Drawing from engrossing survivors' accounts, many never before published, The Minsk Ghetto 1941-1943 recounts a heroic yet little-known chapter in Holocaust history. In vivid and moving detail, Barbara Epstein chronicles the history of a Communist-led resistance movement inside the Minsk ghetto, which, through its links to its Belarussian counterpart outside the ghetto and with help from others, enabled thousands of ghetto Jews to flee to the surrounding forests where they joined partisan units fighting the Germans. Telling a story that stands in stark contrast to what transpired across much of Eastern Europe, where Jews found few reliable allies in the face of the Nazi threat, this book captures the texture of life inside and outside the Minsk ghetto, evoking the harsh conditions, the life-threatening situations, and the friendships that helped many escape almost certain death. Epstein also explores how and why this resistance movement, unlike better known movements at places like Warsaw, Vilna, and Kovno, was able to rely on collaboration with those outside ghetto walls. She finds that an internationalist ethos fostered by two decades of Soviet rule, in addition to other factors, made this extraordinary story possible.

This extraordinary book is a collection of memories of tragedy, loss, bravery and heroism. It opens a window on the rarely told story of the Minsk Ghetto and the Holocaust in Belarus. These stories which recount the memories of child survivors are a testimony to the extraordinary power and resilience of the human spirit.

Zimmerman examines the attitude and behavior of the Polish Underground towards the Jews during the Holocaust.

Under the brutal conditions of the Dachau-Kaufering concentration camp, a handful of young Jews resolved to resist their Nazi oppressors. Their weapons were their words. During the Soviet occupation of Kovno and, after the German invasion, within the Kovno ghetto, the members of Irgun Brith Zion circulated an underground journal, Nitzotz (Spark). In its pages, they debated Zionist politics and laid plans for postwar settlement in Palestine. When the Kovno ghetto was liquidated, several contributors to Nitzotz were deported to the Kaufering satellite camps of Dachau. Against all odds, they did not lay down their pens. Nitzotz is the only Hebrew-language publication known to have appeared consistently throughout the Nazi occupation anywhere in Europe. Its authors believed that their intellectual defiance would insulate them against the dehumanizing cruelty of the concentration camp and equip them to lead the postwar effort for the physical and spiritual regeneration of European Jewry. Laura Weinrib presents this remarkable document to English readers for the first time. Along with a translation of the five remaining Dachau-Kaufering issues, the book includes an extensive critical introduction. Nitzotz is a testament to the resilience of those struggling for survival.

Drawing from engrossing survivors' accounts, many never before published, The Minsk Ghetto 1941-1943 recounts a heroic yet little-known chapter in Holocaust history. In vivid and moving detail, Barbara Epstein chronicles the history of a Communist-led resistance movement inside the Minsk ghetto, which, through its links to its Belarussian counterpart outside the ghetto and with help from others, enabled thousands of ghetto Jews to flee to the surrounding forests, where they joined partisan units fighting the Germans. Telling a story that stands in stark contrast to what transpired across much of Eastern Europe, where Jews found few reliable allies in the face of the Nazi threat, this book captures the texture of life inside and outside the Minsk ghetto, evoking the harsh conditions, the life-threatening situations, and the friendships that helped many escape almost certain death. Epstein also explores how and why this resistance movement, unlike better known movements at places like Warsaw, Vilna, and Kovno, was able to rely on collaboration with those outside ghetto walls. She finds that an internationalist ethos fostered by two decades of Soviet rule, in addition to other factors, made this extraordinary story possible

She was a young German Jew. He was an ardent member of the Hitler Youth. This is the story of their parallel journey through World War II. Helen Waterford and Alfons Heck were born just a few miles from each other in the German Rhineland. But their lives took radically different courses: Helen’s to the Auschwitz concentration camp; Alfons to a high rank in the Hitler Youth. While Helen was hiding in Amsterdam, Alfons was a fanatic believer in Hitler’s “master race.” While she was crammed in a cattle car bound for the death camp Auschwitz, he was a teenage commander of frontline troops, ready to fight and die for the glory of Hitler and the Fatherland. This book tells both of their stories, side-by-side, in an overwhelming account of the nightmare that was World War II. The riveting stories of these two remarkable people must stand as a powerful lesson to us all.

Smolar (b. 1905 in Poland) was in 1941-42 a leader of the Jewish underground resistance organization in the ghetto of Minsk, and later fought in a partisan unit in the Minsk area. His memoirs describe the first days of the war; the establishment of the ghetto in Minsk; the creation of the two underground organizations in the ghetto, one by refugees from Poland, the other - by native Jews, and their subsequent unification; Nazi mass murders of Jews in the ghetto in 1941-42; the flight of ghetto Jews to the forests in order to join the Soviet partisans; partisan warfare. Smolar, as well as other Jews who fought with the partisans, were shocked by the antisemitism of some their non-Jewish comrades in arms. Antisemitism became a habitual phenomenon in the postwar USSR.