Last revised august 30, 2004

, section 34 (Polish Underground).

377 Aviel, A Village Named Dowgalishok, 273–74.

378 Ibid., 279–85. See also Eliach, There Once Was a World, 649, for a somewhat different version which lacks important context.

379 Aviel, A Village Named Dowgalishok, 267, 268.

380 Ibid., 290.

381 Leib Reizer, In the Struggle: Memoirs from Grodno and the Forests (New York and Jerusalem: Yad Vashem and The Holocaust Survivors’ Memoirs Project, 2009).

382 Testimony of Lejb Rajzer, dated 1945, Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute (Warsaw), no. 301/555.

383 Reizer, In the Struggle, 38, 39.

384 Ibid., 123.

385 Ibid., 154–55.

386 According to another account, the unit was augmented by young Jews from Lida, Raduń, Wasiliszki, and other towns, until in numbered about eighty members, of whom more than 30 were from Grodno. The rest of Reizer’s group lived in a family camp numbering some 96 members; most of them were killed during a German raid on the Nacza forest in July 1943. The Leninski Komsomol partisans withdrew from the forest without losses to the Ruska forest. See Spector, Lost Jewish Worlds, 179.

387 Reizer, In the Struggle, 158.

388 Ibid., 158.

389 Testimony of Lejb Rajzer, dated 1945, Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute (Warsaw), no. 301/555.

390 Reizer, In the Struggle, 159–60, 162; testimony of Miriam Jaszuńska in Roszkowski, Żydzi w walce 1939–1945, vol. 4, 293.

391 Ibid., 164.

392 Ibid., 164.

393 Ibid., 167.

394 Arad, The Partisan, 160.

395 Boradyn, “Stosunki Armii Krajowej z partyzantką sowiecką na Nowogródczyźnie,” in Boradyn, ed., Armia Krajowa na Nowogródczyźnie i Wileńszczyźnie (1941–1945), 91. Lieutenant-Colonel Prawdzic-Szlaski lists some 158 military actions by the Home Army directed against the Germans, as opposed to 83 Home Army actions involving Soviet partisans. See Prawdzic-Szlaski, Nowogródczyzna w walce 1940–1945, 132–37. Overviews of military operations undertaken by the Polish underground in this region are impressive: Henryk Piskunowicz, “Działalność zbrojna Armii Krajowej na Wileńszczyźnie w latach 1942–1944,” in Boradyn, ed., Armia Krajowa na Nowogródczyźnie i Wileńszczyźnie (1941–1945), 7–70; Wołkonowski, Okręg Wileński Związku Walki Zbrojnej Armii Krajowej w latach 1939–1945, 154, 204, 212, 217–18, 220, 230, 240, 248, 252–53. A Wehrmacht report from April 26, 1944 counted 57 anti-German actions by Polish partisans between March 5 and April 21, 1944. The report considered the “disciplined and solidly trained” Polish units to constitute a “serious peril” and rated their potential much higher than that of the Soviet partisans. Ibid., 35; Litvin, Akuptsyia Belarusi (1941–1944), 152–53.

396 Silverman, From Victims to Victors, 254.

397 Piotrowski, Poland’s Holocaust, 85. Bronislav Kaminskii was born in Vitebsk, now in Belarus. Although he had a Polish father and a German mother, he considered himself a Russian. He enlisted in the Red Army in 1918 as a volunteer.

398 Silverman, From Victims to Victors, 113.

399 Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret: The Suppression of the Truth About Hitler’s “Final Solution” (Boston: Little/Brown, 1981), 106, 121, 200–201; Józef Lewandowski, “Gen. Sikorski a Zagłada,” Zeszyty Historyczne (Paris), no. 123 (1998): 226–33.

400 Guenter Lewy, The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide (Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2005), 148; based on Elizabeth F. Loftus and James M. Doyle, Eyewitness Testimony: Civil and Criminal, 3^rd edition (Charlottesville, Virginia: Lexis Publishing, 1997), 21–31.

401 Antony Polonsky, The Jews in Poland and Russia, Volume III: 1914 to 2008 (Oxford and Portland, Oregon: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2012), 467. Polonsky goes on to make the usual false charges the Home Army “undertook joint actions” with the Germans against the Soviet partisans.

402 Israel Gutman, “Uczmy się być razem,” Znak (Kraków), June 2000: 66. Gutman went on to accuse the Home Army of not accepting Jews into their ranks. This charge, however, in no way diminishes Jewish responsibility for taking part in crimes against Polish partisans and the civilian population. It is unfortunate that Gutman’s views are not known to Western historians, who continue to rely almost exclusively on Holocaust memoirs for their assessment of Polish-Jewish relations. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum also espouses an uncritical, and unscholarly, appraisal of the activities of Jewish partisans, stressing their singular heroism, to the exclusion of all else, and the vileness of their surroundings. According to Miles Lerman, the former chair of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council: “For some unexplainable reason, the Holocaust literature has failed to espouse sufficiently the heroic deeds of Jewish partisans. … The record must be set straight once and for all! This is the reason why the Holocaust Memorial Museum has decided to create the Center for the Study of Jewish Resistance. Our Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies is implementing special research projects, and is organizing scholarly symposiums to document and disseminate these findings throughout the world.” See “The Holocaust Museum: What Would You Have Done?” Miles Lerman Lecture, DePaul University, October 7, 1997.

403 Tec, Defiance, 151–53; Nechama Tec, In the Lion’s Den: The Life of Oswald Rufeisen (New York: Oxford University Press: 1990), 182–83.

404 Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation, Tuvia Bielski: Rescue is Resistance, Study Guide, 2008, Internet: