawling archives in Minsk and Yad Vashem, and sleeping in synagogue attics to write this book.
Organized, mass Jewish resistance happened in Minsk on a scale unmatched by any other ghetto in occupied eastern Europe, and it succeeded because of genuine solidarity between Jews and Byelorussians. The message is that solidarity is a precondition for survival, and that the absence of nationalist poison in Byelorussian political culture created a rare space in which two populations could treat each other as, in the words of one bemused Nazi report, equally human.
Everywhere one looks, the same mechanisms that enabled the mass murder of Jews in 1941 – the dehumanization of a minority, the weaponization of historical grievance, the attacks on synagogues, the denial of a safe haven for Jews, the demonization of Jewish identity, the vitriol of antisemitic propaganda, the complicity of bystanders – are all in active service.
Epstein's Minsk offers the counter-argument. Soviet internationalism, for all its subsequent betrayals, briefly produced a city in which a Byelorussian woman invented a Tatar passport for a Jewish friend without being asked twice. The Soviets eventually turned on the underground whose heroism they had done their best to expunge from the record. Reminds me of Mamdani's putsch and purge in NYC. Time will tell.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Hersh Smolar, Misha Gebelev, Nahum Feldman, and Chasya Pruslina organized a ghetto underground with a City Committee that united Jewish and Byelorussian Communists across, what both communities called, the border.
The plan was to send Jews into the forests around Minsk, where Soviet partisans operated in the pushcha, the gnarled Byelorussian woodland. The Judenrat's head, Ilya Mushkin, a Communist engineer in dignified clothing whom the Germans had appointed as their man, diverted German-demanded gold toward the partisans. Sonya Kurlandskaya and comrades smuggled a Red Army officer named Ganzenko out of a prisoner-of-war camp in a garbage barrel, straw to breathe through, past the guards; he eventually commanded the Budyonni Brigade and helped create Zorin's Brigade, a forest family camp of 557 Jews who produced shoes and bread and survived the war.
What made Minsk singular among the ghettos of occupied eastern Europe was the breadth of solidarity between Jews and Byelorussians, rooted in two decades of Soviet internationalism that had made interethnic friendship and even marriage ordinary facts of urban life, and in the reality that Germans were equally murderous toward both populations.
Printers, teenagers, nurses, women who hid Jews under long tablecloths, Byelorussian women who invented Tatar identities at police stations, underground members who smeared a forged passport with cemetery blood to convince the Gestapo that Smolar was already dead, all of these people crowd the pages. And then the Soviets came back.
Barbara Epstein was a professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who spent seven years interviewing survivors, learning Yiddish, trawling archives in Minsk and Yad Vashem, and sleeping in synagogue attics to write this book.
Organized, mass Jewish resistance happened in Minsk on a scale unmatched by any other ghetto in occupied eastern Europe, and it succeeded because of genuine solidarity between Jews and Byelorussians. The message is that solidarity is a precondition for survival, and that the absence of nationalist poison in Byelorussian political culture created a rare space in which two populations could treat each other as, in the words of one bemused Nazi report, equally human.
Everywhere one looks, the same mechanisms that enabled the mass murder of Jews in 1941 – the dehumanization of a minority, the weaponization of historical grievance, the attacks on synagogues, the denial of a safe haven for Jews, the demonization of Jewish identity, the vitriol of antisemitic propaganda, the complicity of bystanders – are all in active service.
Epstein's Minsk offers the counter-argument. Soviet internationalism, for all its subsequent betrayals, briefly produced a city in which a Byelorussian woman invented a Tatar passport for a Jewish friend without being asked twice. The Soviets eventually turned on the underground whose heroism they had done their best to expunge from the record. Reminds me of Mamdani's putsch and purge in NYC. Time will tell.
❤️ 🇮🇱
January 31, 2011
This is an excellent work of scholarship on a neglected topic. Little has been written about the Holocaust in Belarus, and even less is available in English. Yet in many ways, the Holocaust in Belarus is unique: unlike the rest of Eastern Europe, the general population of Belarus was on the whole very sympathetic of and helpful towards the Jews. The author attempts to answer the question as to why this was, and to tell the fascinating story of the Minsk Ghetto and the resistance movement within. She does very well on both counts.
The Minsk Ghetto leaked like a sieve, with people constantly going in and out: by the time it was liquidated, 10,000 of its residents had escaped and joined partisan groups in the forest, and when you considered that only about 1/4th to 1/3rd of escapees made it to the partians, that means many more escaped the ghetto, and the population wasn't terribly large to begin with. That detail alone has a story behind it -- and there were many other fascinating facts and figures and tales to tell. I found the book absorbing and engaging in addition to being well-researched. I would love to read more of this author's work.
The Minsk Ghetto leaked like a sieve, with people constantly going in and out: by the time it was liquidated, 10,000 of its residents had escaped and joined partisan groups in the forest, and when you considered that only about 1/4th to 1/3rd of escapees made it to the partians, that means many more escaped the ghetto, and the population wasn't terribly large to begin with. That detail alone has a story behind it -- and there were many other fascinating facts and figures and tales to tell. I found the book absorbing and engaging in addition to being well-researched. I would love to read more of this author's work.
October 15, 2018
When Prejudice Becomes Policy
In The Minsk Ghetto, Barbara Epstein takes a look at the racial and political situation in Belarus during World War II. She shares the results of her interviews with Ghetto survivors and underground workers. And, she divulges information gleaned from all the available research. Throughout are many personal stories of survivors that are heart wrenching. But, the book goes way beyond the emotion, to the idea of resistance.
Resistance takes many forms. The scope of resistance possibilities available in any given situation is determined largely by what one has read, or heard of resistance in the past. Victims of domestic abuse, for example, have a few options. Only those who perceive their governmental justice system to be 'just' and powerful enough to help will be likely to think of turning to the legal system for help in such a crises. We give little enough credence to the limits of what we are presented by the media, in any country.
But, if you've read Corrie Ten Boom's The Hiding Place, Czech Mate, by David Hathaway, The Diary of Anne Frank, God's Smuggler by Brother Andrew, Foxe's Book of Martyrs, or even heard speeches by such statesmen as Gandhi, King, Malcolm X, Patrick Henry, or Winston Churchill; then you realize there are many types of resistance. Of all these, I think the most inspiring was Rosa Parks who merely refused to give up her seat.
Likewise, during the Holocaust there were different methods of resistance. This book's purpose is to describe what happened in the Minsk Ghetto in Belarus. While other forms of protest are more widely known today, such as the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and the citizens everywhere who hid Jews in their houses to prevent them going to the Ghettos, the author here takes the position that there is a need to know the possibilities toward resistance that are less violent, and more diplomatic, since those will be important in the world today.
She explains why people in the Minsk Ghetto were able to flee to the forests, and join the soviet partisans. She also shows why this was not as viable of an option for those in other places like Warsaw. A few of the reasons relate to the lack of a place which to run, and the lack of help from non-Jews. That's what made the situation in Belarus unique.
Belarus had been under Russian occupation for 20 years before Hitler and the Nazis invaded. The Russians had a policy at that time of soviet internationalism. It was considered the patriotic duty to accept people of all nationalities within the Soviet Empire. This was sometimes at the expense of individual minorities who had to ‘take one for the team,’ but sometimes it worked in their favor. When the Germans took the country, the Red Army fled, but the rank and file members of the Soviet Party remained behind to deal with the Germans. Assuming there must be an 'official' Russian resistance party, and not wanting to get in trouble when the Russians returned, the Belorussian resistance formed a movement and called it the 'Auxiliary' Underground, hoping to eventually meet up with the official group. As it turned out, there was no official resistance, and the Soviets later betrayed this unofficial party in the end. But, had they waited and done nothing without authority, then many people would not have survived the war.
In the underground as well as outside it the line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior was sometimes unclear. What the average citizen had was a basic belief in ethnic solidarity, which was taught by spoken law. But, in actual policy, what was referred to as the anti-cosmopolitan campaign was at first directed at Soviet intellectuals generally (among whom were many Jews) but soon came to be focused on Jews in particular. The term 'rootless intellectuals' referred to the fact of Jewish Cosmopolitanism. The Soviet leadership was already quickly moving toward a policy of removing the 'undesirable' Jewish population. In fact, they had held Jewish pogroms in the past, like when the Red and White armies battled it out over the contested areas in the Russian Civil War between 1918 and 1921, and Stalin wanted to do the same after the war.
As we know, Eastern Europe had a long standing practice of expelling the Jews from their countries, usually just after borrowing large sums of money from them, and then seizing their estates for the government. I won't go into the Scottish Clearances because that's another issue altogether, casting out the poor, instead of the Jew among us. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries large numbers of Jews migrated eastward from western and central Europe to Poland and Lithuania (which then included the territories of Ukraine and Belarus) due to expulsions and persecution. Because of this, much of this area in Central and Western Europe had large problems with immigration, which were unresolved. The Holocaust was just the tip of the iceberg. We also know that Hitler thought he had the 'final solution' to make Germany great again. Hitler had a ‘fortress mentality.'
Among the Belorussian people, there existed ethnic wartime solidarity, though it had its strands of anti-Semite undercurrent, the general population resisted ideas of prejudice, in favor of a unified soviet idea. The acceptance of Jews as Byelorussians set Belorussia apart from its neighbors: it was considerably less clear that Jews in Poland were Poles, or that Jews in Lithuania were Lithuanians. But this solidarity among the people of Belarus took Germany by surprise, when they were met with indifference to their solution to the ‘Jewish Problem’ by non-Jews in other countries.
It would seem that, like in the United States of America with Patrick Henry and his ilk, crying that all men are created equal will lead to the emancipation of all races, and not just a privileged few colonists. Our founding fathers never envisaged the Civil Rights movement. But, they certainly got the idea of it right without knowing.
But, there in Europe, there were many groups working to save the Jews. Among them were different Jewish organizations. There were the organizations of the various parties of Jews: Ashkenazi Jews, the Mizrahi Jews, and the Sephardi Jews. But, there were also Jewish organizations, like the General Jewish Labour Bund, the Komsomol, and Hashomer Hatzair, or the 'Young Guard.' In addition to these Jewish peoples and organizations, there were many non-Jews who worked to save the lives of countless Jews during the Holocaust.
Several books were integral to this scholarly work by Barbara Epstein. A few I will mention here, though a couple don’t seem to be widely available today. Numbers one and three in particular don't seem to be available. I'd love to find them.
I read this book as part of my Journey Around the World in 80 Books in 2018, as my stop in Belarus. It is highly recommendable, but with caveats. It is available in Kindle, though the formatting is very simple. Many Kindle Books have ‘features’ that are not available in the cheaper made books, like the footnotes for example. Here, you have to search the back of the book for each footnote number. In the better formatted Kindle ebooks, clicking the footnote number will provide the appropriate footnote in a temporary pop up. And, this book is overpriced, typical of textbooks.
Seeing that you don’t often find such well written evaluations of ethical and racial issues, I’d say it is worth the price. In today’s book market, books that are readily available are often very cheap to purchase on Kindle. Others are more difficult to obtain, and we pay for that effort. I might add as well that this book is not a short quick read. It sparks much research, and a deeper understanding of various political ideologies.
My next stop will be the Ukraine. No, I’m not going to read about the bloodshed and fighting that has taken place over the centuries there. Instead, I’m going for the one better known event, Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl by Mary Mycio, because it deals with how the event shaped the geography, ecology, and wildlife today.
In The Minsk Ghetto, Barbara Epstein takes a look at the racial and political situation in Belarus during World War II. She shares the results of her interviews with Ghetto survivors and underground workers. And, she divulges information gleaned from all the available research. Throughout are many personal stories of survivors that are heart wrenching. But, the book goes way beyond the emotion, to the idea of resistance.
Resistance takes many forms. The scope of resistance possibilities available in any given situation is determined largely by what one has read, or heard of resistance in the past. Victims of domestic abuse, for example, have a few options. Only those who perceive their governmental justice system to be 'just' and powerful enough to help will be likely to think of turning to the legal system for help in such a crises. We give little enough credence to the limits of what we are presented by the media, in any country.
But, if you've read Corrie Ten Boom's The Hiding Place, Czech Mate, by David Hathaway, The Diary of Anne Frank, God's Smuggler by Brother Andrew, Foxe's Book of Martyrs, or even heard speeches by such statesmen as Gandhi, King, Malcolm X, Patrick Henry, or Winston Churchill; then you realize there are many types of resistance. Of all these, I think the most inspiring was Rosa Parks who merely refused to give up her seat.
Likewise, during the Holocaust there were different methods of resistance. This book's purpose is to describe what happened in the Minsk Ghetto in Belarus. While other forms of protest are more widely known today, such as the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and the citizens everywhere who hid Jews in their houses to prevent them going to the Ghettos, the author here takes the position that there is a need to know the possibilities toward resistance that are less violent, and more diplomatic, since those will be important in the world today.
She explains why people in the Minsk Ghetto were able to flee to the forests, and join the soviet partisans. She also shows why this was not as viable of an option for those in other places like Warsaw. A few of the reasons relate to the lack of a place which to run, and the lack of help from non-Jews. That's what made the situation in Belarus unique.
Belarus had been under Russian occupation for 20 years before Hitler and the Nazis invaded. The Russians had a policy at that time of soviet internationalism. It was considered the patriotic duty to accept people of all nationalities within the Soviet Empire. This was sometimes at the expense of individual minorities who had to ‘take one for the team,’ but sometimes it worked in their favor. When the Germans took the country, the Red Army fled, but the rank and file members of the Soviet Party remained behind to deal with the Germans. Assuming there must be an 'official' Russian resistance party, and not wanting to get in trouble when the Russians returned, the Belorussian resistance formed a movement and called it the 'Auxiliary' Underground, hoping to eventually meet up with the official group. As it turned out, there was no official resistance, and the Soviets later betrayed this unofficial party in the end. But, had they waited and done nothing without authority, then many people would not have survived the war.
In the underground as well as outside it the line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior was sometimes unclear. What the average citizen had was a basic belief in ethnic solidarity, which was taught by spoken law. But, in actual policy, what was referred to as the anti-cosmopolitan campaign was at first directed at Soviet intellectuals generally (among whom were many Jews) but soon came to be focused on Jews in particular. The term 'rootless intellectuals' referred to the fact of Jewish Cosmopolitanism. The Soviet leadership was already quickly moving toward a policy of removing the 'undesirable' Jewish population. In fact, they had held Jewish pogroms in the past, like when the Red and White armies battled it out over the contested areas in the Russian Civil War between 1918 and 1921, and Stalin wanted to do the same after the war.
As we know, Eastern Europe had a long standing practice of expelling the Jews from their countries, usually just after borrowing large sums of money from them, and then seizing their estates for the government. I won't go into the Scottish Clearances because that's another issue altogether, casting out the poor, instead of the Jew among us. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries large numbers of Jews migrated eastward from western and central Europe to Poland and Lithuania (which then included the territories of Ukraine and Belarus) due to expulsions and persecution. Because of this, much of this area in Central and Western Europe had large problems with immigration, which were unresolved. The Holocaust was just the tip of the iceberg. We also know that Hitler thought he had the 'final solution' to make Germany great again. Hitler had a ‘fortress mentality.'
"...the Jews had few if any reliable allies."
“During the long history of the Diaspora there have been many moments when life in particular places became untenable for Jews. The solution was to leave and settle elsewhere. What was different about the Holocaust was that it was impossible to leave."
"The Holocaust was not inevitable. The Nazis came to power with the assistance of a German elite that might have acted otherwise, and Nazi Germany was allowed to expand by surrounding nations that might also have acted otherwise."
Among the Belorussian people, there existed ethnic wartime solidarity, though it had its strands of anti-Semite undercurrent, the general population resisted ideas of prejudice, in favor of a unified soviet idea. The acceptance of Jews as Byelorussians set Belorussia apart from its neighbors: it was considerably less clear that Jews in Poland were Poles, or that Jews in Lithuania were Lithuanians. But this solidarity among the people of Belarus took Germany by surprise, when they were met with indifference to their solution to the ‘Jewish Problem’ by non-Jews in other countries.
"One Nazi official reported, with apparent surprise, that in the eyes of the Byelorussian population the Germans appeared as "barbarians and hangmen, the Jew being held to be as much of a human being as the Byelorussian."
It would seem that, like in the United States of America with Patrick Henry and his ilk, crying that all men are created equal will lead to the emancipation of all races, and not just a privileged few colonists. Our founding fathers never envisaged the Civil Rights movement. But, they certainly got the idea of it right without knowing.
But, there in Europe, there were many groups working to save the Jews. Among them were different Jewish organizations. There were the organizations of the various parties of Jews: Ashkenazi Jews, the Mizrahi Jews, and the Sephardi Jews. But, there were also Jewish organizations, like the General Jewish Labour Bund, the Komsomol, and Hashomer Hatzair, or the 'Young Guard.' In addition to these Jewish peoples and organizations, there were many non-Jews who worked to save the lives of countless Jews during the Holocaust.
"...the story of an underground movement built on solidarity between Jews and non-Jews would have a special poignancy and would also have come to occupy a central place in the memory of Holocaust resistance."
”Decades later, in an increasingly conflict-wrought world, overcoming oppression tends to call for building alliances, formulating joint strategies, finding ways to negotiate with opponents."
"...Minsk ghetto model also places Jewish Holocaust resistance in the broader historical context of resistance to fascism as a whole."
"...saving the lives of Jews trapped in the ghettos might have become a higher priority if it had not been for the view, shared by Zionists, Communists, and others, that armed struggle was the highest form of resistance, regardless of the circumstances."
Several books were integral to this scholarly work by Barbara Epstein. A few I will mention here, though a couple don’t seem to be widely available today. Numbers one and three in particular don't seem to be available. I'd love to find them.
Books:
1. Brown Boots, Red Boots: From the Minsk Ghetto To The Camps Of Siberia by Anatoli Rubin
2. The Doctor's Plot by Yakov Rapoport
3. History of the Jews of Eastern Byelorussia by Shalom Cholavsky,
4. Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw by Gunnar Paulsson
I read this book as part of my Journey Around the World in 80 Books in 2018, as my stop in Belarus. It is highly recommendable, but with caveats. It is available in Kindle, though the formatting is very simple. Many Kindle Books have ‘features’ that are not available in the cheaper made books, like the footnotes for example. Here, you have to search the back of the book for each footnote number. In the better formatted Kindle ebooks, clicking the footnote number will provide the appropriate footnote in a temporary pop up. And, this book is overpriced, typical of textbooks.
Seeing that you don’t often find such well written evaluations of ethical and racial issues, I’d say it is worth the price. In today’s book market, books that are readily available are often very cheap to purchase on Kindle. Others are more difficult to obtain, and we pay for that effort. I might add as well that this book is not a short quick read. It sparks much research, and a deeper understanding of various political ideologies.
My next stop will be the Ukraine. No, I’m not going to read about the bloodshed and fighting that has taken place over the centuries there. Instead, I’m going for the one better known event, Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl by Mary Mycio, because it deals with how the event shaped the geography, ecology, and wildlife today.
March 20, 2019
Barbara Epstein was my go-to source when I was doing research for one of my novels and I really can’t thank her enough for writing such a detailed and well-researched account of events that took place in the Minsk Ghetto. There are very few books written on the subject and this fact makes Ms. Epstein’s study even more valuable. She begins by drawing parallels between the Minsk Ghetto and other different ghettos situated in the territory of the German-occupied USSR and explains why the Minsk one was so different. Unlike many other Soviet republics, Byelorussia joined the Soviet Union voluntarily and, as a result, there were hardly any traces of nationalism left when it came to its population, unlike in Ukraine and the Baltic states. Gentiles and Jews considered themselves “Soviet people” and it was this approach that made the forming of the underground possible which later saved so many Jewish lives. I was amazed to learn about the risks Byelorussian gentiles took to save Jewish lives, and how they positively refused to participate in any violent actions, incited by the SS and directed at the Jewish population.
The forming of the underground, the first partisan formations, the inner organization of the ghetto and Sonderghetto (the German ghetto within the ghetto) - every chapter, based on survivors’ accounts and historical documents, is a wealth of information. I really can’t recommend it highly enough. A very well written and important study.
The forming of the underground, the first partisan formations, the inner organization of the ghetto and Sonderghetto (the German ghetto within the ghetto) - every chapter, based on survivors’ accounts and historical documents, is a wealth of information. I really can’t recommend it highly enough. A very well written and important study.
July 11, 2023
“A generation of young Americans grew up with the impression that World War II had been mostly a battle between the Nazis and Western democracy, exemplified and led by the United States, with the Soviet Union playing some vaguely defined marginal role. The Holocaust, according to this view, took place in Germany and Eastern Europe, meaning mostly Poland and Lithuania, but because the Soviet peoples languished under another sort of evil rule, whatever happened there during the war was too confusing to think about. In the context of a worldview that defined Nazism and Communism as two sides of the same totalitarian evil, there was little room for stories of Jews whose resistance to fascism consisted of fighting with Soviet-aligned partisan forces. Within the mainstream Jewish arena in the United States there was even more resistance to such stories. In the postwar years Jews had entered public life in the United States on the basis of an implicit promise of loyalty to the United States, which was understood to mean absolute support for American Cold War policies. The last thing that leaders of the Jewish mainstream wanted to be reminded of was the close if conflicted relationship between Jews and Communism in Eastern Europe, including the Soviet Union and the occupied Soviet territories, before and during the war.”
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 20, 2021
An amazing book that looks into resistance to the Holocaust beyond just the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and looks at what the Jews did to survive from the Minsk Ghetto. A thoughtfully researched treatise on what has been, up to know, a far less recognized area of desperate survival against the atrocities of the Holocaust. Highly recommend!
January 5, 2020
An excellent book that explains with many interviews and painstaking research about the plight of the Jews in Minsk during the Second World War. (full disclosure- Barbara is a third cousin who I just met in person last year)
For those interested in this topic, this book is top notch.
For those interested in this topic, this book is top notch.
August 14, 2021
Barbara Epstein has performed a valuable service to the history of the Holocaust in bringing to light one of the lesser-known stories of struggle and survival, that of the Minsk ghetto in modern-day Belarus from 1941-43. Although the book is written in a somewhat dry and academic style, the story it tells is compelling, not only because it chronicles the determination of thousands of Minsk Jews to survive, but also because it reveals that they had help from a most unusual source – Gentiles, both inside and outside the ghetto, many of them Communists, who shared their determination to fight the Nazis against all odds and who aided them in escaping the ghetto and “going to the forest”, which throughout is used as a euphemism for joining partisan fighters as combatants or support personnel and carrying on the struggle until ultimate liberation by the Red Army. She estimates that as many as 10,000 Jews were saved in this fashion.
Minsk’s ghetto was closed off only by an easily-penetrable barbed wire fence, and the forest was close by. The lack of enmity between Jews and Gentiles here is traced to the existence of an “internationalist” ethos in the interwar history of the Soviet Union, which stressed the unity of all believers in Communism no matter their religious, national or ethnic background; and to the fact that the Byelorussian SSR, since it was considered one of the least prosperous regions of the Soviet Union, escaped the “Harvest of Sorrow” that occurred in nearby Ukraine, with its forced collectivization of more prosperous peasants (“kulaks”) through mass starvation and confiscation of crops and possessions which resulted in millions of deaths and an enmity which exists to this day.
The story is marred by the fact that Stalin, being who he was, suspected those who stayed in the ghetto underground or the city underground, and carried on the fight, to have been traitors or collaborators, as he did those who were prisoners of war or inmates in concentration camps; but at least many of them were later exonerated after Stalin’s death in 1953 through the testimony of their companions.
This book is extremely valuable because it relies mostly on primary sources; Epstein was able to interview scores of survivors in the 1990’s and early 2000’s before they passed away. There is an extensive bibliography (a reading knowledge of German, Yiddish, Russian and Hebrew would be helpful!) as well. The concluding chapters tell in abbreviated form the stories of the Kovno and Vilna ghettos as well, which provide a marked contrast to the story of Minsk.
Highly recommended.
**** review by Chuck Graham ****
Minsk’s ghetto was closed off only by an easily-penetrable barbed wire fence, and the forest was close by. The lack of enmity between Jews and Gentiles here is traced to the existence of an “internationalist” ethos in the interwar history of the Soviet Union, which stressed the unity of all believers in Communism no matter their religious, national or ethnic background; and to the fact that the Byelorussian SSR, since it was considered one of the least prosperous regions of the Soviet Union, escaped the “Harvest of Sorrow” that occurred in nearby Ukraine, with its forced collectivization of more prosperous peasants (“kulaks”) through mass starvation and confiscation of crops and possessions which resulted in millions of deaths and an enmity which exists to this day.
The story is marred by the fact that Stalin, being who he was, suspected those who stayed in the ghetto underground or the city underground, and carried on the fight, to have been traitors or collaborators, as he did those who were prisoners of war or inmates in concentration camps; but at least many of them were later exonerated after Stalin’s death in 1953 through the testimony of their companions.
This book is extremely valuable because it relies mostly on primary sources; Epstein was able to interview scores of survivors in the 1990’s and early 2000’s before they passed away. There is an extensive bibliography (a reading knowledge of German, Yiddish, Russian and Hebrew would be helpful!) as well. The concluding chapters tell in abbreviated form the stories of the Kovno and Vilna ghettos as well, which provide a marked contrast to the story of Minsk.
Highly recommended.
**** review by Chuck Graham ****
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews