Last revised august 30, 2004

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According to a 1996 interview with Rubin Segal, then a member of the Stalin Brigade known as Boris Segalowicz, found in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives,

When he joined the group, there were about 85–90 men, 40 of whom were Jewish. The commander was a Jew from Minsk. … One time they ambushed a town called Naliboki. The commander called all the Jews in the group and told them to do the best they could when they went to fight because if they did well, they might be able to get more Jews to join the partisans. The Jews entered the town first and began fighting the Germans. The other partisans did not join the fight because they got a report that a lot of Germans were coming from Naliboki. The other partisans left but the Jews continued to fight. All but two of them were killed. The two who survived were taken captive. The two men who were captured alive were cut to pieces by the Germans. Boris, Josh [Starkman] and seven other Jews were lucky to be alive because they had stayed behind in camp during the mission because they had all been bitten by a lot of mosquitoes.

157 According to Kazimierz Krajewski, the foremost authority on the topic, a self-defence group was created in Naliboki in August 1942, at the urging of the Germans, in the wake of a nearby assault on German troops by Soviet partisans, to avoid a threatened “pacification” of this small town by the Germans. After the Belorussian police outpost was closed, the townspeople were given a small quantity of rifles (around 22) and told to guard the town against marauding bands and to ensure the delivery of food quotas imposed on the farmers. The self-defence group did not engage in armed confrontations with the regular Soviet partisans. In March and April of 1943, Major Rafail Vasilevich, a Soviet partisan commander, met with Eugeniusz Klimowicz, the leader of the self-defence unit and clandestine Home Army commander. The Soviets began to exert pressure on the Poles to leave their posts and join the Soviet partisans in the forest, but did not sway Klimowicz. Both sides reached a non-aggression agreement whereby the town and the surrounding settlements were to remain under Polish control. When the self-defence group was summoned to the nearby village of Nieścierowicze to fend off marauders, two of its members were wounded. The local Soviet command did not question the validity of such interventions. (The Soviets also ordered the Bielski group to take food only from specified villages—see Duffy, the Bielski Brothers, 112, 166.) For a somewhat different version of the history of the self-defence group see Klimowicz, The Last Day of Naliboki, 198–212. However, the morning of May 8, 1943, a surprise attack on Naliboki was launched by the Stalin Brigade, under the command of Major Vasilevich, with the participation of the Bielski detachment. The Soviets murdered some 130 people, including three women, a teenage boy and 10-year-old child. Most of the victims were actual or presumed members of the self-defence group who were targeted for execution. The town was pilfered and a large part of it, including the church, school, and municipal buildings, was burned to the ground. The townspeople were accused of collaboration with the Germans because, during the assault, a visiting Belorussian policeman had fired a shot at a Soviet commissar. See Krajewski, Na Ziemi Nowogródzkiej, 387–88. See also Komisja Historyczna Polskiego Sztabu Głównego w Londynie, Polskie Siły Zbrojne w drugiej wojnie światowej, vol. 3: Armia Krajowa, 529; Polskie Siły Zbrojne, Armia Krajowa, Drogi cichociemnych: Opowiadania zebrane i opracowane przez Koło Spadochroniarzy Armii Krajowej (London: Veritas, 1954), 133, translated into English as Poland, Home Army, The Unseen and Silent: Adventures from the Underground Movement Narrated by Paratroops of the Polish Home Army (London: Sheed and Ward, 1954), 144; Antoni Bogusławski’s afterword in Łopalewski, Między Niemnem a Dźwiną, 245; Pilch, Partyzanci trzech puszczy, 135; Wacław Nowicki, Żywe echa (Komorów: Antyk, 1993), passim; Wacław Nowicki, “W imię prawdy o żołnierzach AK: List otwarty do prof. A. Hackiewicza,” Słowo–Dziennik Katolicki, August 11, 1993; Zygmunt Boradyn, “Rozbrojenie,” Karta, no. 16 (1995): 127; Piotrowski, Poland’s Holocaust, 102; Boradyn, Niemen–rzeka niezgody, 100–101; Chodakiewicz, Tajne oblicze GL-AL i PPR, vol. 3, 251, 253; Gasztold, “Sowietyzacja i rusyfikacja Wileńszczyzny i Nowogródczyzny w działalności partyzantki sowieckiej w latach 1941–1944,” in Sudoł, Sowietyzacja Kresów Wschodnich II Rzeczypospolitej po 17 września 1939, 277–78, 281–82; Boradyn, Niemen–rzeka niezgody, 100–101; Chodakiewicz, Żydzi i Polacy 1918–1955, 328; Leszek Żebrowski, “Naliboki,” in Encyklopedia “Białych Plam” (Radom: Polskie Wydawnictwo Encyklopedyczne, 2003), vol. 12: 264–69.

158 Musial, Sowjetische Partisanen in Weißrußland, 191. Even though Shimanovich was from the area, he got lost and the partisans arrived late, for which he was reprimanded by the partisan command. Some Jewish members of the Stalin Brigade belonged to Zorin’s partisan unit.

159 Interview with Rubin Segal, 1996, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives. A Polish resident of Naliboki states that a Jewish woman from the Soviet Union was among the attackers. See Klimowicz, The Last Day of Naliboki, 214, 217.

160 Entries for some of these partisans can be found in the website of the Partisans, Ghetto Fighters and Jewish Undergrounds in Israel, Internet: < http://www.partisans.org.il>. See also “Partisans of the Bielski Detachment,” which lists 1190 partisans by name (in the author’s possession).

161 For information on the Pobeda detachment of the Lenin Brigade see Musial, Sowjetische Partisanen in Weißrußland, 63–64.

162 Cited in Piotr Zychowicz, “Bohater w cieniu zbrodni,” Rzeczpospolita (Warsaw), June 16, 2007. Wacław Nowicki also recalled how, in February 1940, local Jews assisted the NKVD in identifying former state officials and military people among the Polish residents for deportation to the Gulag. The assault on Antoni Korżenko is noted in a Soviet report. See Musial, Sowjetische Partisanen in Weißrußland, 201.

163 Nowicki, Żywe echa, 98, 100.

164 Cited in Piotr Zychowicz, “Bohater w cieniu zbrodni,” Rzeczpospolita (Warsaw), June 16, 2007.

165 Correspondence from Maria Chilicka, dated March 3, 2004 and February 6, 2005 (in the author’s possession). The reference to women partisans undoubtedly refers to Jewish women since there were very few non-Jewish women in the Soviet partisan movement in this area.

166 Vasilii Chernyshev (or Chernyshov), a Communist Party apparatchik, was nominated the leader of the Soviet partisans in the Baranowicze district by General Panteleimon Ponomarenko, the first secretary of the Communist Party of Belorussia and later chief of general staff of the partisan movement in Western Belarus. Neither Chernyshev nor Ponomarenko had a military background prior to their appointments to those positions. Chernyshov adopted the nom de guerre of Major General Platon, a military rank he never actually held.

167 This report from May 10, 1943 is reproduced, in Polish translation, in Gasztold, “Sowietyzacja i rusyfikacja Wileńszczyzny i Nowogródczyzny w działalności partyzantki sowieckiej w latach 1941–1944,” in Sudoł, Sowietyzacja Kresów Wschodnich II Rzeczypospolitej po 17 września 1939, 281–82. See also Boradyn, Niemen–rzeka niezgody, 88. The local Home Army commander, Eugeniusz Klimowicz, was charged with various crimes in Stalinist Poland directed at “Fascist-Nazi criminals,” among them with the murder of Soviet partisans. He was brought to trial before a military tribunal in Warsaw in October 1951 and sentenced to death. His death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. In 1957, after the death of Stalin, his conviction was overturned and the proceeding against him was eventually discontinued for lack of evidence. Klimowicz described the events leading up to the pacification of Naliboki in a petition for clemency, dated May 30, 1956, forwarded to the head of the Supreme Military Tribunal. See letter to: Ob. Prezesa Najwyższego Sądu Wojskowego w Warszawie, sygnatura Akt Sr 749/51. In his petition, Klimowicz mentions that Jews detained in Naliboki were all released unharmed after brief interrogations, including one Chaja Szymonowicz, who had denounced Klimowicz during the Soviet occupation. The reality was that any Polish partisan suspected of conspiring against or engaging in armed confrontation with Soviet partisans during the German occupation was branded a Nazi collaborator in the postwar Stalinist period and libel to put on trial and sentenced to death or a long term of imprisonment for that reason alone. See, for example, Borodziewicz, Szósta Wileńska Brygada AK, 104 n.7, 194 n.6, 200, 260.

Klimowicz’s testimony about the conduct of some local Jews during that period is borne out by other witnesses. A rabble of pro-Soviet Jews and Belorussians came to arrest the Catholic pastor of Naliboki, Rev. Józef Bajko, in September 1939, intending either to hand him over to the Soviet authorities or to possibly lynch him (as had been done in other localities). A large gathering of parishioners foiled these plans, allowing Rev. Bajko to escape before the arrival of the NKVD. See Wierzbicki, Polacy i Białorusini w zaborze sowieckim, 115. When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, reportedly an unnamed priest, who allegedly was known as a notorious anti-Semite, intervened on behalf of Jews in Naliboki who were beset by local bands. See Cholawsky, The Jews of Bielorussia during World War II, 272. Rev. Bajko assisted Jews in other ways during the German occupation and he and his vicar, Rev. Józef Baradyn, were locked in a barn and burned alive in August 1943 on suspicion of helping Jews and partisans. See Wacław Zajączkowski, Martyrs of Charity, Part One (Washington, D.C.: St. Maximilian Kolbe Foundation, 1987), Entry 378.

168 Boradyn, Niemen–rzeka niezgody, 89.

169 The Naliboki massacre is under investigation by the Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation of the Institute of National Remembrance. Anna Gałkiewicz, the prosecutor heading the investigation in the Regional Commission in Łódź, issued summary reports of the investigation on September 5, 2002 and May 15, 2003, titled respectively, “Śledztwo w sprawie zbrodni popełnionych przez partyzantów radzieckich na żołnierzach Armii Krajowej i ludności cywilnej na terenie powiatów Stołpce i Wołożyn” and “Omówienie dotychczasowych ustaleń w śledztwach w sprawach o zbrodnie w Nalibokach i Koniuchach.” These reports are posted online at