 were murdered. The brothers escaped into the thick forests nearby. The SS continued separating people from their families, causing survivors to flee into the woods, where they found the Bielskis, who welcomed all Jewish refugees. They even began making night-time forays into towns and farms for food and ambushing German patrols for arms.
Their membership swelled to 1,236 by the war’s end. Their mission of upsetting the Nazi war effort as much as they could succeeded well enough that by 1943, the SS placed a 100,000 Reichsmark bounty of Tuvia Bielski’s head. By late 1943, the Soviets had reached the area and the partisans joined them. They claimed to have killed 381 Nazis or Wehrmacht soldiers by 1944.
4 The Syrets Concentration Camp Revolt
The Nazis installed a camp in Syrets, the western suburb of Kiev, in June 1942. It was one of the first built so far east of Germany or Poland, and its purpose was to force its Jewish prisoners to clean up all evidence of the Babi Yar massacre. There were about 3,000 Jewish prisoners in the camp at any time, and they were forced to bury or burn the naked bodies of their own family members in large pits. Fifteen people starved to death per day—25,000 died in the camp by the time the Nazis dismantled it over a year later. The ashes of the massacre victims were scattered on fallow fields across the area, and the prisoners were forced to live in shallow dugouts without beds. Anyone who refused to carry out the grave detail was immediately murdered by gunshot or mobile gas truck. Commandant Otto Radomski even had some prisoners skinned in front of the other Jews to terrify them.
This continued until September 29, 1943, when the 326 prisoners managed to pick the locks of their chains with keys they had scavenged from the dead. The prisoners were so ill-treated that they were suffering from scabies and aggressive necrosis all over their bodies, but still found the strength to wrestle their SS guards to the ground and stab them to death, gouge their eyes out, and strangle them with their bare-hands. Fifteen Jews escaped into the woods and survived to testify against Paul Blobel, the perpetrator of the Babi Yar massacre. The rest were executed.
3 The Auschwitz Sonderkommando Revolt
Auschwitz was the largest and most infamous of the Nazis’ concentration camps. It became operational on May 20, 1940 and remained so until January 27, 1945, when the Soviets liberated it. Over one million people were murdered in the three camps, about 90 percent of them Jewish.
“Sonderkommando” was a special unite comprised of Jewish prisoners selected at random upon arrival at the camp. They were tasked with policing the corpses, clothing, and valuables to and from the gas chambers and crematoria, and though their job was horrible, they were rewarded with more food and better working conditions. On the morning of October 7, the Sonderkommandos suddenly attacked every single SS guard in and around the gas chambers and crematoria. There were two gas chambers and four crematoria, about 275 meters (300 yds) apart at the north end of Camp II. The Sonderkommandos totaled 451, vastly outnumbering the SS—but the SS were much better armed.
However, these well-fed rebels proved very formidable adversaries and quickly killed several dozen guards with axes and knives, shoved two of them alive into the ovens, then stripped them of their weapons and opened fire on all SS personnel responding to the commotion. Over 70 Nazis were killed. Then the Jews flung the gunpowder satchel into an oven and blew up Crematorium IV. About one dozen men escaped the camp but were recaptured. All remaining Sonderkommandos, whether they had a part to play in the revolt or not, were executed.
2 The Bialystok Ghetto Uprising
Bialystok is the largest city in northeastern Poland, not far from the Belarusian border, and the ghetto contained about 50,000 Jews from late July 1941 until the final liquidation and their deportations to concentration and death camps. When taking over the city one month earlier, the Nazis locked close to 1,000 Jews in the Grea