Mourning the Loss of Jewish Partisan Benjamin Levin

We went on actions, like cutting telephone poles. A bridge - to destroy something. They always liked to go with me because I knew the forest, and had the instinct in the forest - how to move and where to go and what's going on.
— Benjamin Levin

Fourteen-year-old Benjamin Levin escaped execution when Germany invaded his hometown of Vilna in July 1941. A plucky young man, accustomed to running around the streets with his friends, he knew the area well and managed to evade Nazi capture during the first weeks of the occupation.
Tipped off by friends, Benjamin and his family fled from the village before the Vilna ghetto was erected, but they later returned during what they perceived to be a period of relative calm. Unfortunately, this calm was short lived and violence against the Jews continued to erupt. Deciding that it was not safe to remain in Vilna, Benjamin’s father Chaim encouraged him to escape to the woods with a group of other young Jews, and join the fighting partisan units.
Benjamin and his companions joined a brigade composed of Jews, Russians, Poles and Lithuanians, led by an old forester whose expertise kept the city boys alive. Upon the complete liquidation of the ghetto, other survivors from Vilna joined them.
Although he was a teenager, Benjamin knew the forests well and was well acquainted with the customs of the local peasants. These traits made him a valuable asset to the group on food and supply raids, and on missions to destroy bridges.

While Benjamin survived the war, and witnessed the liberation of Vilna, sadly the Nazis and their collaborators killed his parents and older brother. After the war, he made aliyah to Israel where he married and had two children.
Visit www.jewishpartisans.org for more about Benjamin Levin, including five videos of him reflecting on his time as a partisan. The NY Post featured Benjamin in a April 2017 article.

Benjamin passed away on April 13, 2020.

Afraid to Eat, Jewish Partisan Faye Schulman Risked Her Life Observing Passover

"Every picture has a story. This is a picture when I was accepted into the Partisans but many Jewish people escaped from ghettos, from concentration camps and they were not accepted in the Partisans because they had families. They had little children, so they were in in the woods hiding. But the Partisans had an obligation and they felt they should do it to bring them and to bring them to deliver to them some food so they would survive even without joining the Partisans."
— Faye Schulman.

Faye Schulman was born to a large family on November 28, 1919 in Lenin, Poland. She learned photography from her brother Moishe and assisted him in his photography business. On August 14, 1942, the Germans killed 1,850 Jews from the Lenin ghetto, including Faye's parents, sisters and younger brother. They spared only 26 people that day, among them was Faye for her photographic abilities. The Germans ordered Faye to develop their photographs of the massacre. Secretly, she also made copies for herself.

During a partisan raid, Faye fled to the forests and joined the Molotava Brigade, a partisan group made mostly of escaped Soviet Red Army POWs. She was accepted because her brother-in-law had been a doctor and they were desperate for anyone with experience in medicine. Faye served the group as a nurse from September 1942 to July 1944, even though she had no previous medical experience, assisting the camp’s doctor, a veterinarian.

During a raid on Lenin, Faye succeeded in recovering her old photography equipment. During the next two years, she took over a hundred photographs, developing the medium format negatives under blankets and making “sun prints” during the day. On missions Faye buried the camera and tripod to keep it safe. Her photos show a rare side of partisan activity – one is of a funeral scene where two Jewish partisans are being buried alongside Russian partisans, despite the intense antisemitism in the group. In another image, Schulman and three young Jewish men smile joyously after an unexpected reunion in the forest—each believing that the other had been killed.
"I want people to know that there was resistance. Jews did not go like sheep to the slaughter. I was a photographer. I have pictures. I have proof.” She is the only known Jewish partisan photographer.
After liberation, Faye married Morris Schulman, another Jewish partisan. Faye and Morris enjoyed a prosperous life as decorated Soviet partisans, but wanted to leave Pinsk, Poland, which reminded them of a "graveyard." Morris and Faye lived in the Landsberg Displaced Persons Camps in Germany for the next three years, and immigrated to Canada in 1948.

Today Faye lives in Toronto, Canada and shares her experiences with diverse audiences. She has two children and six grandchildren.
The photographs she took during the war have been turned into a traveling photography exhibition entitled Pictures of Resistance: The Wartime Photography of Jewish Partisan Faye Schulman. The exhibit is produced by the Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation and curated by Jill Vexler, Ph.D. In 2010, her book A Partisan's Memoir: Woman of the Holocaust was published.
Visit www.jewishpartisans.org for more about Faye Schulman, including six videos of her reflecting on her time as a partisan and information about the Pictures of Resistance exhibit.

David Broudo - Born April 8, 1924 in Saloniki, Greece

In 1941, the Germans occupied Greece, dividing the country among the Fascist Italians and Bulgarians and establishing a Greek collaborationist government to control the important regions of Athens and Thessaloniki (or Saloniki). This is where David Broudo was born in 1924. Descendants of the Sephardic Jews were exiled from Spain in 1492, and some made their way to Greece. The Broudo family had lived in Saloniki since the days of the Ottoman Empire.

Greece's involvement in WWII began in October of 1940 when Mussolini ordered an Italian invasion through Albania. The Greek army not only managed to successfully repel the attack, they also drove the Italians back, occupied a quarter of Albania, and subdued 530,000 Italian troops. Although this was the first victory for Allied forces in WWII, the Germans immediately closed in on Greece through Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, bringing an end to the Greco-Italian War and beginning the Nazi occupation of Greece. Over the next year and a half, the Jewish Greek population became increasingly marginalized, and in 1943, the entire Broudo family was deported.

Unlike other members of his family, who were sent directly to Germany, David was sent to a holding camp near Lamia, Greece. With one desperate and courageous attempt, David leapt onto the roof of a passing train, escaping the grasp of the Nazis.

David made his way to the forest where he came across a brigade of Greek andartes, the Greek guerrilla fighters who first appeared in the mountains of Macedonia in 1941. Once Broudo revealed his identity, he learned that the resistance group contained other Jewish members. For the next year, David fought as a guerrilla resistance fighter with the andartes, participating in the pitched gun battles of Crete and Lamia, during which many of his comrades fell to German bullets.

David Broudo (far right) with the Greek partisans, 1943

He helped destroy the supply lines the Germans had established for their campaign in North Africa by blowing up bridges and trains, sabotaging the train tracks. Most ingeniously, he smuggled munitions supplies destined for the resistance movement in Athens, past the German blockades, by emptying milk barrels and filling them with guns. His fighting prowess earned him an officer’s commission with the Greek resistance. By the time of the liberation he was planning and executing sabotage missions, as well as interrogating high-ranking German prisoners.

In 1944, Broudo and almost 50,000 other Greeks were imprisoned for their war efforts. From the prison, David was sent with forty-five other men to a desolate Greek island where he spent three and a half years, afterwards being transferred to prisons in Agrinio, Corfu, Oiru, Lamia, Zakynthos, and Evia. Of the experience Broudo said:

“This was a Greek island that was empty of human beings, only the wind. Not one person was on this island. The sea winds moved and nothing else. No one lived there. They would come and bring water and speak with ships once a week if they could enter. The water on the island was saltwater. Once, they didn't show up for a month. Airplanes flew over and dumped water and that was it.”

After the liberation, David's partisan efforts continued. As he described in a JPEF interview:

“After liberation, we went there and waged war against the English, against those who sat in Cairo. But in Cairo, half of them were Communists. Those people in Cairo who escaped Greece when the Germans invaded included officers, half of whom were Communists. The English were put into jails in Cairo. Afterwards, they were brought to Greece, and they were with the king and tanks. For the first time, I saw these tanks that Churchill brought with him, him being in Libertania in a hotel.”

When the war ended, David was sentenced to death by Greek authorities. His sentence was later commuted to life in prison and in 1956 he was deported to Israel where he lived until his death on January 16, 2011. Several decades after the war, the Greek government recognized David Broudo and the efforts of the partisan fighters.

David Broudo and other partisans, date unknown.

Broudo wrote an article entitled “Saloniki Memories,” about his experience in the war, and collaborated with another Jewish andarte on a book about the history of the Saloniki Jews.

Watch JPEF's interviews with David Broudo.

2020 International Holocaust Remembrance Day - 75th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau

This year's International Holocaust Remembrance Day also happens to be the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp by the Soviet Red Army. The day has been commemorated around the world since the UN passed a resolution on the matter a decade ago, on the 60th anniversary of the camp's liberation.


This day is an excellent opportunity to introduce students to the tens of thousands of Jewish Partisans who fought against the Nazis and their collaborators.

During this week, use our free 'Finding Leadership' curriculum to encourage your students to challenge their assumptions about leadership and authority, and inspire them to step up and make a difference.

Using the framework described by Ronald Heifetz in his book, "Leadership Without Easy Answers," our curated educational resources allow students to explore leadership as a set of activities anyone can perform — regardless of who is 'the leader', invoking life lessons from young partisans who proved that young people can make a difference.

As we mark this day and honor those who lost their lives to the Nazi regime, we are also reminded of the perils of bigotry and xenophobia. This day bears even more importance as we witness anti-Semitic attacks on the rise around the world.

For more information on resistance from within the concentration camps, visit: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-sonderkommando

Visit our enhanced E-Learning site at www.jewishpartisans.org/elearning and download our lesson plans at http://www.jewishpartisans.org/curriculum.

Max Cukier (z"l), born on January 23, 1918

"We had food what can eat thousand people, we were going in special my group what I was with the commander. We were going in to farmers where they lived close to big cities, but they never, Russian partisans was afraid, we not afraid, we're going in. They have food, so much of it, and pigs, cows. We took 10 pigs, you know, the meat in the summertime was too hot you no can eat, it's too hot, the meat. We have so much to eat." — Max Cukier.

Max Cukier was born into a Hassidic family in Ryki, Poland, on January 23, 1918. Growing up as a pacifist, Max never imagined he would carry a machine gun. This changed with the outbreak of the war. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Max fled to Soviet occupied territory, eventually ending up in Belarus.

For the next two years he lived as a Polish refugee, persecuted by the Soviet government as a non-citizen. When the Nazis began their attack against Russia in 1941, Max went into hiding, traveling from village to village in search of food and shelter.

Early in 1942 Max saw that hiding in villages was becoming too dangerous, and he took to the woods. In the forest, he made contact with other Jewish refugees, as well as some escaped Russian POWs. Eventually he joined the famous Bielski Brigade, a combination partisan unit and family camp. Taking initiative, Max began to organize small units and lead missions, bombing bridges and masterminding a daring attack on a German bunker using an abandoned Soviet tank. During this time, Max met and married his wife, and she began to accompany him on missions, becoming his lookout.

After liberation, Max first joined the Red Army and then defected from the USSR, escaping into Italy. In Italy, he became involved with several Zionist organizations, becoming an acquaintance of Golda Meir, Israel's future prime minister. He traveled to Israel, and in 1948 came to the U.S. under the auspices of the Zionist Cultural Congress.

Over time, Max focused on building a new life as a civilian, started an importing business, and eventually moved to Los Angeles, where he raised three children and three grandchildren.

Max passed away January 17, 2011.

Visit www.jewishpartisans.org for more about Max Cukier, including five videos of him reflecting on his time as a partisan.

Celebrating the Life of Jewish Partisan Cesia Blaichman (z''l)

Cesia Blaichman (z"l)


As a teenager in Wlodawa, Poland, Cesia Blaichman (z''l) and her three brothers escaped from the Nazis with the help of her cousin, Joe Holm (z"l). Holm brought her and her three brothers to join his all Jewish partisan brigade. In April 1944, Frank Blaichman’s partisan unit joined the group, and Cesia met the man who would become her husband of 70 years. Frank recounted the extraordinary story of their combat, heroism, and ultimate triumph, in his memoir, "Rather Die Fighting".

As a Jewish partisan, Cesia fought bravely against the Nazis and their collaborators in the forests and small villages near Lublin. She nursed the wounded, cooked for her fellow partisans and participated in operations to ensure the safety of other Jews. She and her three brothers survived the war, but their parents, sisters, and many relatives perished.

Cesia and Frank married after the war and emigrated to New York where they raised a family dedicated to promoting the Jewish partisan legacy, and to ensuring that future generations are empowered to stand up against hatred and oppression.

Cesia and Frank Blaichman on their wedding day.

Frank Blaichman talks about meeting Cesia, and the impact she made on his life, in JPEF’s film "Every Day the Impossible: Women in the Partisans".

Sadly, Cesia passed away on September 24, 2015, surrounded by her family. We extend our deepest condolences to the Blaichman, Sekons and Pomeranc families.

May Cesia’s memory be a blessing. Learn more about Cesia Blaichman's inspirational life.

Featured Jewish Partisan - Joseph Greenblatt, born on August 5th, 1915

"I lost my family – lost my father, my mother, my brother, lost all the close relatives, and that was about 70 members of my closest family. It was tough to talk about it, and the refresh bring it back to your memory. It was painful. But as the time was going by, and I felt the story which I know firsthand has to be told." — Joseph Greenblatt.

Joseph Greenblatt was born in Warsaw on August 5, 1915. He learned about resistance from his father, an army captain who had fought for Polish independence during WWI. At 18, Joe enlisted in the Polish army as an infantryman, and became an officer in 1938. In 1939, he was mobilized and sent to the Polish-German border. He witnessed the German invasion directly, and fought for almost twenty days before being taken prisoner and sent to a German POW camp. It was in the camp that he began to establish connections with the newly formed Armia Krajowa (AK). The AK hijacked a German truck and transported Joe to a hospital, freeing him and his fellow prisoners.

Joe returned to Warsaw only to find the Jewish population of the city walled into a newly formed ghetto. Though they were imprisoned, the Jews of Warsaw were far from passive; underground resistance units had already begun to form. Joe used his army connections to amass a stockpile of black market weapons. There he also met and married his wife, the younger sister of a comrade in arms.
In the spring of 1943, rumors of a full-scale liquidation began to circulate. Joe and the other partisan commanders decided it was time to act. Disguised as Nazis, they attacked German soldiers as they entered the ghetto. Joe remembers how men from his unit threw a Molotov cocktail into a tank, destroying it and killing several Germans. Joe eventually escaped from the ghetto through the sewer system, emerging in the Gentile quarter. Hiding his identity with a Christian alias, Joe made contact with his old POW comrades and joined the AK. For a while, he worked as a member of the Polish underground, raiding a German train depot and aiding in the assassination of a prominent SS official. In late 1944, he was remobilized with the Polish army.

When Germany surrendered, Joe was working as the commander of a camp of German POWs. After the war, Joe went to work for the Irgun under the command of Menachem Begin, traveling between Belgium and Israel as an arms dealer.

Joseph and his wife eventually moved to the United States, settling in Anaheim, California. Sadly, Joe passed away on March 11, 2003 at the age of 87.

Visit www.jewishpartisans.org for more about Joseph Greenblatt, including four videos of him reflecting on his time as a partisan.

Left: Joseph Greenblatt and his wife Irene, 1944. Right: Joseph and Irene, 1978.