Minsk Ghetto book | The Minsk Ghetto 1941-1943: Jewish Resistance and Soviet Internationalism

book: The Minsk Ghetto 1941-1943: Jewish Resistance and Soviet Internationalism | Barbara Epstein

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	• The Minsk Ghetto 1941-1943: Jewish Resistance and Soviet Internationalism Barbara Epstein University of California Press, 2008 - 376 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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A treasure chest for Holywood

I just read this book and recommend it highly. While it could have used some better editing it tells a bunch of stories that could be the basis for a series of great movies like Defiance. The Amazon product description makes the point about the books exploration of the distinctiveness of the Minsk experience, where a history of relatively low levels of Antisemitism in Belarussia (low for Eastern Europe that is) was reinforced by an egalitarian and overtly anti-Antisemitic Soviet ideology to create the basis for a multi-ethnic resistance movement with broad support from the population as a whole and active support for Jews by ordinary Belarusians and the Belarussian partisan movement which had Jews in its leadership, Jews in its fighting organizations and Jewish fighting units. Some 10,000 Jews were therefore able to escape from the Minsk Ghetto and join the Partisans. Epstein points out the sharp contrast between the situation in Belarussia and those in Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine where Jews found little outside support and sometimes great hostility. She provides overwhelming evidence for her thesis. She also follow up on the wartime resistance story with the postwar denigration of the Minsk resistance and the persecution of its leaders by a Belarussian Communist Party leadership that wanted to cover up the fact that they had fled from the Germans and made no preparations for the creation of an underground resistance. The resistance was only honored at the end of the 1950s after the deStalinization campaign and only then were some of its leaders released from the Gulag. All in all an inspiring and sobering tale.

Stan

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Minsk Ghetto book

Very interesting and well researched and written study of the Minsk Ghetto during WWII. Interesting to compare with the book by Tec on which the movie Defiance was based.

Drawing from engrossing survivors' accounts, many never before published, The Minsk Ghetto 1941-1943 recounts a heroic yet little-known chapter in Holocaust history. In vivid and moving detail, Barbara Epstein chronicles the history of a Communist-led resistance movement inside the Minsk ghetto, which, through its links to its Belarussian counterpart outside the ghetto and with help from others, enabled thousands of ghetto Jews to flee to the surrounding forests where they joined partisan units fighting the Germans. Telling a story that stands in stark contrast to what transpired across much of Eastern Europe, where Jews found few reliable allies in the face of the Nazi threat, this book captures the texture of life inside and outside the Minsk ghetto, evoking the harsh conditions, the life-threatening situations, and the friendships that helped many escape almost certain death. Epstein also explores how and why this resistance movement, unlike better known movements at places like Warsaw, Vilna, and Kovno, was able to rely on collaboration with those outside ghetto walls. She finds that an internationalist ethos fostered by two decades of Soviet rule, in addition to other factors, made this extraordinary story possible.

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