Far from the main theater of war, far from the Nazi death camps, far from the doomed heroism of the Warsaw Ghetto, there were the Jews of Minsk.
Surrounded by mud and barbed wire, the Minsk Ghetto played home to an unknown tale of Jewish courage during World War II. But if Berkeley historian Barbara Epstein has her way, it won’t remain unknown for long.
Epstein is the author of “The Minsk Ghetto 1941-1943: Jewish Resistance and Soviet Internationalism.” To research it, she traveled to the Belarusian capital numerous times, pouring over Communist Party and KGB archives. She also met with former members of the underground and survivors of the Minsk Ghetto.
They all had stories to tell.
“Until the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was difficult for Westerners to interview survivors,” Epstein says, “and very difficult to use the archives, partly because they didn’t want Westerners in the Communist Party offices, and also they were a mess. I had the luck to get to the archives while they were being organized.”
She pieced together a most counterintuitive story in the annals of Nazi persecution. Situated in an Eastern European backwater, Minsk had a few things going for it that aided the Jews.
For one, with POW camps nearby, the Nazis worried far more about those prisoners than they did the Jews. For another, by 1941, the German military was stretched thin in Soviet territory. The Minsk ghetto was circled with flimsy barbed wire rather than brick, and guards patrolled it spottily.
It proved a porous border. Though always in mortal danger, Jews slipped in and out to obtain food and medicine, and to join partisan units nearby.
Most importantly, the Jews of Minsk had a secret weapon: the non-Jews of Minsk. Like the Danes and Bulgarians, the local non-Jews felt duty bound to aid their imprisoned neighbors.
“Large circles of Byelorussians were willing to help,” Epstein says. “Young people tended to reject ethnic prejudices, in particular anti-Semitism. They were proud of having friends from all nationalities. They regarded it as a sign of their patriotism.”
In other words, they were good communists, true believers in a Marxist utopia. They didn’t need to be told to help the Jews.
“Anti-Semitism just didn’t have the teeth,” Epstein adds. “There are memos from German officers saying Byelorussia was the first place they were unable to stir up pogroms against the Jews. The people seemed to have the attitude that Jews were people like themselves.”
She cites the example of Riva Sherman, a Jew married to a Tatar. As the Nazis closed in, Sherman’s non-Jewish friend helped her get a passport identifying her as a Tatar. The Germans remained suspicious and brought in a string of non-Jews — her friends, actually — who could confirm Sherman’s Jewish identity. Without any prompting, all said they’d never seen this Tatar woman in their lives.
Epstein got the story from Sherman herself, still alive and kicking in Minsk.
Epstein, 64, first became aware of the Minsk Ghetto while attending a Yiddish immersion course in Lithuania. She had long been interested in tales of Jewish resistance, so the Minsk story intrigued her.
Why hasn’t it yet intrigued the world? Epstein has theories. For one, most survivors from Poland and other epicenters of the Holocaust immigrated to Israel or North America, where their stories could easily be told. Survivors of the Minsk Ghetto stayed in the Soviet Union, where until recently they had little freedom to speak out.
For another, politics. Some Soviets misunderstood the Minsk underground, believing it to be a German or anti-communist operation. Some Zionists turned up their noses because many of the Minsk operatives were indeed communists. “The establishments were happy that this communist-led underground was not big news,” laments Epstein. “The Jewish establishment was part of this.”
So Minsk remained mostly forgotten in heroic Holocaust lore.
A longtime Berkeley resident, Epstein is a history professor at U.C. Santa Cruz. Raised by left-leaning immigrant parents, the New York native spent two summers on Israeli kibbutzes connected to HaShomer HaTzair, an Israeli Marxist-Zionist youth movement. She was even a card-carrying communist for a time, before settling into her career as a historian and teacher.
“I grew up with stories of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising,” she says, adding that the Minsk Ghetto story “appealed to me in that this is the history of people working together across ethnic barriers. I was glad to find a story in which communists behaved well.”
“The Minsk Ghetto 1941-1943: Jewish Resistance and Soviet Internationalism” by Barbara Epstein ($39.95, University of California Press, 351 pages)