When Jewish Fighters Are the Enemy

By Steve Rodan

Few would argue that Yeheskel Atlas was not a Jewish hero. Atlas spent World War II as a partisan, recruiting Jews to attack the German police and army in Poland.

On Aug. 10, 1942, Atlas' unit killed 44 German policemen in Derechin. As a physician, he was able to treat the injured; as a commander he impressed his Soviet sponsors with daring raids.

After World War II, Atlas and his partisan unit of Jewish survivors were dismissed by Israel. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion did not see partisans as fighters who should be recognized, let alone granted stipends. Instead, the new Israeli regime branded them communists. This, in contrast to every country that helped support the families of partisans killed or injured during the war.

Israel's policy stemmed from its refusal to spend money on Holocaust survivors and Ben-Gurion's concern that honoring partisans would raise questions of his abandonment of the Jews in occupied Europe. But there was an even stronger factor: From the first days of the state, Israel was determined not to anger post-war Germany, regarded as a potential source of hundreds of millions of dollars in reparations.

To reduce friction, Israel became one of the few countries that refused to commemorate V-Day, or the Allied victory over Hitler on May 9, 1945. Ben-Gurion would also turn to Bonn to finance Yad Vashem to avoid any Holocaust narrative that might offend West Germany.

Israel's policy resulted in a narrative in which the Jews of Europe were essentially cowards who marched to the gas chambers. Any rescue of Jews was the work of gentiles, honored by Yad Vashem from the early 1960s.

That left no room for Atlas, whose parents and sister died in the Polish ghetto of Kozlovshchizna in November 1941. In mid-1942, as the Germans were liquidating scores of Jewish ghettos, Atlas organized 120 Jewish survivors active in the Lipiczany Forest. The Jews were bold, blowing up a German train, destroying a bridge and constantly attacking German troops. The height of Atlas' partisan career was on Oct. 10, 1942 when his unit participated in a battle in which 127 Germans were killed, 75 taken prisoner and a huge amount of weapons and ammunition were seized. He died of injuries after a battle in December 1942 in Wielka Wola.

In all, there were 1.5 million Jews who fought during World War II, whether as partisans or in Allied armies. Tuvia Bielski, a former Polish Army soldier, helped Jews break out of the ghettos in Byelorussia. Working with Soviet partisans, he was reported to have saved 1,200 Jews, the same number attributed to Oskar Schindler. He commanded the largest Jewish partisan group in Europe.

Bielski and his brothers were ignored by the State of Israel and Yad Vashem. In 1993, Yad Vashem granted Righteous Gentile status to Konstantin Kozlovski and his sons Gennady and Vladimir. In Yad Vashem’s citation, Kozlovski was credited with sheltering Jews who had escaped from the ghetto “until the Bielskis’ partisans came to pick them up.” There was nothing about the Bielski brothers, some of whom fought in the 1948 war for Israel's independence, or their rescue efforts.

Bielski left Israel after the war for the United States. But thousands of other ex-partisans remained and demanded official recognition and stipends similar to those injured in the 1948 war. They held sit-ins and street demonstrations until Ben-Gurion finally agreed to meet two representatives on May 9, 1950. The session was stormy.

"From a moral perspective, they are like any other disabled," Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary, "but the State of Israel has no responsibility toward them...Before them comes those disabled from the world war from the Jewish units that we, the Jewish Agency, recruited. Before them, comes the disabled from the 1948 war."

Ben-Gurion and Yad Vashem would also refuse to recognize Zionist activists who saved Jews during World War II. Adolf Berman, his wife Basia, and Leon Feiner, were credited with rescuing between 11,000 and 12,000 Jews, mostly from Warsaw. In late 1943, the three, working with the Polish underground, smuggled 600 Jewish children to the Aryan side of Warsaw.

Instead, Yad Vashem's policy was to honor the gentiles and dismiss the Jews who had hired them for rescue. So, the state-sponsored Holocaust memorial ignored Rabbi Zalman Schneerson, who saved numerous Jewish children in France during the war. Yad Vashem honored May Charretie, a gentile courier employed by the rabbi.

Marianne Cohn was a Jew from Berlin who smuggled Jewish children from Vichy France to Switzerland during World War II. She worked with two French gentiles who served as drivers and guides. When Cohn was captured along the Swiss-French border, she was tortured to death. Years later, Yad Vashem honored the Frenchmen and dismissed Cohn, recognized in France and Germany.

It was only in the mid-1990s that Israel's harsh attitude toward the partisans began to soften. By this time, most of the Jewish fighters were dead and commemorated by other Holocaust memorial centers. Thousands of World War II veterans of the Red Army were also arriving from the Soviet Union. In 1995, the Knesset held a special session to mark the victory over Hitler.

For his part, Ben-Gurion would never make peace with Jews who fought Hitler. Indeed, the Zionist leader would see Jewish fighters as the enemy -- particularly the Irgun and Lehi underground in Palestine in the mid-1940s.

"Terrorists," Ben-Gurion called the Irgun in July 1947 after it hanged two British soldiers in retaliation for the execution of three underground members, "a gang of hooligans...worse than the Nazis."

Below: Yeheskel Atlas