LAST JEWISH PARTISAN FORT IN EASTERN EUROPE | POLITICS OF MEMORY | GERMANY | FANIA YOCHELES BRANTSOVSKY | LITVAK AFFAIRS

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To date, we believe the most cohesive series of essays on these subjects is that by the inspirational Lithuanian thinker and author Leonidas Donskis (1962-2016), who asked at each juncture for English versions of these works to appear on the pages of Defending History (index of essays).

The majesty of history has her own caprices that on occasion arise just when it seems that a curtain of silence has come down over what is in plain sight. Or, to translate the Yiddish turn of phrase for such moments: Nu, so what does God do?

It turns out the territory allocated for military purposes to Germany’s Lithuanian Brigade abuts, adjoins or lies very near to the remnants of one of Lithuania’s most important Holocaust sites: the Jewish Partisan Fort, as it was universally known among World War II veterans and Holocaust survivors here, where around one hundred escapees from the Vilna Ghetto, all or nearly all Jewish, lived in underground wooden bunkers in the forest encampment, as part of the anti-Nazi network of partisans sponsored by the Soviet Union during its alliance with the United States, Great Britain and the Allies in the vast war effort to bring down Hitler. The location is the Rūdninkai training ground, in the region of Rūdninkai forest (Rudnicki forest, Lithuanian — Rūdninkų giria, Yiddish — Rudnítsker vald).

See Defending History’s 2010 report on the Jewish Partisan Fort. For around three decades, visitors from around the world were taken to the fort by Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (Brancovskaja, 1922-2024), beloved Vilna Ghetto survivor and veteran of the Jewish partisans who lived there from the day after her escape from the Vilna Ghetto on 23 September 1943, upon its liquidation by the Nazis, and through to the defeat of Nazi forces in Vilna in July 1944. From foreign tourist groups to annual Yiddish summer course students, people were inspired to follow Fania to the fort to try to imagine how the indomitable human will to survive prevailed for around one hundred fighters whose families had been murdered and who had managed to escape to the forest to join up with the anti-Nazi partisan forces (whose networks included Abba Kovner, Abraham Sutzkever, Shmerke Kaczerginski, and numerous other heroic figures of anti-Hitler resistance). Many of Fania’s trips to the fort with visitors were videotaped. See for example the 2007 video now part of the Lithuanian Yiddish Video Archive (LYVA). It was moreover her last wish that the fort be preserved and restored for posterity.

Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (Brancovskaja, 1922-2024) showed multitudes of visitors to Lithuania the remains of the “Jewish partisan fort” where she was one of around a hundred Jewish escapees from the Vilna Ghetto who joined up with the partisan resistance.

When far-right prosecutors launched kangaroo “war crimes investigations” against anti-Nazi partisan veterans Yitzhak Arad in 2006, and Fania Brantsovsky and Rachel Margolis in 2008, the international outcry eventually put a stop to them (though the defamation for the annals of history continues apace after their death — recent examples here and here — with scarcely a whimper from Fania’s “followers” for whom anything but “sentimental sweet old lady” sentiments are taboo). The 2008-2009 firewall constructed around Fania in Vilnius (Rachel was in Israel) had been spearheaded by the then ambassadors of Austria (Andrea Wicke), Britain (Simon Butt), Canada (Brian Herman / Habib Massoud), France (François Laumonier), Ireland (Dónal Denham), Norway (Steinar Gil), as well as leading figures from the American embassy, including consuls (/attachés) Joe Boski and Timothy O’Connor.

All of these diplomats proudly went with Fania to see the fort and to learn about the valiant resistance against the Nazis put up by the Jewish partisans. Moreover, Ireland’s Ambassador Denham, who inspirationally initiated and led the entire effort by the Western diplomatic corps, organized a banquet to honor Fania and issue her with a lifetime certificate of achievement. America’s Ambassador John A. Cloud issued her his own certificate of achievement presented at an embassy sponsored luncheon. In diplomatic history, this was verily the first occasion since the fall of the USSR that Western diplomats in these lands stood up forcefully and publicly to protest the abuse of prosecutorial powers to trash and delegitimize persons out of favor with state organs. A year later, German ambassador Hans-Peter Annen hosted a reception for Fania where he presented her with the German president’s Federal Cross of Merit.

Contemporaneous chronological reports on the saga are in Defending History’s Fania Brantsovky section. Moreover, the Defending History community was proud to lead the way in understanding the attempts to criminalize Jewish anti-Nazi resistance in the context of Double Genocide Holocaust revisionism, including early articles in the Guardian, Jewish Chronicle, and Irish Times that were followed over the years by papers in academic venues.

Clearly, if fate has now ordained that a brigade of forces from EU, NATO, modern democratic Germany is to be settling into a new base or military training ground anywhere near the Jewish Partisan Fort, then surely it is Germany’s — and NATO’s, and indeed Lithuania’s — high responsibility to preserve and protect the remnants of the Jewish fort from sinking further into the earth and disappear. (Already various bureaucrats are informally telling folks that the fort is “near rather than inside” the military training grounds, a cop-out that is as morally lame as it is practically unreliable — closed military training grounds have serious effects on surrounding perimeter locations, and the open dirt-road access to the fort is now open to question. For the higher realms of history, education, and historic memory of the Holocaust, preservation of the fort by the new training grounds is rather more striking than yet another photo-op rich “Holocaust memorial ceremony” in lush city centers.)

Indeed, it is an educational gift from above, and one in the spirit of the highest historic justice, for the thousands of German brigade soldiers en route “back” to Lithuania to be educated about the Holocaust, in part, precisely in the Jewish partisan fort abutting their own military training grounds, where one hundred amazing Vilna Ghetto survivors stood up to Hitler’s colossal war machine, with some of them living to make it back to the streets of Vilna in the summer of 1944.

It is sad that Chancellor Merz was perhaps not properly informed of the Holocaust resistance history of the new German training grounds, hence his silence last Thursday during the inaugural festivities. But that can now be rapidly put right by a determination of the German defense and foreign ministries, and indeed partner forces in the NATO alliance, to announce a project to restore the Jewish resistance fort, in close cooperation with Lithuanian authorities and international Holocaust commemoration organizations. Given the enormity of the Holocaust’s genocide, the one surviving Jewish fort deserves UNESCO and other protection as well.

What a magnificent opportunity for educating the young German — and other — soldiers coming to Lithuania to defend our common European freedom.

— Dovid Katz

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Acknowledgment: DefendingHistory.com thanks Birgit Kraemer (Cologne) and Mantautas Šulskis (Vilnius) for informing us that the new German military base is near the site of the Jewish partisan fort in the forest. Neither is responsible for any part of the content of this article, and we hope both will publish their own views in due course.