Partisan Sonya Oshman (A''H) passes away at the age of 90

Former Jewish partisan Sonya Oshman (A''H) passed away this Friday, March 2nd. A survivor of the Novogrodek ghetto and a Bielski partisan, she leaves behind a remarkable story of loss, courage, and perseverance.

The eldest of four children, Sonya was born in 1922 to a family of wealthy Novogrodek merchants. Novogrodek was a Polish town with a population in the thousands, approximately half of whom were Jewish. The Gorodinskys were well-respected, and Sonya’s father would occasionally be called upon to mediate the tensions between the town’s Polish and Jewish communities.

Sonya was planning to enroll in medical school in Bialistok the year the Soviets invaded. Though the Soviet occupation saw many Jews deported to the harsh Siberian hinterlands, theirs was a comparatively fortunate lot. After the Nazis occupied Poland in the summer of 1941, they ended up systematically murdering most of the town’s Jewish population, including Sonya’s youngest brother and grandparents.

Novogrodek’s Jewish population could be counted in the thousands before the war. In May of 1943, only 500 remained – mostly skilled laborers and their families, living in squalid conditions inside Novogrodek’s courthouse, which had been turned into a makeshift ghetto by the Nazis. On May 7th, another massacre was conducted, reducing the ghetto population by half. Sonya’s mother and sister were among those killed.

Immediately after the May 7th massacre, the remaining 250 Jews started plotting their escape. The initial plan to storm the courthouse gates on a Sunday night fell through the Nazis were informed of the plot. Instead, the escapees decided to dig a tunnel underneath the ghetto through to the woods; a slow, stealthy escape through a hidden tunnel would give the sick and the old enough time to get out.

The work was difficult and dangerous. The excess earth had to be disposed of, and the summer rains threatened to collapse the tunnel. To avoid suspicious dirt stains, the diggers would wear burlap sacks – or dig naked. In spite of it all, Sonya befriended and fell in love with Aaron Oshman – her future husband – during the time they spent digging together.

Just a month before the escape, Sonya’s father was transferred to another ghetto, along with a handful of other skilled workers. She would never see him again.

The escape finally occurred on a rainy September night. About seventy of the escapees – including two of Sonya’s cousins and the tunnel’s mastermind – lost their lives when they accidentally ran back towards the ghetto and were shot by the guards, who mistook them for ambushing partisans. Most of the other escapees, including Sonya, eventually made it to the Bielski partisan camp. There, she was reunited with her one surviving brother and Aaron, whom she would later ask to marry her. She also learned of her father’s brutal death in the Koldichevo ghetto.

After the war ended, Aaron and Sonya made their way to an Italian displaced person’s camp with other refugees, and eventually ended up in Brooklyn. Their first child was born shortly before they arrived in the States.

Sonya is survived by her two children and four grandchildren. Before her passing, she traveled extensively to tell her family’s story in schools, synagogues, and community centers across the country, including a program with JPEF on Jewish Women partisans at the 92nd Street Y in New York City.  For more on Sonya Oshman, the Novogrodek tunnel escape, and the Bieslki brigade, please watch the JPEF documentary, A Partisan Returns: The Legacy of Two Sisters. Gila Lyons also wrote an excellent piece about her in Tablet magazine, which can be read here.

Featured Jewish Partisan - Rae Kushner (A''H), born on February 27th

"But he knew the way how to go in the woods. We didn't know nothing. I [was with] my sister and my father and I said to him, '…we're going to die together or we're going to be rescued together.' We were sitting under the bushes for 10 days. And it was pouring."
— Rae Kushner.

Born on February 27, 1923, Rae Kushner was the second-oldest of four children. Her family lived in the Polish town of Novogrodek, where a thriving Jewish community comprised just over half of its population.

Soviet troops entered Novogrodek in September of 1939 after the Soviet Union invaded Poland. Though the Russians took away the Kushner business and home, life under Soviet rule was relatively tolerable. Then, in the summer of 1941, the Nazis invaded Poland at the start of Operation Barbarossa. Though rumors of mass killings had reached Novogrodek by that point, few Jews actually believed that the Germans would carry out such atrocities.

Following several massacres, the remaining Jewish population was forced into a ghetto. Rae lived in the city’s courthouse with her family and nearly approximately 600 other Jews. Rae's mother and older sister were killed in a subsequent massacre on May 7, 1943.

Starting in the middle of May, the remaining Jews dug a 600-foot tunnel during the nights, using tools made in the ghetto workshops and hiding the dirt in the walls of buildings. Rae and her family helped with the digging. When completed, the 600-foot tunnel was only large enough for one person to crawl through. Upon emerging from it, the escapees were met with gunfire, darkness and disorientation. Consequently, only 170 survived out of the 250 that escaped. Rae’s brother was among the fallen, having lost his glasses during the crawl through the tunnel.

Rae and her surviving family spent ten days hiding in the woods, eventually making their way to the home of an acquaintance. The woman fed them and allowed them to sleep in her stable with the cows for one week — a risk that carried the penalty of a violent death.

Shortly thereafter, the Bielski partisans took in the escapees from Novogrodek — including Rae and her family. In the Naliboki encampment where the Bielskis had managed to shelter over 1,200 people, Rae regularly stood guard and often cooked the camp meals — mostly potatoes, soup and small pieces of bread. During that time, Rae met and fell in love with Joseph Kushner, whom she knew prior to the war. Rae and Joseph were married in August of 1945, a little over a year after the Bielski camp was liberated by the Red Army. They were among the many partisan couples who found love in the forests.

After the war, Rae returned to her hometown of Novogrodek, only to find it destroyed. Rae and her family ended up in an Italian displaced persons camp for three years. It was here that Rae gave birth to her daughter Linda, the first of her four children.

In 1949, the family moved to New York and Rae had two sons, Murray and Charles, as well as another daughter, Esther. Both of her sons went on to have prominent careers in business. Rae passed away in 2004, but her name lives on in prominence today. The Rae Kushner Yeshiva High School in Livingston, New Jersey is one of the most prestigious Jewish schools on the East Coast, with over 850 students attending.

For more information on Rae, including seven videos of her speaking about her experiences, please visit the JPEF partisan pages. Rae is also featured in JPEF's short film A Partisan Returns — you can find it on our films page.

Featured Jewish Partisan - Sam Lato, born on February 24th

"Whenever you went on assignment, the most dangerous part is coming back. Going there, they don’t know you're there, so you sneak in. While you sneak in, they might catch you, they might shoot you, but going back is the problem, because they know you're here, and they're going to go after you. However, if they don't know the direction you went, they won't catch you, but if they saw one, they're going to go after you. Because this is their army here. So that was the most dangerous part."
— Sam Lato.

Sam Lato was born in Baronovich, Poland on February 24th, 1925. He moved with his family to Warsaw at the age of three, where his skills as a craftsman earned him a scholarship to a local Jewish trade school. He eventually returned to Baronovich, which went under Soviet control in 1939 after the blitzkrieg of Poland.

Life was calm in Baronvich until 1941 when the Germans invaded Poland and quickly occupied Sam’s hometown. Soon, the Baronvich ghetto was formed. It was here that Sam became a member of the local resistance, even before he knew of the partisans’ existence. He started making cigarette lighters to sell on the black market, and smuggled ammunition and medical supplies from his factory job.

A year later, the Germans began to commit massive acts of violence against the locals. While Sam was fortunate enough to avoid several massacres, he and 15 other young men decided to take their chances in the forests of Belarus. At the age of seventeen, Sam fled from Baronvich and eventually found his way to a partisan camp. He was surprised to discover that there were already over a hundred Baronvich Jews in the brigade. Sam wasn’t with the partisans long before he met Genia Wishnia, whom he married only a few months later. They went on several missions together.

Sam’s brigade was in poor condition when he first arrived. They had no explosives to commit sabotage, and their camp was infested with lice. Sam and his friends would joke, “When you take off your jacket, put it in the corner so it [won’t] go away. Otherwise, the lice [are] going to move it outside for fresh air.” However, in the spring of 1943, they began receiving airdrop support from the Russians. They received new weapons, clothes and medical supplies. Soviet paratroopers even came to help coordinate the brigade’s activities, and Sam was recruited into their ranks as an auxiliary.

Sam and Genia in Germany, 1946

Sam was at one point assigned to accompany a Polish paratrooper. He followed him everywhere because no one was supposed to be alone. Sam didn’t think much of the short Pole, and didn’t know who he was or what he did. After Sam was relieved of his assignment and returned to his brigade, he was summoned by his colonel. The colonel instructed Sam to never repeat what he saw or heard during his time with the Pole, because he was none other than the exiled Polish prime minister.

In 1944, Sam joined the Russians in their advance to the Baltic Sea. After the war, he and Genia stayed in the USSR for several years before ultimately immigrating to the United States with their son, Edward. Genia lost her life to breast cancer in 1987. In 2006, Sam wrote a book about his time as a partisan in response to the denial of the Holocaust, as well as those who believed that the Jews went quietly. "The Jews did not go quietly,” he said in a 2009 interview. “Resistance, both peaceful and fierce, was waged by rabbis, senior adults, and men, women and children alike." The book, From Ghetto to Guerilla: Memoir of a Jewish Resistance Fighter, received the gold medal for its category at the 2007 Independent Publisher Book Awards, and was introduced to the Holocaust Documentation and Education Center in Hollywood, Florida in February 2008.

Sam currently resides in Sunset, Florida. He has three grandchildren.

Visit www.jewishpartisans.org for more about Sam Lato, including seven videos of him reflecting on his time as a partisan.

Partisans in the Arts: Abraham Sutzkever, Poet (1913-2010)

In 1984, the New York Times declared Abraham Sutzkever, “the greatest poet of the Holocaust.” His poems (which are written in Yiddish and have been translated into 30 languages) possess a subtlety met with powerful imagery, his language stripped down by the directness that comes from witnessing far more horrors of reality in a few years than most do in the span of their lives. Before he was a universally acclaimed figure in poetry, Sutzkever was a renowned poet in Vilna, known as the Jerusalem of Lithuania because of its intellectual and cultural development.

Sutzkever, who lost his mother, his newborn son, and his city of Vilna in the occupation, did not give up his fight or his art. He smuggled weapons into the ghetto and composed poems whatever the conditions. Sutzkever even hid in a coffin to write, during which he witnessed the liquidation of a smaller ghetto. These lines were composed here:

I lie in this coffin
The way I would lie
In a suit made of wood,
A bark
Tossed on treacherous waves,
A cradle, an ark.

Sutzkever and a group of intellectual friends, who were known as the “Paper Brigade”, rescued cultural works from destruction by the Nazis. Originally tasked with collecting Jewish cultural documents for the Nazi-created Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question, which intended to study the Jewish race after they were annihilated, Sutzkever instead carefully hid the works, including drawings by Chagall and the diaries of Theodore Herzl.

Before the ghetto was liquidated, Sutzkever, his wife, and a few of his friends escaped through sewers. They joined with partisans and fought against the Germans and collaborators until the end of the war. Sutzkever recalls, "conditions for the Jewish partisans in the forest were very difficult. A typical Jewish partisan had to prove himself to the partisan headquarters. They gave these Jews missions that were almost impossible to fulfill in order to test them."

After the war was over, Sutzkever returned to Vilna, resurfaced the precious cultural treasures he had hidden during the occupation, and with these works launched the Museum of Jewish Art and Culture. Sutzkever also testified at the Nuremburg trials (click here to watch a video of the testimony). In a 1985 interview with the New York Times, Abraham Sutzkever said: “When I was in the Vilna ghetto, I believed, as an observant Jew believes in the Messiah, that as long as I was writing, was able to be a poet, I would have a weapon against death.”

"A Wagon of Shoes”:

The wheels they drag and drag on,

What do they bring, and whose?

They bring along a wagon

Filled with throbbing shoes.

The wagon like a khupa
In evening glow, enchants:

The shoes piled up and heaped up,

Like people in a dance.

A holiday, a wedding?

As dazzling as a ball.

The shoes — familiar, spreading,

I recognize them all.

The heels tap with no malice:

Where do they pull us in?

From ancient Vilna alleys,

They drive us to Berlin.

I must not ask you whose,
My heart, it skips a beat:

Tell me the truth, oh, shoes,

Where disappeared the feet?

The feet of pumps so shoddy,

With buttondrops like dew —
Where is the little body?

Where is the woman too?

All children's shoes — but where

Are all the children's feet?

Why does the bride not wear

Her shoes so bright and neat?

'Mid clogs and children's sandals,

My Mama's shoes I see

On Sabbath, like the candles,

She'd put them on in glee.

The heels tap with no malice:

Where do they pull us in?

From ancient Vilna alleys,

They drive us to Berlin.

Partisan Vitka Kovner (A''H) passes away at the age of 92

On February 15th, 2012, Jewish partisan Vitka Kovner passed away at the age of 92 at her home in Israel.

Born in the town of Kadish on the Polish-German border in 1922, Vitka escaped to Vilna after Germany invaded Poland in 1939. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union and turned Vilna into a ghetto, Vitka joined up with poet and future husband Abba Kovner to organize the United Partisans Organization (FPO) – a Jewish armed resistance movement. Vitka committed FPO’s first act of sabotage when she blew up a Nazi train line with a homemade bomb.

When the Nazis gave orders to liquidate the ghetto in 1943, she helped evacuate much of the Jewish population to the forests following a failed uprising. Vitka continued her work in the resistance with the Avengers, an all-Jewish partisan brigade formed from the ashes of the FPO and led by Abba Kovner. After the war, Vitka and her husband helped hundreds of European Jews immigrate to Palestine. They both followed in 1946, settling at Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh, where Vitka passed away this Wednesday. She is survived by four grandchildren and leaves behind a proud legacy of survival and resistance.

For more information on Vitka, including seven videos of her speaking about her experiences, please visit the JPEF partisan pages. Vitka is also featured in JPEF's short film Women in the Partisans. Click here to read her obituary in the JTA.

UPDATE: The Jerusalem Post published a good article about Vitka, which you can read here.

Figures of Resistance: Bei Dao (born Zhao Zhenkai, 1949)

Bei Dao’s poetry may not appear subversive, however his writings and his involvement in the publication of a literary journal brought dangerous attention to him during China’s Cultural Revolution. Without conceding to governmental pressure, Bei Dao was exiled in 1989.

Bei Dao, whose pseudonym means “Northern Island”, once wrote: “Poets must not exaggerate their own function, but even less should they underrate themselves.” Similarly, Bei’s resistance did not come inherently from his words, but rather from the fact that he unapologetically created and disseminated them despite the threat of persecution. He came of age during the Cultural Revolution and like nearly all youth at that time joined the Red Guard, Mao’s indoctrinated movement - which was oftentimes violent. In 1969, however, Bei Dao’s mindset changed when he saw the so-called idyllic countryside of contemporary propaganda — which, in reality, he found to be backwards and poverty-stricken. His enthusiasm for the Cultural Revolution waned; he instead became interested in reading and writing.

While living as a construction worker, Bei met with friends who exchanged their writings. They founded the journal Jintian and took turns posting it around Beijing in broad daylight; they could not do so at night, as they were likely to “disappear”. Bei recalled, “I and two others volunteered to put up the pages, knowing that we were taking great risks in doing this. But the thing that was even more anxiety-inducing was that we didn't know what kind of reception the writing might get!”

According to Bei, the “Misty Poets”, as he and his friends were called, troubled the government with their writing because of the language it used, “which differed greatly from the official language to which people were accustomed.” In addition, the poetry was attacked as being too subjective and promoting individualism. Bei Dao’s writing became popular, especially among Jintian’s core fans: university students.

Bei’s writing was tacked on to the Democracy Movement, which he once apparently supported in the 1976 protests at Tiananmen Square. Over a decade later when the 1989 events of Tiananmen Square occurred, the government exiled Bei who happened to be at a literary conference in Berlin. Months earlier, Dao began a letter project which included thirty-three other signers, asking for the release of political prisoners in China.

As a poet, Bei Dao’s separation from home—and six years separation from his wife and daughter—would not stop him from writing. In Stockholm, he revived Jiantian in reaction to the 1989 Tiananmen Square events. The journal’s revival gave a voice to other Chinese writers who had been exiled or were unable to publish their work to a Chinese audience. Bei Dao’s writing, even in translation, is brilliant, widely published, and has been repeatedly nominated for a Nobel Prize. Its existence alone is a symbol of resistance against government censorship.

The Jewish People Has Lost a Warrior - Joseph Fox (A''H)

By Steve Fox

On January 14, 2012, there is one less Holocaust survivor to tell his story. That was the day that my father, Joseph Fox (A''H) a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, a proud Partisan, loving husband, father and grandfather, passed away at the young age of 89. I say young because he was rarely sick and had his full faculties until the very end. He worked until 3 years ago and he could still talk politics and sports with opinionated authority. Fortunately, his illness was short and he did not suffer very much when he died. This was in stark contrast to his youth when, as a 16 year old, he was forced to participate in forced labor groups building the walls of the infamous Warsaw Ghetto and, after escaping the Ghetto, witnessing death and destruction as he and his family hid from the Nazis.

In September of 1942, while he hid in the forest with his brother and father, the Nazis exterminated all of the Jews of Zdzhilovice, Poland, a small farming village near Lublin – including his mother, sister, and 5 cousins, whose bodies were then buried in a mass grave. I asked him how he felt when they returned to the town shortly thereafter and made the grisly discovery. He told me that they didn’t have time to mourn but had to focus on ways to survive. It seems that G-d wanted my father to survive the war and raise a family, despite many close calls and 2 bullet wounds. He emerged from the war a victor and not a victim, having joined the Stalin Brigade of Russian partisans.

He spent the last 2 years of the war blowing up supply lines and attacking Germans in the difficult terrain of the Carpathian Mountains. He once told me that the first time he had a gun and was chasing a Nazi soldier, it was a revelation to him that the soldier was scared of a Jew and could run and bleed just like anybody else. It was this realization that gave him the strength to continue and fight. Having lost both of his parents and a sister, he and his brothers made their way to the United States after the war, where his uncles were already established in the sewing machine business. After working for them for a number of years, he opened his own sewing machine business in the Garment Center and would help some of the biggest designers in the industry such as Halston, Calvin Klein, Anne Klein and many more set up their first shops in New York. He later private-labeled a line of dress forms, which found their ways into factories, colleges and productions for TV and theater.

Despite being a Holocaust survivor, he was determined to give his family a normal life, devoid of the suffering that he endured as a youth. He did not transfer his scars onto us, but he believed very strongly in educating the next generation about the horrors of the Holocaust so that the world would never forget. To that end, he was a board member of the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance Organization (WAGRO) and helped organize New York’s largest Holocaust commemorations for over 40 years. It was at that gathering in April of 2011 that the first of three significant events took place in the final year of his life.

At the commemoration, now organized by the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors, our family was chosen to light the first of 6 candles to commemorate the Shoah. In the past, they had only allowed one family member to accompany the survivor, but now our entire family joined him on stage. Three generations stood together to show the fruits of his life in America, despite overwhelming odds. Shortly thereafter, he was called by a fellow survivor in Israel, who informed him of the discovery of the mass grave where members of both their families had been killed. Not feeling up to making a long trip, he sent his children and grandchildren in his stead. My brother and I, along with my son, participated in the ceremony along with the Israeli family, 150 Israeli students in Poland for March of the Living, and government officials and students from the village.

From left to right: a representative of the President of Poland, Steve Fox, The Lasting Memory Foundation founder Zbigniew Nizinski, and Rabbi Michael Schudrich, Chief Rabbi of Poland.

In essence, we attended the belated funeral for my father’s family – complete with speeches, Kaddish, and Kail Maale Rachamim, read by the chief Rabbi of Poland. At the end, 200 of us sang Hatikvah in this killing field, showing the Nazis that we have indeed been victorious. After 69 years, my father finally got closure from that terrible part of his life.

In November, just 2 months before he died, he was one of 55 partisans honored at a dinner by the Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation. He was very excited to go and felt happy that partisans like him were being recognized for their courage and strength. At the dinner, he commented to actor Ed Asner, who read out the names of the partisans in attendance during the ceremony in their honor, that it wasn’t easy being a partisan – but it was the only way he could survive. At the end of the evening, when they sang the Partisan Hymn, he appeared to stand taller than his 5’7” frame would allow.

Joseph Fox with actor Ed Asner at JPEF's Partisan Tribute Dinner on November 7, 2011 in New York City.

To the outside world, my father was a proud survivor and a successful businessman. To us, he was a loving husband, father, and grandfather whose Chesed quietly extended to family and friends. He was successful, had a great sense of humor, and was a smart, well-rounded person. He was my mentor, my friend, my inspiration, and a role model for me and my children. May his memory be a blessing to all of us and may his heroism and compassion be an inspiration to all of Klal Yisrael.

Steve Fox is the president of Fox Marketing and Video Productions in Teaneck, NJ and Co-chair of the Teaneck Holocaust Commemoration Committee. He can be reached at foxy555@aol.com.