Bielski partisans

The Bielski partisans were an organization of Jewish partisans who rescued Jews from extermination and fought against the Nazi German occupiers and their collaborators in the vicinity of Nowogródek (Navahrudak) and Lida in German-occupied Poland (now western Belarus). They are named after the Bielskis, a family of Polish Jews who led the organization.

Under their protection, 1,236 Jews survived the war, making it one of many remarkable rescue missions in the Holocaust. The group spent more than two years living in the forests and was initially organised by members of the Bielski family.

The Bielski family were millers and grocers in Stankiewicze (Stankievichy) near Nowogródek, an area that at the beginning of the Second World War belonged to the Second Polish Republic and was occupied by the Soviet Union in September 1939 (cf. Polish September Campaign and Soviet invasion of Poland (1939)) in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union.

The Bielski family served as low-level administrators in the new government set up by the Soviets which strained their relations with the local Poles, to whom the Soviet Union was an occupier. During Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union that began on 22 June 1941, Nowogródek became a Jewish ghetto, as Nazis took over those lands and implemented their genocidal policies (see Holocaust in Poland and Holocaust in Belarus).

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