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About the Book

Drawing from interviews with and written accounts by survivors, The Minsk Ghetto 1941-1943 recounts a chapter in Holocaust history that runs counter to the familiar story of the abandonment of the Jews by their neighbors. Unlike Warsaw, Vilna, and elsewhere in Poland and Lithuania, where Jews found few allies outside the ghettos, in Minsk Jews and Byelorussians worked together to stymie German efforts. Due to close collaboration between the Jewish underground inside the ghetto and the Byelorussian underground outside it, and also ties between Jews and Byelorussians who did not belong to the underground, approximately ten thousand Jews escaped the ghetto and reached partisan units in the forest. This book tells the story of how Jews and Byelorussians worked together to defeat the Germans and to save Jewish lives, and addresses the question of why such collaboration was so much more widespread in Minsk than in the cities of Poland and Lithuania. Before the German occupation Minsk had been a Soviet city: its young people had grown up imbued with Soviet internationalism, with the concept of “the friendship of peoples of different nationalities.” Minsk’s young people had been taught that opposing anti-Semitism was a matter of pride and a mark of patriotism. Elsewhere in Eastern Europe the Germans were able to capitalize on right-wing nationalist perspectives that cast Jews Communists and as enemies of the nations in which they lived. In Byelorussia nationalism had never taken hold. The invading Germans were stunned to find a local Byelorussian population that was unreceptive to their efforts to incite pogroms, and that regarded the Jews as human beings like themselves. . Origins of the Book “I grew up in the left—the New York left—and from an early age, I heard about the Holocaust and about Jewish resistance. In high school I already had one foot in the general left—protesting bomb testing--and the Jewish left: I spent two summers on kibbutzim connected to Hashomer Hatzair, a Marxist-Zionist youth movement." Barbara Epstein’s father was born in a shtetl near Bialystok, and came to the United States as a child. From an early age, Barbara was interested in learning Yiddish, the first language of her father. Wanting to read left-Yiddish literature in the original, she began her studies at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City and continued on to a summer program at the University of Vilnius, in 1997. For an assigned paper to be written and presented in Yiddish, she researched the Vilna Ghetto Underground and Jewish Holocaust resistance. Barbara’s work on the Holocaust and Jewish resistance took her to Belarus, formerly Soviet Byelorussia. There, with the help of interpreters and translators, she sought out survivors of the Minsk Ghetto who had been involved in the struggle. Stories of a Communist-led resistance movement inside the ghetto emerged: of Byelorussians saving Jews, and Byelorussians working with the Jews in solidarity against the Germans. Unlike the ghettos of Warsaw, Kovno, and Vilna, where the local population, on the whole, turned its back on the Jews, in German-occupied Soviet Minsk, something different happened. Jews and Byelorussian, members of the underground and ordinary citizen, risked their lives to create a cross-ethnic alliance against the Nazis. “I was so used to the idea that Jewish resistance meant Jews fighting the Germans alone, that at first, I didn’t think this qualified as Jewish resistance. But then it occurred to me: what I was discovering was interesting precisely because these stories were so different from those we already knew about local abandonment. Theses stories were about saving lives, about alliances and solidarity across ethnic lines.” . Praise for The Minsk Ghetto "Barbara Epstein has written a revelatory book. Arduously and carefully, she brings to light and to life an aspect of the Holocaust in Belarus that we did not know, showing us that the victims were not only victims but also fighters. And so were a good many people who were not Jews, yet joined with them to resist Nazi brutality." Frances Fox Piven, author of Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America . "When historian Barbara Epstein traveled to Minsk to learn Yiddish, the language of her ancestors, she got more than she bargained for. An amazing, forgotten story emerged that ran against the grain of almost all accounts of the Holocaust. The Minsk Ghetto is an invaluable, and deeply moving addition to Holocaust and World War II history." Richard Walker, author of The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area . "This richly researched, beautifully written account of one of the most important instances of inter-ethnic solidarity and resistance in face of the Holocaust packs an analytic punch as powerful as its emotional one." Leo Panitch, author of Renewing Socialism: Democracy, Strategy and Imagination . "Surrounded by mud and barbed wire, the Minsk Ghetto played home to an unknown tale of Jewish courage during World War II. But if Berkeley historian Barbara Epstein has her way, it won’t remain unknown for long." Dan Pine, book review: “The Ghetto Nobody Knows,” J. The Jewish Weekly, 8/22/08 . "...a highly valuable contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust, Byelorussian and Soviet history, and World War Two." Jennifer Foray, Department of History, Purdue University, book review: Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, Fall 2009, Vol 28, No. 1 . Reviews and Interviews J. The Jewish Weekly, The Ghetto Nobody Knows, Review and interview with Dan Pine, August 22, 2008. . KPFA Against the Grain: Solidarity Against the Nazis, Interview with Ramsey Kamaan, August 26, 2008. Audio interview . Jerusalem Post, Flight or Fight, extract from review by Contributing Edtior Matt Nesvisky, September 28, 2008. Alternate translation of full review with criticism from Leonid Smilovitsky, Tel Aviv University. . History in Review, "The Minsk Ghetto 1941-1943", review by Simone Bonim, November 14, 2008. . Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, Fall 2009, Vol 28, No. 1, book review by Jennifer Foray, Department of History, Purdue University. . About the Author Barbara Epstein holds a Ph.D. in American History from University of California, Berkeley, and is a member of the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Epstein is recipient of many awards and grants, including the Rockefeller Foundation, the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and the Humanities Research Institute of the University of California at Irvine. Her articles about political and social movements in the United States have appeared in numerous scholarly journals. Political Protest and Cultural Revolutions: Nonviolent Direct Action in the 1970s and 1980s was published by the University of California Press. Epstein’s most recent book, The Minsk Ghetto 1941-1943, describes the collaboration of Jews and Byelorussians in resisting German occupation during World War II and examines why Jews encountered something other than hatred and anti-Semitism outside the ghetto walls. . Buy the Book The Minsk Ghetto 1941-1943 is available from the following booksellers. Click the icon to go to the website. . . . Contact Barbara Epstein is available for interviews, speaking engagements and book readings. . Contact Audrey M. Berger, Publicist, 510-233-2786, email . Website designed and maintained by Kim Beeman, Engineering Design .