The title of this book intrigued me, as did the picture on the cover of a group of young armed partisans staring into the camera with steely determination. To my mind they had the same look about them as those brave Estonians and Latvians we have come to know as “Brothers of the Forest”. Looking at the cover closer, I noticed that the book was in fact about Jewish resistance and survival during the Second World War in Poland and the former Soviet Union.
What intrigued me was that when I read the book, I had trouble distinguishing between the Jewish partisans in their desperate struggle to stay alive and Baltic partisans fighting the Soviets in their respective homelands. Both groups suffered terrible repression at the hands of the hated foreign invaders. Their families had either been exterminated immediately or shipped off to Stalin’s Siberia or extermination slave labour camps in Hitler’s Reich.
In any case anti-partisan activity seemed mainly carried out on a day to day basis by Nazi police battalions specially trained and recruited for duty in the occupied territories the Nazis overran. In the Baltic States it was an unsavoury organization known as the NKVD (subsequently renamed the KGB). Large well organized partisan units with heavy weapons sometimes fought pitched battles with the armed forces of both sides. In both cases, the eventual outcome must have seemed almost hopeless to those caught up in the meat grinder.
For some time, Nazi Germany and its co-belligerents appeared sure to win, at least until the battle of Stalingrad when arguably the tide turned, but this could not have been obvious to those stranded in the forests and swamps. The Baltic Forest Brothers pinned their hopes on help from the West, a hope that disappeared when the full realization of what had happened at the Yalta conference sunk in, yet they fought on for many years after war’s end.
Estonians and Latvians had to a large degree been looked down upon by the German “master race”. Jews had never been well regarded by the Slavic people, notwithstanding some Jews in high positions such as Lazar Kaganovich and prior to that Leon Trotsky. Periodic violent anti-Semitic pogroms had been a regular feature of life in Tsarist Russia for centuries. The hated German overlords had enslaved Estonians and Latvians for seven hundred years.
So where am I heading with all this? It’s impossible to dismiss the book as pro-Soviet fabrication or yet another shrill Jewish lobby attempt to remind the world again of the holocaust.
It seems to me that quite often one person’s partisan is regarded as a heroic freedom fighter while another person views the same individual as a terrorist. A good example would be the late Mr. Arafat and the late Mr. Menachem Begin, former Prime Minister of Israel, who was also responsible for terrorist bombings. Both had lots of innocent blood on their hands, yet both are regarded as heroes by their constituents.
It’s easy to decide which is which when you live in a black and white world. It’s not so easy when people through no fault of their own get caught up in great power national interest struggles and are forced through circumstances to choose between almost equally repugnant alternatives.
It’s even more problematic in an open multicultural and free society, far removed both culturally and geographically, when an older generation that lived through traumatic and world changing events, tries with the best of intentions to educate the young in a manner that could be perceived as being black and white.