Hersh Smolar (1905–1993)

I profiled Hersh Smolar in a guest entry on the Executed Today blog.

What Marek Edelman's The Ghetto Fights was to the Warsaw Ghetto and Chaika Grossman's The Underground Army was to the Bialystok Ghetto, Hersh Smolar's book is to Minsk. Already in his mid-thirties by the time the war began, he was one of the principal leaders of the Jewish resistance in Minsk. This resistance movement has been unjustly neglected and it was really quite substantial, focusing not only on fighting the Nazis but show more also rescuing Jewish noncombatants such as children, old people, etc. Some 10,000 Minsk Jews were able to escape the ghetto into the nearby forests.

Smolar isn't writing about himself, but rather the movement in general, in a matter-of-fact tone with no flourishes. He concludes the book with some troubling stories about post-war Soviet anti-Semitism; even in the forests, anti-Semetic partisans sometimes shot their fellow Jewish fighters for no reason.

This might be good to read alongside books on the Bielski partisan group, which was also from Belarus; the Bielskis are mentioned in passing in Smolar's account. show less