Opinion | The Last Jewish Partisan Fort | History | Blaming the Victims | Germany
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AI is no replacement for original historical research. But AI is a good place to start compiling a list from well-known and widely available published sources. This was the first result of a query about the names of known Jewish partisans who spent part of their time during the Holocaust at the Rūdninkai (Rudnitsker) Jewish partisan fort in Lithuania.
A first look yielded 403 Jewish partisans who were based at the fort during some or all their time in the anti-Nazi resistance.
Its survival is now imminently threatened by the arrival of Germany’s Panzerbrigade 45, which is situated, as fate would have it, adjacent to this last relic of Jewish partisan resistance in Lithuania. The Panzerbrigade’s infrastructure (barracks building, road creation, deforestation, no-access days because of shooting practice, signs warning people away, building workers’ partying). Since Solveig Grothe’s article in Der Spiegel last June, part of the ensuing discussion in Lithuanian social media, and a few mainstream media articles, has included far-right talking points along the lines of “there were no Jewish partisans, this was all a Soviet invention after the war for propaganda purposes” (among other typical history-revisionist claims). Somewhat similar sentiments have been officially declared by Lithuania’s Culture Ministry (which is responsible for whether a site counts as a heritage site worthy of preservation) in its replies to the media over the last six months. Panzerbrigade 45’s lavish PR has not to date mentioned the existence of the Jewish partisan fort that abuts it, though it has engaged in extensive “Jewish cred” work, all of it laudable, including scrubbing old gravestones in cemeteries elsewhere, doing photo-ops with the head of the Jewish museum on its roof, and participating in the state’s Holocaust memorial day commemoration on September 23rd.
Here, merely as a starting point, is AI’s response, unedited. Hopefully the relevant history institutions internationally will now rise to the occasion of developing and documenting the list of Jewish Holocaust survivors (whose families were all massacred) who survived the war by joining the partisans and spent part of their time as fighters at the Rūdninkai / Rudnitsker base.
It is the only surviving remnant of the Jewish anti-Nazi resistance in Lithuania.
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Numbered Rūdninkai / Rudnitsker Partisan Working Roster
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1. Abramovich, Shlomo — [3, 10]. Born 1914; named in the Kovno account’s order for six fallen partisans [3]; also in the Lexicon [10, p. 42].
2. Abramowicz, Dina — [1a].
