How did you spend your teen years? Playing sports or video games? In Europe during WW II thousands of Jewish teens were involved in the war – - not playing war, but actually helping to fight it by sabotaging German army supply lines. To say they have a story to tell would be an understatement, as the excerpt below from an article by Renee Ghert-Zand shows:
Last November, a family reunion like no other took place in New York.
None of the attendees were actually related, but that didn’t matter. It was an emotional gathering of 55 brothers and sisters in resistance, Jewish partisans who had, as teenagers and young adults, hidden and survived in the forests of Europe and fought the Nazis by sabotaging German army supply lines. They had parted at the end of World War II, and never thought they would see one another again.
These Holocaust survivors were brought together by the Jewish Partisans Educational Foundation (JPEF), a San Francisco-based non-profit organization that produces and disseminates educational materials about Jewish WWII partisans to 6,500 educators around the world.
Mitch Braff, JPEF’s founder and executive director, knew that, given the advanced age of the attendees, this reunion was going to be a once-in-a-lifetime event. A filmmaker by training, he instinctively perceived that the occasion should be documented in an artful and meaningful way.
“I see things through a filmmaker’s lens, and I knew this would make a great documentary movie,” Braff said.
“If you or your family are aware of any partisans still living, please have them contact jewishpartisans.org. We’d love to have them attend the dinner with us,” Zwick requested.
Of the tens of thousands of Jews who were once partisans fighting the Nazis, Braff expected that perhaps 20 or so would respond to the video and JPEF’s other outreach efforts. To his astonishment, 55 ended up making the trip to New York. Many of the former partisans, nearly all now octogenarians and older, were local, coming from their homes in New York and New Jersey. Others journeyed to the reunion with their families from Montreal, Florida, Texas and California.
At the emotional center of the film are two of the attendees: Allen Small, 84, a retired women’s fashion executive from Florida, and Leon Bakst, 87, a retired grocer from Dallas. Small had recognized Bakst’s name on the list of former partisans who had committed to coming, but Bakst had not recognized that of Small, who had been known during and before the war as Avraham Meir Shmulevitch.
Small had known Leon as Leibl, and the two had been friends and schoolmates in Ivye, Poland (about 50 miles from Minsk, now part of Belarus).
“Thank God for that organization,” Small said of JPEF. “Now I have family.”
Corrie Ten Boom had a family, too, and much of it was lost at the hands of the very group these young resistance fighters were combating. To learn about the Ten Boom’s involvement in WW II, read Corrie’s book THE HIDING PLACE, or take a virtual tour of her home in Ha’arlem, Holland, which has since been converted into a museum. Prior to WW II the Ten Boom family had spent a hundred years doing something we can do today – - praying per Psalm 122:6 – - praying for the peace of Jerusalem!
To read more about the Resistance Fighters Reunion, go to The Times of Israel website
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