Pioneers and Partisans
By Anika Walke (2015)
1. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, a small group of young Belorussians fled to the forests. As the invading Nazis and their local collaborators murdered more than 800,000 Belorussian Jews, these young partisans, now bereft of relatives, joined the Soviet partisan movement and created “family units” that fought the Nazis while also sheltering Jewish civilians. In interviews with the elderly survivors, Anika Walke reconstructs the history of the German occupation of what is today known as Belarus—the starvation, the mass shootings, the murders in the ghettos. After the war, the Soviet state refused to “divide the dead” by nationality. The uniquely horrific experience of the Jews was submerged in the general narrative of war losses. The Holocaust on Soviet soil is searingly detailed in this profound meditation on the pain of memory and erasure.
