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The Partisan: From the Valley of Death to Mt. Zion
Yitzhak Arad is an Israeli historian, retired IDF brigadier general and a former Soviet partisan who has served as director of Yad Vashem from 1972 to 1993.
- GenresHistory
241 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1979
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About the author
Yitzhak Arad
14 books10 followersYitzhak Arad is an Israeli historian, author, retired IDF brigadier general and a former Soviet partisan, director of Yad Vashem from 1972 to 1993. He specialised in the history of the Holocaust.
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November 28, 2019
“It’s all the same war.”
Or so it seemed to Itzhak Rudnitzky, aka Yitzhak Arad – ghetto survivor, Soviet partisan, Palmach guerrilla, Brigadier-General of the Israeli Defense Forces and its Chief Education Officer; and, finally, director of Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Memorial. In ten years, from the invasion of Poland on September 3, 1939, to the conclusion of the First Arab War, Arad’s life was one long war for survival and rebirth. As such he offered one of the most poignant Holocaust memoirs and detailed, if somewhat dry, account of the Israeli Independence War.
There is little of the padded and embellished dramatization so beloved of the modern general reader; and in truth his account is dramatic enough on its own. He meticulously recalls his ordeal as a teenager in occupied Poland and Lithuania; his natural adolescent urge to rebellion becomes a real war as his family and community are destroyed by the Nazi Shoah and its native Lithuanian collaborators. In Arad’s pages we see the SS as, at times, the more “humane” of the two. Ironically, Arad was declared a wanted war criminal by the post-Soviet Lithuanian regime, which lionizes its Nazi collaborators as “patriots.”
No doubt the Jewish and Soviet partisan units (and Arad was in both) perped some unsavory doings in their own right (see the film “Defiance” on the parallel Bielski Brothers of the same area.) Yet young Jews like Arad/Rudnitzky were faced with the kill-or-be-killed realities of genocide. One of the most wrenching chapters is his return from the forest in “victory,” to see the twisted ruins and rubbled memories of Lithuania’s Jewish families, communities, houses, and culture. With his old life literally gone, Arad – still a boy by modern standards – set out on a journey of Christlike resurrection in the Holy Land.
Here his war continued in new form, and now it became somewhat problematical. The black/white dichotomy of survival at all costs left no room for nuance in creating the Jewish State; and here we see why it took the form it did and why peace with its neighbors remains elusive. With this ruthless mindset, born of annihilation and rebirth, there was no consideration that Palestine’s Arabs were not exactly Lithuanian pogromists: their guerrillas felt themselves as much a resistance to occupation as the Jewish and Soviet partisans of the Baltic forest. To Arad, after his own soul-searing ordeal, there was no law higher than survival in the name of those who did not. His recounting of his Palmach career is packed with details, rather unlike his forest partisan days, which were slow to begin and drawn out over several years. In Palestine/Israel, events surge like a blitzkrieg.
To Arad’s generation Israel and the Holocaust were a dialectical process, as inseparable from the body of Jewry as a right and left hand. The bitter lessons of Nazi-occupied Lithuania have sown dragon’s teeth that still chew the innocent. Though Arad professes peace in his conclusion, I suspect it’s with Oliver Cromwell’s reservation that this comes only through war. Arad was selected as Chairman of Yad Vashem for this reason: the Holocaust to be represented by such a resistance warrior, not the terrified, confused, resigned victim of reality.
The book is well-illustrated with good maps of the partisan theater. My personal copy is inscribed by the author; though I’m critical of his position on certain points, I can still highly recommend his book as part of the larger picture of the Holocaust. Not all its victims died unresisting, though resistance was never a guarantee of survival.
Or so it seemed to Itzhak Rudnitzky, aka Yitzhak Arad – ghetto survivor, Soviet partisan, Palmach guerrilla, Brigadier-General of the Israeli Defense Forces and its Chief Education Officer; and, finally, director of Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Memorial. In ten years, from the invasion of Poland on September 3, 1939, to the conclusion of the First Arab War, Arad’s life was one long war for survival and rebirth. As such he offered one of the most poignant Holocaust memoirs and detailed, if somewhat dry, account of the Israeli Independence War.
There is little of the padded and embellished dramatization so beloved of the modern general reader; and in truth his account is dramatic enough on its own. He meticulously recalls his ordeal as a teenager in occupied Poland and Lithuania; his natural adolescent urge to rebellion becomes a real war as his family and community are destroyed by the Nazi Shoah and its native Lithuanian collaborators. In Arad’s pages we see the SS as, at times, the more “humane” of the two. Ironically, Arad was declared a wanted war criminal by the post-Soviet Lithuanian regime, which lionizes its Nazi collaborators as “patriots.”
No doubt the Jewish and Soviet partisan units (and Arad was in both) perped some unsavory doings in their own right (see the film “Defiance” on the parallel Bielski Brothers of the same area.) Yet young Jews like Arad/Rudnitzky were faced with the kill-or-be-killed realities of genocide. One of the most wrenching chapters is his return from the forest in “victory,” to see the twisted ruins and rubbled memories of Lithuania’s Jewish families, communities, houses, and culture. With his old life literally gone, Arad – still a boy by modern standards – set out on a journey of Christlike resurrection in the Holy Land.
Here his war continued in new form, and now it became somewhat problematical. The black/white dichotomy of survival at all costs left no room for nuance in creating the Jewish State; and here we see why it took the form it did and why peace with its neighbors remains elusive. With this ruthless mindset, born of annihilation and rebirth, there was no consideration that Palestine’s Arabs were not exactly Lithuanian pogromists: their guerrillas felt themselves as much a resistance to occupation as the Jewish and Soviet partisans of the Baltic forest. To Arad, after his own soul-searing ordeal, there was no law higher than survival in the name of those who did not. His recounting of his Palmach career is packed with details, rather unlike his forest partisan days, which were slow to begin and drawn out over several years. In Palestine/Israel, events surge like a blitzkrieg.
To Arad’s generation Israel and the Holocaust were a dialectical process, as inseparable from the body of Jewry as a right and left hand. The bitter lessons of Nazi-occupied Lithuania have sown dragon’s teeth that still chew the innocent. Though Arad professes peace in his conclusion, I suspect it’s with Oliver Cromwell’s reservation that this comes only through war. Arad was selected as Chairman of Yad Vashem for this reason: the Holocaust to be represented by such a resistance warrior, not the terrified, confused, resigned victim of reality.
The book is well-illustrated with good maps of the partisan theater. My personal copy is inscribed by the author; though I’m critical of his position on certain points, I can still highly recommend his book as part of the larger picture of the Holocaust. Not all its victims died unresisting, though resistance was never a guarantee of survival.
Displaying 1 of 1 review