Fugitives of the Forest: The Heroic Story of Jewish Resistance and Survival During the Second World War

J.L. Granatstein, distinguished research professor emeritus of history
at York University, is the author of Who Killed Canadian History?, and
co-author of The Canadian 100: The 100 Most Influential Canadians of the
20th Century and the Dictionary of Canad

The Nazi Holocaust was a disaster of terrible proportions for European
Jewry. Millions were herded off to the camps, there to be exploited for
their labor or processed for the ovens by a bureaucratic machine of
incredible power and awesome cruelty. Ultimately, six million were
exterminated. The story is well known (though recent events make clear
that it needs to be retold continually), yet questions remain. Why did
so few Jews rise in revolt? Where was the resistance that might have
sent a few Nazis to Hell?

Winnipeg historian Allan Levine has tried to grapple with these
questions by tracing the activities of Jewish partisans in occupied
Eastern Europe. Those who escaped the ghettos made their way into the
forests, stole or found weapons, linked up with Red Army or Polish Home
Army partisan units, and tried to resist and harass the occupiers. Their
struggle was largely unequal, for, as Levine makes clear, the Jews faced
attacks from anti-Semitic or suspicious Poles and Soviets alike. The
military utility of the Jewish guerrilla efforts was likely small, but
the moral and morale effects were very large. That Jews resisted, that
Jews fought the Nazis, offered the possibility of revenge and
redemption.

Levine’s book is well researched. He has done dozens of interviews
and made use of survivors’ accounts as well as the voluminous
literature on the Holocaust and World War II. What he lacks, almost by
definition, are documentary sources, for few records were created by the
fugitives of the forest. This is likely as definitive a story as we will
get of this small but critical guerrilla effort.