About 150 people engaged in armed operations. Hundreds of men, women, and children eventually found their way to the Bielski encampment at its peak, the unit hosted 1,236 people, 70 per cent of them women, children and elderly no one was turned away. He sent emissaries to infiltrate the area's ghettos, recruiting new members to the unit, which was sheltering in the Naliboki forest. He had been interested in the Zionist youth movement. The unit's commander was the oldest brother, Tuvia, who had served in the Polish Army from 1927 to 1929, rising to the rank of corporal. The unit originally numbered some 40 people, but quickly grew. In the spring of 1942, together with 13 ghetto neighbors, they formed the nucleus of a partisan combat unit. The four Bielski brothers, Tuvia, Alexander (also known as 'Zus'), Asael, and Aron, fled into the nearby forests after their parents and other family members had been killed in the ghetto on 8 December 1941. This strained the Bielskis' relations with their neighbours, many of whom were subjected to Soviet repression.ĭuring Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union beginning 22 June 1941, a Jewish ghetto was established within Novogrudok, as the Germans took over the area and implemented their genocidal policies (see Holocaust in Poland and Holocaust in Belarus). Under the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland, the remainder of the Bielski family served as low-level administrators for the Soviets, with Tuvia Bielski becoming a commissar. After performing reserve duty, he engaged in trade, eventually becoming a smuggler. Polish September Campaign and Soviet invasion of Poland (1939)) in accord with the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.īefore the war, Tuvia Bielski had received training in the Polish Army. Before World War II, the Bielski family had been millers and grocers in Stankiewicze (Stankievichy), near Novogrudok, an area that at the outbreak of the war belonged to Poland and in September 1939 was occupied by the Soviet Union (cf.

The hider brothers