A 'Defiant' Group Honored during Holocaust Remembrance

Ann Monka was a young girl when the Nazis entered Eastern Europe, intent on carrying out the “final solution” to wipe out Monka and all the rest of the continent’s Jews.

But thanks to sheer luck and not a small amount of courage, she and most of her family never became victims of the Nazi genocide that claimed 6 million European Jews. Instead, they spent much of the war with a group of Jewish partisans in the woods of Belorussia (contemporary Belarus), fighting back against the German war machine.

“They encouraged us to sing and dance,” Monka, now 82, said of the hard-bitten resistance fighters known as the Bielski partisans who sheltered her until the Nazis left in 1944. “I can still sing the partisan song.”  

Monka fled to the Bielski group from Lida, a Jewish ghetto, when she was 12, with her mother and a cousin, but her father, brother and sister were rounded up and placed on a train bound for a concentration camp. Incredibly, however, the entire family was eventually reunited -- the other members of the Monka clan jumped from that train and eventually found their way to the partisans’ hidden forest encampment. All of them survived the war.

Ann Monka was among hundreds of guests yesterday at the Robert Treat Hotel in downtown Newark, where the city held its 25th annual Holocaust remembrance ceremony. Representatives of the region’s Jewish community, including dozens of Holocaust survivors, were joined by hundreds of students from Newark public and Catholic schools at the event. Rabbi Clifford Kulwin of Temple B’nai Abraham in Livingston, a congregation founded in Newark 160 years ago, served as emcee.

The event was sponsored by the city, the Berger Organization, Edison Properties, the Holocaust Council of MetroWest, Temple B’nai Abraham and the Manischewitz company.

The keynote speaker yesterday was Robert Bielski, son of Tuvias Bielski who, along with his brothers Zus and Asael, founded the partisan group that saved Monka’s family and more than 1,200 other Jews. The Bielskis’ exploits, which included stiff armed resistance to the Germans, were dramatized in the 2008 film Defiance starring Daniel Craig.

“The Bielski family teaches us that ordinary people can stand up to forces of tyranny and genocide,” Mayor Cory Booker said. “Their courage is a renewed commitment to oppose genocide. Today we stand in humble reverence of the Bielski family and the men and women of the Jewish partisan movement who define the word ‘defiance.’”

“They treated their friends beneficently, the neutrals justly and their enemies swiftly,” said Robert Bielski of his father and uncles.

Bielski spoke of the partisans’ brazen exploits, which included burning Nazi grain supplies, fighting alongside Russian partisans, and rescuing, despite incredible odds, as many Jews as they could. Once, Tuvias Bielski slipped into the Lida ghetto, disguised as a Gentile, to encourage as many people as possible to escape and join them in the woods.

“It was the largest armed rescue of Jews by Jews,” Bielski said, adding, “They were not legends. They were real.”

The Bielski partisan camp, although crude, was also a miniature society, with schools, medical facilities, a soap factory, a synagogue and even a theater group, Bielski said.

Most importantly, of course, it was a safe haven. The 1,200 Bielski partisans who marched out of the woods in 1944, following the Nazi departure, today have 25,000 living descendants.