Shortly after the invasion citizens were informed that any and all “generosity toward Jews was to be stopped immediately.” This policy would come as no surprise to the Jews of eastern Europe who had been oppressed in countless ways throughout their entire history in the region. Tuvia Bielski Asael Bielski Zusia Bielski It was the month of June 1941 and Nazi Germany along with its Axis allies invaded the Soviet Union and all of eastern Poland and present-day Belarus territory was soon to be occupied by the Germans within two months. Everywhere in the streets he could see people were running in a mad panic for any type of shelter they could find. From his window he could see smoke and burning buildings. In the village of Stankevich, Belarus, Tuvia Bielski was sound asleep when the sounds of gunfire woke him from his slumber. He worked in his own store as a laborer.” He was sweeping the floors because he was a capitalist, a bourgeois. The Russians forced my father to work for them. I was forced to go to a Russian school, instead of the Tarbut. “I remember we were very happy that the Russians liberated us from the anti-Semitic government of Poland, and we were happy that the Germans didn’t occupy our area of Belarus, but when the Russians came in, right away they took away my father’s business. However time would soon disprove that theory.Ĭharles Bedzow from Lida, a city northeast of Novgrudek said the following: Some Jews had welcomed the Soviets as liberators, believing that life under the communists might be preferable to that of the Poles. Hundred of thousands of Polish officials, officers, soldiers, policemen, teachers, churchmen, landowners, and civilians with their families were sent to Siberian concentration camps. In some areas, especially in eastern Poland, which the Soviet Union invaded in 1939, and subsequently “formally” annexed, the situation was particularly volatile.ĭuring the two year occupation till the Soviet-German war outbreak in 1941, the Soviets carried out the ethnic cleansing of Poles considered as a potential threat to full annexation of these territories into Soviet Union. Prior to the onset of WWII, conditions throughout occupied Poland & Belarus varied greatly. Holocaust Resistance: Table of Contents| Photographs| Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
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