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The Minsk Ghetto 1941–1943: Jewish Resistance and Soviet Internationalism, by Barbara Epstein. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. 351pp. $39.95.
Contrary to its title, The Minsk Ghetto 1941–1943 does not focus solely upon the clandestine activities undertaken within the borders of the Jewish ghetto established by Byelorussia’s German occupiers in 1941. Rather, Epstein uses the testimonies of former resisters, both Jewish and Byelorussian, to examine the inner workings of the extensive underground network in wartime Minsk. In the process, Epstein presents a detailed portrait of a nation whose pre-war history and wartime trajectory were both comparable to and sharply divergent from those of its more well-studied neighbors. Largely isolated from developments occurring elsewhere on the continent, these self-declared “Soviet citizens” in the Byelorussian capital forged their own path through the difficult terrain of German occupation. For the Jews of Minsk, and, indeed, for countless Byelorussians, this path led from the city to the partisan units in the nearby forests.
The first few chapters of this work explore the unique history of Minsk in comparison to that of other Eastern European cities with large Jewish populations. Of critical significance was the fact that, for two decades before the war, Minsk was under Soviet rule. Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, Byelorussian political parties had elected to join the new Russian federation, thus creating the Soviet Socialist Republic of Byelorussia. Largely underdeveloped and lacking a wealthy peasantry, Byelorussia was not subjected to the same violent collectivization program as was most notably implemented in nearby Ukraine. On the contrary, the interwar period saw modernization, industrialization, and the expansion of education, which helped to promote a fairly positive impression of Soviet rule. Most importantly for the nation’s Jewish citizens, these developments were accompanied by the rise of a new Byelorussian-Soviet identity, which, according to Epstein, “provided an indigenous basis for an ethnically inclusive understanding of patriotism” (p. 75). Especially in the capital city of Minsk, Soviet rule had fostered “Jewish integration and had promoted an ideology of internationalism that had a particular influence on young people, leading many to regard interethnic relationships with pride” (p. 31). These relationships forged under the mantle of Soviet internationalism constituted the backbone of wartime resistance in this occupied city.
On June 22, 1941, German forces commenced the invasion of the Soviet Union. Within a week, Byelorussia found itself under German rule, and, for the next three years, Minsk would serve as the capital of Reichskommissariat Ostland, which included Byelorussia, the Baltic nations, and parts of Poland. In early August 1941, the city’s approximately 71,000 Jewish residents were forced into the old Jewish area in the northwestern sector of the city. The population of the ghetto soon swelled to more than 100,000, as Jews from surrounding areas were brought to Minsk following the destruction of their towns and villages. Here, they would be subjected to one deadly attack after another. In November 1941, for example, at least 12,000 Jews—mostly children, the elderly, and others exempted from labor details—were removed from the ghetto and brought to an execution site outside of the city, where they were all killed. With each successive action, the Germans constricted the borders of the ghetto and tightened the noose around its remaining inhabitants until finally “liquidating” the ghetto in October 1943.
As in other occupied countries, the Germans mandated the creation of a Jewish Council, or Judenrat, shortly after their arrival in Minsk. However, Ilya Mushkin, the first head of this Jewish Council, was hardly the compliant, malleable leader the Germans had expected him to be: from the time of his appointment in July 1941 until his disappearance and presumed death in February 1942, Mushkin doubled as one of the leaders of the Jewish underground. In fact, the three leading institutions of the ghetto, namely, the Jewish Council, the Jewish Labor Exchange, and the Jewish Hospital, all served as important centers of ghetto resistance. Mushkin and his colleagues at these institutions fostered active cooperation between the ghetto resistance and the Minsk city underground. In this manner—and because Byelorussian resisters were amenable to such interactions—wartime Minsk saw the creation of a large, highly organized underground network including Jews, Byelorussian city-dwellers and peasants, former Red Army officers and soldiers, escaped prisoners of war, and even German soldiers.
Unlike their correlates in other regions and ghettos, Jewish underground organizations in Minsk were not concerned with promoting cultural or religious activities, nor did they work towards the staging of a ghetto-wide revolt, as did the leaders of the famed Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1943. Rather, the Jewish underground in Minsk aimed to send men, women, and children to the surrounding forests, where they would be able to evade the ongoing German pogroms and, at the same time, help speed the victory of the Red Army. This is not to say that those Jews who made it to the forest expected to survive the war; on the contrary, Epstein’s historical subjects were well aware of Germany’s exterminationist intentions. And, yet, Epstein’s portrayal of these resisters and their activities is so engaging and detailed that one almost forgets that this was a life-and-death struggle waged by a people targeted for death.
Epstein also extends her analysis into the first post-war decades, which saw the official marginalization of the Minsk city underground. Even before the arrival of the Red Army in Minsk on July 3, 1944, the reestablished Communist Party of Byelorussia had begun to prosecute and punish former resisters, whether Jewish or Byelorussian. Accused of collaboration and treason simply because they had remained in German-occupied Minsk and worked for German enterprises, these resisters became unwitting pawns of Communist officials acting upon a variety of largely self-serving motives. The final rehabilitation of the Minsk underground occurred only in February 1960 after years of lobbying by former resisters and their family members. Eventually, 113 members of the Minsk underground would be exonerated of the charges of collaboration and espionage. This about-face, however, came too late for the scores of former resisters who had died in prison or been wrongly executed.
Epstein’s analysis of wartime events would have been strengthened by a deeper exploration of motives, especially of those driving Jewish and Byelorussian collaboration. Most problematically, Epstein refers to the last group of Jewish ghetto leaders, Polish Jews imported from Warsaw and Lodz, as collaborators willing to denounce fellow Jews to the German authorities. However, no context is provided for either their arrival in the Minsk Ghetto or their behavior vis-à-vis the Byelorussian Jews. Epstein also repeatedly notes that those Jews looking to escape into or out of the ghetto attached themselves to departing or arriving work details, while members of the ghetto underground struck from the record those Jews who had escaped into the forest. Were the German administrators in Minsk truly so lax with their own record-keeping in this region, and, if so, why? Perhaps unintentionally, Epstein presents a portrait of a somewhat hapless German administration. The incorporation of further German-language sources, such as the intelligence reports cited on occasion throughout the work, might have provided a slightly more balanced assessment. Lastly, Chapter Eight, which focuses on strategies of resistance seen elsewhere in the region and the Kovno Ghetto in particular, seems misplaced, as only the earlier chapters of the work are explicitly comparative. Still, these criticisms should not detract from the import of Epstein’s work, which offers a highly valuable contribution to our understandings of the Holocaust, Byelorussian and Soviet history, and World War Two writ large.
Jennifer L. Foray
Department of History
Purdue University
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