more fearful of the disruptions partisans could bring.19
Belarus, with its plentiful forests and swamps, was ideal territory for partisan warfare. The German army chief of staff later fantasized about using nuclear weapons to clear its wetlands of human population. This technology was not available, of course, but the fantasy gives a sense of both the ruthlessness of German planning and the fears aroused by difficult terrain. The policy of the army was to deter partisan warfare by striking “such terror into the population that it loses all will to resist.” Bach, the Higher SS and Police Leader, later said that the ultimate explanation for the killing of civilians in anti-partisan actions was Himmler’s desire to kill all the Jews and thirty million Slavs. There seemed to be little cost to the Germans in preemptive terror, since the people in question were meant to die anyway (in the Hunger Plan or Generalplan Ost). Hitler, who saw partisan warfare as a chance to destroy potential opposition, reacted energetically when Stalin urged local communists to resist the Germans in July. Even before the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler had already relieved his soldiers of legal responsibility for actions taken against civilians. Now he wanted soldiers and police to kill anyone who “even looks at us askance.”20
The Germans had little trouble controlling the partisan movement in late 1941, and simply defined the ongoing mass murder of Jews as the appropriate reprisal. In September 1941 a clinic on anti-partisan warfare was held near Mahileu; its climax was the shooting of thirty-two Jews, of whom nineteen were women. The general line was that “Where there are partisans there are Jews; and where there are Jews there are partisans.” Just why this was so was harder to establish. The anti-Semitic ideas of Jewish weakness and dissimulation conspired in a sort of explanation: military commanders were unlikely to believe that Jews would actually take up arms, but often saw the Jewish population as standing behind partisan actions. General Bechtolsheim, responsible for security in the Minsk area, believed that if “an act of sabotage is committed in a village, and one destroys all of the Jews of the village, one can be certain that one has destroyed the perpetrators, or at least those who stood behind them.”21
In this atmosphere, where the partisans were weak and the German reprisals anti-Semitic, most Jews in the Minsk ghetto were in no hurry to escape to the forest. In Minsk, despite all of its horrors, they were at least at home. Despite the regular mass killings, no fewer than half of Minsk’s Jews were still alive as 1942 began.
In 1942, the Soviet partisan movement took on new strength at the same moment as the fate of Belarusian Jews was sealed, and for much the same reason. In December 1941, confronted with a “world war,” Hitler communicated his desire that all the Jews of Europe be killed. The Red Army’s advance was one of the main sources of the weakening German position in Belarus, and of Hitler’s newly explicit desire for the murder of all Jews. Advancing Soviet forces were even able to open a gap in the German lines in early 1942. The “Surazh Gates,” as the space between Army Group North and Army Group Center was called, remained open for half a year. Until September 1942, the Soviets could send trusted men and arms to control and supply the partisans operating in Belarus. Soviet authorities thereby established more or less reliable channels of communication. In May 1942 a Central Staff of the Partisan Movement was established in Moscow.22
Hitler’s express decision to kill all the Jews of Europe raised the association of Jews and partisans to a kind of abstraction: Jews were supporters of Germany’s enemies, and so had to be preemptively eliminated. Himmler and Hitler associated the Jewish threat with the partisan threat. The logic of the connection between Jews and partisans was vague and troubled, but the significance for the Jews of Belarus, the heartland of partisan warfare, was absolutely clear. In the military occupation zone, the rear of Army Group Center, the killing of Jews began again in January 1942. An Einsatzkommando painted Stars of David on their trucks to broadcast their mission of finding Jews and killing them. The leaders of Einsatzgruppe B resolved to kill all the Jews in their zone of responsibility by 20 April 1942, which was Hitler’s birthday.23
The civilian occupation authorities in Minsk also followed the new line. Wilhelm Kube, the General Commissar of White Ruthenia, met with his police leaders on 19 January 1942. All seemed to accept Kube’s formulation: while Germany’s great “colonial-political” task in the East demanded the murder of all Jews, some would have to be preserved for a time as forced labor. Killing actions in Minsk would begin in March, directed against the population that remained in the ghetto during the day while the labor brigades were outside the ghetto at work.24
On 1 March 1942 the Germans ordered the Judenrat to provide a quota of five thousand Jews the following day. The ghetto underground told the Judenrat not to bargain Jewish blood, which the Judenrat was probably not inclined to do anyway. Some of the Jewish policemen, rather than aiding the Germans to make their quota, warned their fellow Jews to hide. When the quota was not delivered on 2 March, the Germans shot children, and stabbed to death all the wards of the Jewish orphanage. They even killed some workers returning home. In all they murdered some 3,412 people that day. One Jewish child who escaped the bloodshed was Feliks Lipski. His father had been killed as a Polish spy in Stalin’s Great Terror, disappearing as people did then, never to be seen again. Now the boy saw people he knew as corpses in ditches. He remembered shades of white: skin, undergarments, snow.25
After the failure of the action of early March 1942, the Germans broke the Minsk underground, and accelerated the mass murder of the Jews. In late March and early April 1942, the Germans arrested and executed some 251 underground activists, Jews and non-Jews, including the head of the Judenrat. (Kaziniets, the organizer of the underground, was executed that July.) At around the same time, Reinhard Heydrich visited Minsk, and apparently ordered the construction of a death facility. The SS set to work on a new complex at Maly Trastsianets, outside Minsk. Beginning in May 1942, some forty thousand people would be killed there. The wives of German officials remembered Maly Trastsianets as a nice place to ride horses and collect fur coats (taken from Jewish women before they were shot).26
Some ten thousand Minsk Jews were killed in the last few days of July 1942. On the last day of the month, Junita Vishniatskaia wrote a letter to her father to bid him farewell. “I am saying good-bye to you before I die. I am so afraid of this death because they throw small children into the mass graves alive. Farewell forever. I kiss you, I kiss you.”27
It was true that Germans sometimes avoided shooting younger children, instead throwing them into the pits with the corpses, and allowing them to suffocate under the earth. They also had at their disposal another means of killing that allowed them to avoid seeing the end of young life. Gas vans roved the streets of Minsk, the drivers seeking stray Jewish children. The people called the gas vans by a name that had been used for the NKVD trucks during the Great Terror a few years earlier: “soul destroyers.”28
The girls and boys knew what would happen to them if they were caught. They would ask for a tattered bit of dignity as they walked up the ramp to their death: “Please sirs,” they would say to the Germans, “do not hit us. We can get to the trucks on our own.”29
By spring 1942 the Jews of Minsk were coming to see the forest as less dangerous than the ghetto. Hersh Smolar himself was forced to leave the ghetto for the partisans. Of the ten thousand or so Minsk Jews who found Soviet partisan units, perhaps half survived the war. Smolar was among the survivors. Yet partisans did not necessarily welcome Jews. Partisan units were meant to defeat the German occupation, not to help civilians endure it. Jews who lacked arms were often turned away, as were women and children. Even armed Jewish men were sometimes rejected or even, in some cases, killed for their weapons. Partisan leaders feared that Jews from ghettos were German spies, an accusation that was not as absurd as it might appear. The Germans would indeed seize wives and children, and then tell Jewish husbands to go to the forest and return with information if they wished to see their families again.30
The situation of Jews in the forests slowly improved over the course of 1942, as some Jews formed their own partisan units, a development that the Central Staff of the Partisan Movement eventually sanctioned. Israel Lapidus formed a unit of some fifty men. Sholem Zorin’s 106th Detachment counted ten times as many, and raided the Minsk ghetto to rescue Jews. In individual cases Soviet partisan units provided diversions that allowed Jews to escape from the ghetto. In one case, partisans attacked a German unit on its way to liquidate a ghetto. Oswald Rufeisen, a Jew who worked as a translator for the German police in the town of Mir, smuggled weapons into that ghetto, and warned its inhabitants when the liquidation was ordered.31
Tuvia Bielski, also a Jew, probably rescued more Jews than any other partisan leader. His special gift was to understand the perils of partisan warfare between Stalin and Hitler. Bielski hailed from western Belarus, which is to say from the part of northeastern Poland that the Soviets had annexed in 1939 and then lost to the Germans in
