Bielski Tuvia
- טוביה בילסקי
- Tuvia Bielski
History
Tuvia Bielski - Jewish partisan commander.
Was born in 1906, in Stankiewicze, to family of farmers. At the age of seventeen he joined the Zionist pioneering movement, and in 1928 he was mobilized into the Polish army. He married and settled in the village of Subotnik where he opened a textile store. In September 1939 the area was annexed to the Soviet Union. With the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, Bielski was mobilized. When the Germans invaded the region he fled to the forest, and from there to his village of birth. After his parents and other members of their family were slaughtered, Bielski and his brothers escaped to the forests. they created a partisan core there, consisting mostly of members of Bielski's family.Hundreds of the surviving Jews in the ghettos of the Novogrudok region streamed into Bielski's camp. His band inspired terror in the Novogrudok region as it took vengeance on the Belorussian police and on the farmers who massacred Jews. The German authorities offered a reward for assistance in capturing him.With the creation of the band of Jewish partisans in the Naliboki Forest, Bielski won the trust of the Soviet partisan unit in the vicinity, and he made his camp a maintenance base for the Soviet fighters. His group was a Jewish community in the forest, with a synagogue, workshops, a school.
In the summer of 1943, the Germans initiated a massive hunt through the Naliboki Forest in order to destroy the partisan forces and Bielski retreated to the thickest part of the forest with his entire band. In the summer of 1944, the area was liberated and Bielski then immigrated to Palestine with his two surviving brothers and in 1954 he settled in the United States.
Sources
Encyclopedia of the Holocaust / ed. I. Gutman. - New York : Macmillan, 1990. - Vol. 1, p. 215-216
Cataloguing system of the Yad Vashem (Jerusalem/Israel) http://www.yadvashem.org