A Soviet Narrative of Jewish Resistance? Review of Hersh Smolar Jews Without Yellow Stars: Stories of Jewish Partisan Fighters in Nazi-occupied Belarus

Ruth Murphy’s bilingual English-Yiddish translation of Hersh Smolar’s Jews Without Yellow Stars beautifully presents the Yiddish writer’s vivid portrayals of daily life and resistance in partisan camps in the Belarussian forests during the Holocaust. Murphy’s translation stands out from the very first pages as an extraordinarily skillful rendering of Smolar’s colorful language—noticeable even to readers like myself, whose proficiency in Yiddish is insufficient to fully grasp the original text.

Written at a time when Smolar regarded Soviet communism as a solution to the “Jewish problem,” as he put it in his 1979 interview with Claude Lanzmann, ^{1 1} Interview with Hersh Smolar, created by Claude Lanzmann during the filming of “Shoah”, Tel Aviv, 1979. USHMM oral history collection, RG-60.5038, transcript page 56. his short sketches of partisan life in the forests present to a large extent a Soviet narrative of Jewish resistance: they delve into interethnic camaraderie among anti-fascist fighters, notions of heroism and vengeance, the punishment of suspected spies and collaborators, partisans’ military operations, and the everyday functioning of a partisan society within a “domesticated” forest space that offered refuge for resisters from the Minsk ghetto. Nearly every story is accompanied by well-researched historical notes that do more than provide background. They interweave with the narrative and ground the author’s literary rendering of the partisan movement within a historical timeline, allowing often overlooked or forgotten individuals of the Jewish antifascist resistance in the Soviet Union to reemerge.

To fully grasp what Smolar’s prose conveys about Jewish resistance in Soviet partisan units, one must consider his complex biographical trajectory: that of a Communist revolutionary, resistance fighter, Yiddish writer, and eventual target of the Soviet antisemitic campaign of the late 1960s. The fate of Hersh Smolar followed the fate of Yiddish, and Jews, under Communism. For most of his life, Hersh Smolar’s biography reads as the story of a Soviet Jew and a communist hero—someone who lived through the Bolshevik Revolution and the civil war, whose communist activities in interwar Poland led to several years of imprisonment, and who was ultimately honored with Soviet war decorations for his role in the resistance during the Second World War. In the postwar period, his identity also encompassed that of a prolific Polish Yiddish writer and editor of Folks-shtime (Voice of the People), a Yiddish-language journal published in postwar Warsaw. During the late 1950s and 1960s, Smolar maintained an uneasy relationship with the Communist authorities in Poland. Tensions between the Yiddish writer and communist apparatchiks began to intensify in the 1950s, especially following the persecution and murder of members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in Moscow. In 1956, as editor of Folks-shtime, Smolar published an editorial titled Undzer veytik un undzer treyst (Our Pain and Our Consolation) that addressed Stalinist crimes against the Yiddish cultural milieu in the Soviet Union—most notably the “Night of the Murdered Poets,” the execution of thirteen Yiddish intellectuals in Moscow in 1952. Though Smolar remained a lifelong Leninist, his seemingly unwavering faith in Soviet communism was challenged by antisemitism in the postwar Soviet Union and Poland. Facing Gomułka’s anti-Zionist campaign in Poland in the late 1960s, Smolar emigrated to Israel in 1971.

In Jews Without Yellow Stars, Smolar’s short sketches about Jewish resistance, that could be situated somewhere between the genres of testimonial literature and historical fiction, resonate with the dominant postwar Soviet narrative of the “Great Patriotic War”. Although Jewish partisans are usually the central protagonists in the stories, they live and fight alongside Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, and Belarussian guerrillas. Smolar frequently depicts the Soviet partisan movement as a space of welcoming camaraderie – one that is strengthened, rather than undermined, by the combatants’ diverse ethnic, social, and geographical backgrounds. In “The President of Our Capital,” for instance, he portrays a bond between two unlikely comrades: Tevl, a former yeshiva student, and Vasilevski, a partisan commander and “descendant of a Polish family exiled to Siberia” (p. 166). Similarly, in “No Longer an Orphan,” the emotional core of the story lies in the almost paternal friendship between Vilik, a twelve-year-old orphan from the Minsk ghetto, and Aleksander Borisenko, a Ukrainian partisan: “A strong bond formed between the tall, broad-shouldered Ukrainian from the Poltava region, Aleksander Borisenko, and little Vilik. Neither budges from his spot without the other. They eat together, sleep together, and together set off on battle operations” (p. 220). Vilik undergoes a profound transformation in the story, turning from a ghetto orphan, having lost his family members and his prewar (Jewish) self, into a Soviet antifascist fighter. This theme of inter-ethnic camaraderie — of a “fraternity of peoples” in the communist wartime propaganda parlance —echoes throughout the book, as it does more generally in partisans’ postwar Soviet testimonies and memoirs about their experiences in the Second World War. ^{2 2} Jonathan Brunstedt, The Soviet Myth of World War II: Patriotic Memory and the Russian Question in the USSR, Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Smolar understood Jewish resistance as part of the broader Soviet guerrilla movement during the German occupation of Belarus. While in the Minsk ghetto, he and his comrades adopted the stance that “the ghetto is death,” ^{3 3} Interview with Hersh Smolar, created by Claude Lanzmann during the filming of “Shoah”, Tel Aviv, 1979. USHMM oral history collection, RG-60.5038, transcript page 13. viewing joining the Soviet partisans in the forests as the only means of resistance and survival. As a result, from the early months of the German occupation, the resistance within the Minsk ghetto focused its efforts not on organizing an internal uprising, but on sending Jews into the forests of Belarus to join the partisan movement. In this respect, the resistance in Minsk—a ghetto populated by Soviet Jews who had lived under Soviet rule for two decades—was different from that of ghettos like Białystok or Vilna, where the Jewish communities had experienced only a brief and incomplete Sovietization in 1939-1940. ^{4 4} Evgeny Finkel, Ordinary Jews : Choice and Surviving During the Holocaust, Princton: Princton University Press, 2017.

Situated less than 100 kilometers from Minsk, the Naliboki Forest became a refuge for Jews fleeing the Minsk ghetto, many of whom joined the growing resistance movement. Organized Soviet partisan detachments had been operating in the forest since early 1942, but even earlier, in 1941, small groups—primarily Red Army soldiers who had escaped German encirclement or fled the unbearable conditions of prisoner of war camps—had already taken to the woods. These early partisans, living between the forest and nearby villages and dependent on the resources of local populations, were loosely structured, and their activities often bordered on social banditry. A turning point came in May 1942, when Stalin ordered the creation of the Central Headquarters of the Partisan Movement to unify existing groups and coordinate military operations. In late 1942 – 1943, at the height of the resistance, Belarusian partisans numbered around 300,000, including approximately 15,000 Jews.

The Naliboki Forest stands out as a unique site within the broader landscape of Soviet anti-fascist resistance. Unlike many other partisan strongholds, it provided shelter to substantial Jewish partisan groups, including Jewish family camps such as the Bielski partisans. Smolar’s unit, which grew to about 500 members, also included a significant number of noncombatants, mostly women and children, who took on auxiliary roles in the camps.

However, not all those fleeing ghettos were readily accepted by the partisans. Smolar’s stories also point to instances of antisemitism within the Soviet partisan movement and address the complex experiences of Jewish combatants, whose family members were left behind in the ghettos. In “Deserter,” the protagonist, a Jewish partisan, repeatedly returns to the forest camp after unsuccessful attempts to rescue his pregnant wife from the ghetto. His movements raise suspicion and the Soviet detachment’s commissar accuses him of treason. “In the forest, you can only serve one master” (p. 236), Smolar writes, poignantly summarizing the plight of Jewish fighters torn between the Soviet resistance and their families.

The forest is indeed often a protagonist in its own right in the stories. The vast Belarusian forests, with their dense vegetation and swamps served as hiding places from the Germans. Between 1942 and 1943, various German military and SS units, known as “Bandenkampfverbände” (anti-bandit units), were deployed as part of a broader Nazi security strategy, alongside the Final Solution and the use of slave labor. ^{5 5} Phillip W. Blood, Hitler’s Bandit Hunters: The SS and the Nazi Occupation of Europe, University of Nebraska Press, 2011. During German blockades—when “bandit hunters” entered the extensive forests where Soviet partisan camps were based—partisans would retreat deeper into the forest. In the stories, nature often emerges as a partner in resistance, offering shelter and protection, “like a mother when mortal danger lay waiting at every step” (p. 296). However, at other times, nature also represents a danger. In “Third Bridge,” Smolar writes, “One step – and the abyss draws you in. There are no trees, only bushes, which conceal the danger lurking there for each one that tries to crawl across the accursed earth” (p. 272), describing a self-rescue by Jewish partisans in the Naliboki forest during a German attack in 1943. This duality of the forest—both a refuge and a hostile space, an unnatural habitus for Jewish partisans coming mostly from an urban background – is a recurrent theme in Smolar’s stories. It is also a common memorial trope in Holocaust testimonies and literature. ^{6 6} Tim Cole, “’Nature Was Helping Us’: Forests, Trees, and Environmental Histories of the Holocaust”, Environmental History, vol. 9, n. 4, 2014: 665-686.

Another central protagonist in the book is weaponry—a metonym for resistance and revenge in Smolar’s prose. Weapons are an extension of combatants’ bodily capabilities and objects invested with a strong symbolic meaning. ^{7 7} Nathan Joseph, Uniforms and Nonuniforms: Communication Through Clothing, New York: Greenwood Press, 1986, p. 22.
Several stories allude to the transformative power of arms, which turned ghetto inhabitants into anti-fascist fighters. Weapons also render vengeance possible. “What can be sweeter than to tally up and carry the seized trophies from the enemy, the joy of a successful act of vengeance?” asks Smolar in “Old Shimen Tells a Tale…”, where captured German trophy weapons stand as a tangible proof of much-desired and long-awaited vengeance.

As Solon Beinfeld observes in his well-contextualizing introduction to Hersh Smolar’s book, several of its short stories had already appeared in Fun Minsker Ghetto (From the Minsk Ghetto), published in Moscow in 1946, prior to the full Yiddish edition released in Łódź in 1948. This earlier publication, Beinfeld notes, stands as “a rare example of Soviet Jewish Holocaust literature” (p. XIII). One might add, as Gennady Estraikh points out, that the Russian translation of Smolar’s work—printed in 50,000 copies—was “unique as a Russian-language publication of this kind,” ^{8 8} Gennady Estraikh, “ Hersh Smolar : A Polish Personage in the Soviet Jewish Cultural Scene, 1940s-1960s”, in Katharina Friedla and Markus Nesselrodt (eds.), Polish Jews in the Soviet Union (1939 – 1959): History and Memory of Deportation, Exile, and Survival, Academic Studies Press, 2021: 175-198, p. 179.
given that most other widely circulated accounts of resistance came from non-Jewish partisans.

The appearance of Smolar’s stories at this particular historical moment aligns with the emerging Soviet narrative of resistance and martyrdom in the Second World War. In the Soviet Union, the first volumes of memoirs recounting the “Great Patriotic War” had begun to appear as early as 1944–1945, with a wave of partisan recollections following in the late 1940s. Smolar’s stories share much with this early Soviet literature and memoirs on resistance and war. One such element is the Soviet wartime parlance, which Ruth Murphy’s translation renders with notable fidelity, particularly in the terminology used to describe the enemy—terms like “Hitlerites” and “German beasts” punctuate Smolar’s depictions of encounters with Germans and their local collaborators.

Another central “Soviet” motif in the stories is violence against those labeled as “spies,” “informers,” and “local collaborators”—categories that, in the context of multidirectional violence among Polish Home Army soldiers (Armia Krajowa), local pro-German military formations, and Soviet partisans could prove fluid and acquire different meanings over time. The story “Enemies,” for example, recounts an encounter between a partisan commander and two women he identifies as spies. He unmasks them and, instead of bringing them to the camp for interrogation, executes them on the spot and orders their bodies displayed as a form of intimidation:

On a piece of canvas, I wrote with a trembling hand, ‘Thus we will do to all our enemies’, and ordered that the corpses be brought to the main road. There we tossed them out onto the very center, pinning to them the canvas with the inscription (p. 144).

While demonstrative violence was mainly employed by the Nazis—exemplified by the SS’s use of torture, public executions, and the display of corpses to terrorize the local population—Soviet partisans also engaged in targeted acts of violence. These included the assassination of individuals and their families accused of collaboration, as well as the disarmament and burning down of villages labeled as enemy strongholds. This particular story is also notable for its portrayal of women, who in Smolar’s stories appear in a rather limited range of roles of courageous comrades-in-arms, maternal figures caring for male partisans, or dangerous spies.

Yet, Smolar’s book on Jewish resistance within the Soviet partisan movement cannot be reduced to the dominant Soviet-era narrative of the Second World War—the narrative tradition Svetlana Alexievich aptly termed “sterile Soviet heroism”. ^{9 9} Svetlana Alexievitch, La guerre n’a pas de visage de femme, Presses de la Renaissance, 2004, p. 22.
Jews Without Yellow Stars is, above all, an example of early Soviet Holocaust literature about the resisters of the Minsk ghetto, who experienced a form of liberation as partisans in the Belarussian forests—a reclamation of bodily autonomy and agency in contrast to the confinement of the ghetto and the enforced marking with a Yellow Star. Moreover, the inclusion of the 1942 testimony by Natan (Nosn) Smolar—Hersh Smolar’s brother—on the deportation and murder of his wife and his three-year-old daughter, situates Smolar’s stories within the tragedy of his family, of his community and of European Jewry as a whole. Noteworthy for both its literary and testimonial qualities, Smolar’s short stories offer a rare instance of Holocaust prose on Jewish resistance—now accessible to scholars and general readers alike with an interest in Soviet Holocaust history and Yiddish literature.