ilians deemed non-threatening. These were the living conditions of the Lenin Ghetto, near Pinsk, in Brest Province in southern Belarus. There were a few thousand Jews in the ghetto until August 14, 1942, when the SS entered and murdered almost every single human being, including infants. Thirty people were spared to work in the ghetto as tailors and woodwrights, and they were guarded by an SS garrison of 100, plus 30 Aryan Belarusian policemen who also hated the Jews.
On 12 September 1942, the town was assaulted from the northeast by about 150 partisan soldiers, including the famous Bielski brothers, who killed thirty SS officers, soldiers, and police. They then broke through the wall, evacuated the 30 Jews remaining, and burned the ghetto to the ground before retreating into the surrounding woodland.
8 Zdzieciol Ghetto Partisans
Today, Zdzieciol is called Dzyatlava, just over the Polish border in Belarus. It was a small town of about 6,000 during WWII. The Nazis occupied it on June 30, 1941, and established the ghetto on February 22 of the next year. On July 23, 1941, all of the most respected, well-educated citizens of the town were assembled in the main square and were arrested without being charged with any crimes. The SS Einsatzkommandos took them away in trucks and told the citizens watching that they would be put to work in labor camps. Instead, they were all shot in a forest a few miles outside of town.
Once the ghetto was set up, eight people were forced to share living space in a single room without furniture except for collapsible cots. Anyone found smuggling food in from the city was immediately shot. Alter Dvoretsky, a local lawyer, organized a resistance group of about 60 people, who acquired guns and ammunition, and prepared to arm the ghetto residents in the event that it would be liquidated. These Partisan rebels cooperated with the Soviet Red Army in ambushing German patrols and stealing all weapon and food supplies from two dozen supply depots.
The SS decided that this activity was a result of ghetto residents escaping: They liquidated the ghetto on April 30, 1942, and again on August 6. In the first incident, 1,200 of the most able-bodied Jews were marched out of the city and shot, then thrown into mass graves. The second incident resulted in 2,000 to 3,000 being shot, but the Partisans were able to fight on and remain hidden in the forests for the rest of the war.
7 Czestochowa Ghetto Uprising
Czestochowa is a fairly large city in southern Poland and was one of the first cities to fall to the Germans after the Polish Army was defeated. Germany annexed it on September 3, 1939, two days after beginning WWII. The next day, the Wehrmacht, not the Waffen SS, committed one of their very few war crimes when they fired on unarmed civilians in two separate areas of the city, killing almost 600 men, women, and children. Soldiers who were involved have stated that this was not done because the victims were Jewish, but because the 42nd and 97th Wehrmacht Regiments were nervous and inexperienced. Many of the victims were non-Jewish.
On April 9, 1941, the ghetto was completed and 95 percent of the city’s Jews were forced in—about 45,000 total. The SS had taken over control of the city. On June 26, 1943, in the face of weekly deportations to Treblinka death camp and a supposed imminent liquidation, the 5,000 or so Jews inside the ghetto staged an urban firefight primarily along Nadrzeczna Street, where they took cover in makeshift bunkers and street-level basements. They were very poorly armed, with only one gun for every four people, and a few hundred Molotov cocktails, but those who weren’t armed at the outset hoped that they could strip weapons from dead Germans. They did so, and lasted an amazing five days, but the SS had no real difficulty in quelling them. Their leader, Mordechai Zylberberg, shot himself just before the SS stormed into his bunker. Around 1,500 Jews died fighting, 500 were executed immediately afterward (many of them by flamethrowers), and some 3,800 to 4,000 who had been unable to arm themsel