Last revised august 30, 2004

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264 Aleksander Pruszyński, “Wracam na swoje: Białoruś—wczoraj, dziś, jutro,” Goniec (Mississauga), December 7–13, 2007 (Part 33), and December 14–20, 2007 (Part 34). See also Gutman and Bender, The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations, vol. 4: Poland, Part One, 182 (Dolenga-Wrzoszek).

265 Pola Wawer, Poza gettem i obozem (Warsaw: Volumen, 1993), especially at pp. 97–100; Michał Grynberg, Księga sprawiedliwych (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 1993), 421–23; Gutman and Bender, The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations, vol. 5: Poland, Part 2, 626–27.

266 Gutman and Bender, The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations, vol. 4: Poland, Part 1, 411–12. Bronisław Krzyżanowski and his wife Helena sheltered Guta Baran and her son Zeev, as well as her relatives Sofi Rachel and Gegory Baran. For additional examples of assistance provided to Jews by members of the Home Army see Krajewski, Na Ziemi Nowogródzkiej, 38.

267 Gutman and Bender, The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations, vol. 5: Poland, Part 2, 793–94.

268 Emanuela Cunge, Uciec przed Holocaustem (Łódź: Oficyna Bibliofilów, 1997), 182–307, especially 216–21, 239, 247, 253, 261, 274, 282, 290–92, 302. After the “liberation” the Cunges obtained good positions in Wilno. They became part of the privileged Soviet elite who had access to goods not readily available to the general population. Ibid., 305–307.

269 Based on a Yad Vashem deposition cited in Allan Levine, Fugitives of the Forest: The Heroic Story of Jewish Resistance and Survival during the Second World War (Toronto: Stoddart, 1998), 191.

270 Rubin, Against the Tide, 142. Sulia Wolozhinski Rubin from Nowogródek was a member of Bielski’s group.

271 Account of Zussya Dolsky, a member of the “Organi Keyser” company, in Kowalski, Anthology on Armed Jewish Resistance, 1939–1945, vol. 4 (1991), 447.

272 Yehuda Adelman, Heroes Without Medals (New York: Vantage Press, 1983), viii. The author, a native of Horodek and member of the Soviet partisans, was employed by Smersh as a counter-intelligence officer.

273 Tec, Defiance, 151–53; Nechama Tec, In the Lion’s Den: The Life of Oswald Rufeisen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 182–83. Tec is correct, however, when she writes that what particularly irked the Soviet underground was the arrival of emissaries and trained professional officers (paratroopers) sent by the Home Army supreme command. See Krajewski, Uderzeniowe Bataliony Kadrowe 1942–1944, 381–83. These contacts were, for the Soviets, a sign of the lack of subordination of the Polish partisans, and this they could not tolerate. But it was merely a pretext, and Polish actions had little to do with disturbing the Soviet-Polish “equilibrium,” which the Soviets never intended to respect in any event, since the course of those relations was already cast. See Gnatowski, “Kontrowersje i konflikty między ZWZ–AK i radzieckim podziemiem na północno-wschodnich ziemiach Polski w latach 1941–1944,” in Liedke, Sadowska and Tyrkowski, Granice i pogranicza, vol. 2, 188–89; Boradyn, Niemen–rzeka niezgody, 151, 155 n.240. Notwithstanding, seemingly friendly relations between the Polish and Soviet partisans continued. The latter were invited to the Polish Independence Day celebrations in Derewno (Derewna) on Novermber 11, 1943, with which they were visibly displeased. See Poland, Home Army, The Unseen and Silent, 152; Polskie Siły Zbrojne, Armia Krajowa, Drogi cichociemnych, 142. However, it was the publication in the bulletin of the Home Army district command of information about the discovery of the mass graves of Polish officers in Katyn, which had resulted in the breaking of diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and the Polish government in London, that particularly incensed the Soviet partisan command when a copy of the bulletin fell into its hands. See Wołkonowski, Okręg Wileński Związku Walki Zbrojnej Armii Krajowej w latach 1939–1945, 126. Additionally, there was a history of conflict stemming from the continuous plundering of local villages by Soviet partisans, which resulted in interventions by Polish units from time to time. For a summary of some of these activities see Bohdan Urbankowski, “Antysowieckie powstania: Polska,” in Encyklopedia “Białych Plam”, vol. 1, 227. According to Soviet sources, some Soviet partisans (intruders) were killed by Polish partisans. See Smilovitskii, Katastrofa evreev v Belorussii 1941–1944 gg., 139.

274 Both American historian Martin Dean and German historian Bernhard Chiari, for example, appear to accept Tec’s interpretation in their rather superficial treatment of the topic which scarcely acknowledges Polish sources. See Dean, Collaboration in the Holocaust, 143–44; Chiari, Alltag hinter der Front, 283–84. Belorussian historians still generally adhere to the traditional Soviet point of view but attempt to put a Belorussian spin on the Soviet partisan movement in that area. See Viktor I. Ermolovich and Sergei V. Zhumar, Ognem i mechom: Khronika polskogo natsionalisticheskogo podpolia v Belorussii (1939–1953 gg.) (Minsk: Belorusskii nauchno-issledovatelskii tsentr dokumentovedeniia, arkheografii i arkhivnogo dela, 1994), 33; Ivan P. Kren’, “Der Einsatz der Armia Krajowa auf dem Territorium Weißrusslands aud weißrussischer Sicht: Versuch einer Ortsbestimmung,” in Chiari, Die polnische Heimatarmee: 585–98. See also the rebuttal by Sigizmund P. Borodin (Zygmunt Boradyn), “Die weißrussische Geschichtsschreibung und Publizistik und die Heimatarmee in den nordöstlichen Gebieten der Republik Polen 1939 bis 1945,” in ibid. (Chiari), 599–616; and the overviews by Kazimierz Krajewski, “Der Bezirk Nowogródek der Heimatarmee: Nationalitätenkonflikte und polnische Verhältnisse 1939–1945,” in ibid. (Chiari), 563–84 and by Piotr Niwiński, “Die nationale Frage im Wilnagebiet,” in ibid. (Chiari), 617–34. Recently Russian nationalist historians have revived the old Soviet stereotypes with a vengeance depicting the Polish underground as a negligible anti-German force that somehow managed to murder more Soviets and Belorussians than the Nazis. See, for example, Elena Viktorovna Iakovleva, Polsha protiv SSSR 1939–1950 (Moscow: Izdatelskii dom “Veche”, 2007), especially 195–96. A minority of liberal Russian historians reject these primitive views. See, for example, Boris Sokolov, Okkupatsiia: Prawdy i mify (Moscow: Izd. Ast-Press Kniga, 2002).

275 This interpretation conveniently ignores salient facts such as the following: the Polish government in exile, and consequently the Home Army supreme command, continued to advocate cooperation with the Soviet partisans and Polish partisan units repeatedly attempted to come to an agreement with the Soviet partisans operating in the Wilno and Nowogródek regions; the Soviet leadership had issued directives already in January 1943 aimed at the destruction of any independent Polish underground movement; the Soviet partisans carried out treacherous massacres of the Polish underground in Naliboki in May 1943 and Burzyński’s partisan unit in Narocz forest in August 1943 (neither of which Tec and like-minded authors care to mention); finally, Soviet partisans conducted incessant and brutal “economic” operations against the civilian population. Moreover, Tec’s position falsely assumes that the Soviets were prepared to share power in this area, but as Zygmunt Boradyn argues compellingly in his study Niemen–rzeka niezgody, which is based largely on Soviet archival documents, they were not. The charge, found in Soviet reports from this time, that the Polish underground was planning an assault on the Soviet partisans is patently false. See, for example, Markov’s report dated October 15, 1943, in Boradyn, ed., Armia Krajowa na Nowogródczyźnie i Wileńszczyźnie (1942–1943), 57.

276 Davies, Rising ’44, 626.

277 Sara Bender, “Life Stories as Testament and Memorial: The Short Life of the Neqama Battalion, an Independent Jewish Partisan Unit Operating During the Second World War in the Narocz Forest, Belarus,” East European Jewish Affairs, vol. 42, no. 1 (April 2012): 1–24, here at 10.

278 Ibid., 20 n.54.

279 Jewish Partisans in Belarus 1941–1944, Introduction by Jenni Buch, Internet: