But the film has provoked controversy over whether the Bielski brothers, who helped more than 1,200 Jews to escape from the ghettoes, were courageous heroes or ruthless killers who, fighting alongside Soviet partisans, committed atrocities against ethnic Poles.
KAGAN, Jack (#311)
#311
Mr. Jack KAGAN BEM
Resistance
1929 - 2016
“one of the last to get out before the tunnel was discovered, he survived as one of 30,000 Jews who fought the Nazis in the forests”
Jack Kagan with a fellow partisan after the war
One of 30,000 Jews who fought the Nazis in the forests of Eastern Europe, a Holocaust writer and educator. As a boy, twice escaped from a labour camp in Nowogrodek in Belarus and joined the Bielski partisans, whose story was told in the film Defiance. He marched, as he said, “not on his broken and bleeding feet but on the strength of his spirit.”
“Jack was 14 years old when in September 1943 he found himself in a labour camp in Nowogrodek, Poland. Jack decided to join a group of Jews who planned to escape from the camp through a dug-out tunnel and meet up with local partisans. On the day of the escape Jack was one of 200 who fled the camp, but as he crossed a frozen river the ice broke and his boots were drenched with frozen water. Although he was eventually able to get out, he missed his rendezvous with the partisans. Jack came across a small farm house, but the lady living there was too frightened to give him shelter. With options running out Jack made his way back Nowogrodek and sneaked into the camp on a horse-drawn cart. There he found that his toes had become black with frost bite so a dentist amputated his toes with a scalpel. As Jack lay recovering, those remaining in the camp began digging a new tunnel through which to escape. Once the tunnel was completed Jack was one of the last to get out before the tunnel was discovered, but this time he did manage to meet with the partisans and joined the Bielski brothers. Jack survived the war as one of the 30,000 Jews who fought the Nazis in the forests of Eastern Europe.”
Surviving The Holocaust With The Russian Jewish Partisans by Jack Kagan and Dov Cohen
with a Foreword by Sir Martin Gilbert
We Stood Shoulder to Shoulder: Jewish Partisans in Byelorussia 1941-1944 (2010)
by Jack Kagan, Inna Gerasimova and Viacheslav Selemenev with a foreword by Sir Martin Gilbert
Storm before the Silence – in Memory of Jack Kagan
By Michael Kagan
‘My father – Jack Kagan (Yehuda ben Yaacov v’Devorah from the town of Navahredok) passed away on Sunday December 18th 2016 in London at 7:30am…the man who had escaped from the work camp into the forests during the coldest winter imaginable; a winter that destroyed the German 6th army at Stalingrad, and a winter that all but destroyed European Jewry. He was 13 years old and he knew that if he didn’t make the rendezvous with the partisans he would die a silent death amongst the white frozen trees. The group of nine reached a frozen river.
‘The first tested the ice, it held, and crossed. The second followed; the third; fourth; until it was my father’s turn. Was he heavier than the others? Difficult to believe. Was he heavier footed than the others? Also difficult to believe. So how is it that when he began his crossing, the ice cracked and he found himself up to his knees in freezing water? They pulled him out and kept walking. But the water had flowed into his boots, boots that someone had given him as a parting gift, boots that were lined with wool to keep him warm, boots that would help him survive.
‘Taking his boots off and tipping out the water was not possible since the wool had become saturated like a sponge, and as they plunged deeper into the forest the heavy water began to freeze encasing his feet in blocks of ice. They reached the cabin; there were no partisans. Had they missed the rendezvous? Had their contact been ambushed? Or was it just too cold to go wandering around that endless, ageless forests looking for a bunch of Jews?
‘I remember as a boy, when I complained to my father that it was cold, he would laugh and answer: “Cold? You have no idea what cold is. When I was…” And when we would go skiing and be stuck on a halted ski lift somewhere over the Alps, he would inevitably say: “When I was in the forest that winter, it was so cold that the sap would freeze and the trees would split in half with the sound of an artillery shell being fired.”
‘Lying in that hut, trying to keep warm, his feet without feeling, he realized that he would not be able to make it further. He decided to go back to the camp. How does one make decisions like that: to go on would be certain death, to return would be uncertain death?
‘As my father would always say, shrugging his shoulders and smiling his infectious smile: “Life is precious.” So he said his farewells and began the journey back; back to his father and mother and sister, who were still there working their daily shift on almost zero rations, trying to believe that somehow they would survive in spite of all the evidence around them that seemed to contradict that belief. Jack crawled the last part, his legs no longer able to support him, and lay in wait near the gate for a sign, a plan, a hope.
‘At the end of the day a band of brothers returned from work somewhere outside the camp. He somehow made a signal and somehow he was spotted and somehow he was surrounded and somehow he was dragged through the gates and somehow he wasn’t caught. Somehow.
‘The boots were sacrificed and cut off him revealing blackened toes – gangrene had already set in. The dentist – this was a death camp not a hospital – was called and with him came his few instruments. They plied my father with home-made vodka until he was barely conscious and then cut off his toes with pliers. And until the day he died he was toeless.
‘…When, many years later, his granddaughter – my daughter – asked what had happened to his toes, he answered: “They just went for a walk.”
‘…So what’s so special about the 18th of Kislev? It is the defining date marking the end of 500 years of Jewish life in Navahredok, Dad’s town. It is the day in 1941 that the big slaughter of the Jews took place. 5100 Jews were taken into the forest, made to undress in the freezing cold, run across a trench and machine-gunned to death. On that date every year, the remnants of the town gather in Tel Aviv and grieve and remember what once was. That was the day my father chose to die.
‘Reb Nachman says (Torat 67) that when it comes time for a Tzaddik to die, his upper soul descends into the body to pull out the lower soul that doesn’t want to leave this world of mitzvot, of good deeds. When the upper soul enters the body it causes a sudden boost in energy making it appear from the outside as if the person is more vital and getting better. But it’s not; it’s an illusion. It’s just the storm before the silence.
May my father, the Tzaddik, rest in peace – he deserves it. This is a poem that I read at the funeral:
Thanks to my Feet*
Thank you my feet*
– frozen,
bloody,
rotting.
You kept creeping,
and crawling.
You saved me from certain death.
For me, the ice broke,
Not like at a party,
But like at a funeral,
My funeral.
For me, the waters did not part
To let me walk through,
But poured in and cleaved
To my body and soul.
My poor feet,
All ten toes gone,
Each one cut off
In its prime.
One little toe for Mummy,
One little toe for Daddy,
One little toe for Sis,
And the rest for the all rest.
I am orphaned.
My toes are gone.
I walk in this world Toeless, but I walk.
Toeless I run,
For I am alive,
And now my feet
Have sprouted new life.
One little toe for Michael,
One little toe for Jeff,
One little toe for Deb,
And the rest for the all rest.
(*This first stanza, originally in Yiddish, is from an essay by Jack (Idel) Kagan that appeared in the Pinkas Navahredok entitled “How I Survived”.Dr. Michael Kagan, April 16th 2015)
Jack Kagan: Hidden Histories
Jack Kagan talks about the Magen David from Novogrodek’s synagogue, all that is left from a once thriving Jewish culture in the town.
‘Defiance’
A film ‘based on Nechama Tec‘s 1993 book Defiance: The Bielski Partisans, an account of the Bielski partisans, a group led by Polish Jewish brothers who saved and recruited Jews in Belarus during the Second World War, and who carried out the largest armed rescue of Jews by their own people during the war. Trailer:
Bielski brothers were heroes, says survivor
Daniel Craig’s latest film Defiance tells the powerful story of three Jewish brothers who fled the Nazi occupation of their Polish town, set up a partisans’ camp in dense forest and fought back.
Now Jack Kagan, who as a 14-year-old boy escaped from his prison camp to join the fighters in the forest, has spoken out in defence of the three brothers – Tuvia, played by Craig, Zus (Liev Schreiber) and Asael (Jamie Bell) – who carried out the largest armed rescue of Jews by their own people during the war.
Mr Kagan, 79, who attended the premiere of the film which opened on Friday, said in an exclusive interview with The Sunday Telegraph: “The brothers were heroes. They saved my life and so many others. Without them we would all have been killed.
“They were much more concerned with saving Jews than with killing Nazis. They did not kill innocent people,” Mr Kagan said at his home in Hampstead, northwest London, where he lives with his 77-year-old wife Barbara.
“They killed collaborators who had betrayed the Jews to the Nazis, and any Nazis who threatened their community.
“It was war and they were protecting their people who had seen thousands of Jews, including their own families, murdered by the Nazis.”
Mr Kagan, who moved to Britain in 1947, said the killings acted as a deterrent to others “who thought of selling Jewish lives to the Germans for a sack of potatoes”.
He rejected an accusation that the Bielski detachment was involved in a massacre of Polish anti-Nazi resistance fighters by pro-Soviet partisans at Naliboki forest in eastern Poland on May 8, 1943, claiming that the Bielskis were stationed 37 miles (60km) from the area at that time.
Mr Kagan, who speaks good English with a strong Polish accent, says the film, directed by Ed Zwick and based on a book by Nechama Tec, captures the brothers’ characters accurately.
“When I closed my eyes and listened I could tell which brother was talking,” he said. “It took me back all those years and the memories came flooding back.
“There was a great camaraderie at the camp. We were unhappy because so many members of our families, including my mother and sister, had been massacred. But we were happy because we were free and we were fighting back.”
Mr Kagan, an active member of the 45 Aid society for concentration camp survivors, said the camp was “a special place”.
He remembers vividly the day he and his 21-year-old friend Pesch arrived after escaping from the labour camp and trekking through the forest for five days.
Every step was agony. Jack had lost all his toes to frostbite and gangrene following an earlier failed escape attempt. His toes were amputated by a dentist using pliers.
The pain was forgotten when he saw two of the Bielski brothers and a dozen other Jewish partisans in a reconnaissance group. “They were on tall horses and carrying machine guns,” he says. “It was an amazing sight.
“I had come from a camp where thousands of Jewish people were being killed by the Germans. And now there were all these fighters, with guns. I felt very proud.”
The partisans, who at their height numbered several hundred fighters and 1,200 people in the separate “family camp”, rode out to farms to take clothes, crops, cows, horses and pigs from farmers to feed the refugees.
The brothers, strapping farmers aged 35, 33 and 29, moved the camp several times to stay one step ahead of the Germans. They ended up in Naliboki forest where they created a settlement with a bakery, tannery, infirmary, workshops for carpenters, tailors and shoemakers and even a small theatre.
As a disabled 14-year-old, Jack was unable to join the fighters. Instead he moved to the family camp and spent his days carrying wood, cleaning, making boot nails and washing the clothes of his 20 year-old cousin Berl, who was one of the fighters.
Jack slept in a hut camouflaged with vegetation. He ate bread, soup and whatever food the partisans brought back from their farm raids, and took a fortnightly bath at the camp’s bathhouse.
It was a long way from the comfortable middle-class upbringing he had enjoyed, with his parents and a sister in the eastern Polish – now Byelorussian – town of Novogrudek. His father and uncle ran a successful business making saddles and sandals, and the family lived in a four-bedroom detached wooden house.
The idyll ended in 1939, two years before the Nazis arrived, when Jack was 10. The Russians came to town first. They closed the synagogues, sent the richest Jews to Siberia and shut down the Kagans’ business because it was a private enterprise, anathema to Communists.
But much worse was to come. War broke out on June 22, 1941, and six days later the Luftwaffe bombed Novogrudek. Jack’s home was destroyed and he and his family, along with many others, were given refuge in the few houses still standing.
On July 4, the Nazis marched in and began a reign of terror in which thousands of Jews were massacred. On July 26, German soldiers gunned down 52 Jews in the marketplace. “A Nazi orchestra played Strauss music as the executions were carried out,” Mr Kagan recalls.
In December, more than 5,000 Jews were taken to pits outside the town and executed. Jack’s immediate family was spared and were moved into a labour camp in the town in August 1942, where they were forced to make saddles for the Nazis. Jack had to carry huge piles of wood and bags of grain.
By now, stories had begun to reach the labour camp of partisan gangs, including the Bielski brothers, roaming around the forests, fighting with the Germans and offering shelter to Jews who had escaped from the Nazis.
Jack’s father was sent to a concentration camp and his mother and sister were shot by the Germans in May 1943. “I was unable to work and I thought I would be next,” he said. The prisoners drew up an escape plan and dug a 250-metre tunnel – complete with lighting, wooden supports and trolleys – from their cramped quarters, under the barbed wire to the edge of the forest.
Jack finally escaped on Sep 26, 1943, after the prisoners dug a 250-yard tunnel. They cut off the Germans’ searchlight to give the 232 Jews extra cover, but the darkness disoriented some of the escapers, who ran into Nazi guards, and 70 were shot dead.
To avoid the Germans, Jack took a circuitous route. It was an arduous five-day journey, covering 40km, and he was in constant pain.
Jack and Pesch survived on bread and water from friendly farmers. They reached the home of a non-Jewish man who had helped Berl to find the Bielski brothers, only to find that it had been burned down by the Nazis and that he and his wife had been thrown onto the flames.
Just when their hopes were beginning to fade they recognised a former neighbour who had joined the partisans, driving a horse and cart. They were on their way to the Bielski camp. And freedom.
El Malei Rachamim
אֵל מָלֵא רַחֲמִים שׁוֹכֵן בַּמְּרוֹמִים, הַמְצֵא מְנוּחָה נְכוֹנָה עַל כַּנְפֵי הַשְּׁכִינָה, בְּמַעֲלוֹת קְדוֹשִׁים וטְהוֹרִים כְּזוֹהַר הָרָקִיע מַזְהִירִים אֶת כָּל הַנְּשָׁמוֹת שֶׁל שֵׁשֶׁת מִילְיוֹנֵי הַיְּהוּדִים, חַלְלֵי הַשּׁוֹאָה בְּאֵירוֹפָּה, שֶׁנֶּהֶרְגוּ, שֶׁנִּשְׁחֲטוּ, שֶׁנִּשְׂרְפוּ וְשֶׁנִּסְפּוּ עַל קִדּוּשׁ הַשֵׁם, בִּידֵי הַמְרַצְּחִים הַגֶּרְמָנִים הָנַאצִים וְעוֹזְרֵיהֶם מִשְּׁאָר הֶעַמִּים. לָכֵן בַּעַל הָרַחֲמִים יַסְתִּירֵם בְּסֵתֶר כְּנָפָיו לְעוֹלָמִים, וְיִצְרוֹר בִּצְרוֹר הַחַיִּים אֶת נִשְׁמוֹתֵיהֶם, ה’ הוּא נַחֲלָתָם, בְּגַן עֵדֶן תְּהֵא מְנוּחָתָם, וְיַעֶמְדוּ לְגוֹרָלָם לְקֵץ הַיָּמִין, וְנֹאמַר אָמֵן.
God, full of mercy, who dwells in the heights, provide a sure rest upon the Divine Presence’s wings, within the range of the holy and the pure, whose shining resemble the sky’s, all the souls of the six million Jews, victims of the European Holocaust, who were murdered, slaughtered, burnt and exterminated for the Sanctification of the Name, by the German Nazi assassins and their helpers from the rest of the peoples. Therefore, the Master of Mercy will protect them forever, from behind the hiding of his wings, and will tie their souls with the rope of life. The Everlasting is their heritage, the Garden of Eden shall be their resting room, and they shall rest peacefully upon their lying place, they will stand for their fate in the end of days, and let us say: Amen
“El Malei Rachamim” (Hebrew: אֵל מָלֵא רַחֲמִים, lit. “God full of Mercy” or “Merciful God”), is a Jewish prayer for the soul of a person who has died, usually recited at the graveside during the burial service and at memorial services during the year.)