The Bielski Brothers

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Robert Bielski, Tuvia’s son, recalled that his father was a man of few words and strong principle: “He was proud, and he never talked about himself as a hero but always about the responsibility that we should all feel to the Jewish people. He was the calmest man, but he had a rare temper. If he was on the verge of losing it, you knew—abandon ship!” Assaela Bielski, Asael’s daughter, who never got to meet her father, had come from Israel, where she works as a journalist. “The strange thing is that my mother had such beautiful memories of their time in the forest, maybe because that was the only time they were together,” she said. “They had grown up right there. My mother’s stories were always funny, romantic—about how young and beautiful everyone was. And it would always be funny—they would laugh endlessly, say, when a German airplane dropped a bomb in the wrong place. Is that tragic or funny? I don’t know.”

Zvi Bielski, Zus’s son, has a lot of memories. “My father was a very, very aggressive person, but he never hit me,” he said. He described walking in Central Park once with his father, then in his sixties, and coming upon a mounted police officer whose horse was acting up. “My father just approached the horse, which was bucking wildly—the cop was embarrassed—and my dad just calmed it down. That’s how gentle he was.”

He went on, “My dad came to visit me in Israel when I was in the Army. First he told me not to go—but when he came to visit he was so proud. He took the gun out of my hands, handled it like a pair of sneakers. ‘Never have your gun on safety,’ he told me. He was a great father, but he was hard to impress. I used to skydive, and once I had a videotape made—a cameraman jumped out with me. I couldn’t wait to get to Brooklyn to show it to Dad! So I showed him the tape. Nothing, no expression. So, finally, I say, ‘Pop, did you see that shit!’ He looked at me: ‘So? You had a parachute, didn’t you?’ ” ♦

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2008/10/27/081027ta_talk_gopnik#ixzz0mVHti2Po
Son of famed Bielski brother tells Palm Harbor audience how trio saved Jews from Nazis

By Terri Bryce Reeves, Times Correspondent
In Print: Thursday, January 7, 2010

The image of actor Daniel Craig, who played Tuvia Bielski in the movie Defiance, is superimposed on Zvi Bielski as he speaks.

[TERRI BRYCE REEVES | Special to the Times]

PALM HARBOR — In 1941, as the Jews of Eastern Europe were being massacred by the tousands, the Bielski brothers took refuge in a dense Polish forest filled with wolves, poisonous snakes, swamps and frigid temperatures during the winterIt was there they staged their revenge for the deaths of their parents, family members and friends.

The horrific actions by the German Nazis turned Tuvia, Asael and Zus Bielski (approximate ages were 33, 30 and 27 at the time) into guerrilla fighters as well as tender-hearted souls who created a makeshift village in the woods to shelter and protect more than 1,200 Jews.

Five generations later, "20,000 Jewish people are alive because of the work the Bielski brothers," said Zvi Bielski of Brooklyn, N.Y.

Zvi Bielski, the son of Zus Bielski, visited the Chabad of Pinellas County in Palm Harbor on Tuesday night to share some of the brothers' heroic stories as told in the 2008 movie Defiance.

He warned the audience the stories weren't pretty, as the Bielskis made sure those responsible paid dearly for Jewish deaths.

"They survived by killing Nazis," said Zvi Bielski, who would say only he's in his 50s. "They took their heads off and put them on trees so when others came to the forest they would know that the partisans were waiting for them. They killed to save Jewish people."

As they eliminated the Nazis searching for them, they collected their weapons and explosives.

The Bielski Brigade also let it be known that they wouldn't tolerate those who turned in their Jewish brothers to the German occupiers.

On a couple of occasions, they went to Polish homes, killed the families and burned their houses down.

Nothing was taken, Zvi Bielski said, "but it left a sign that if you turn in a Jew, this is what will happen to you."

Tuvia Bielski was Zvi's uncle. In the movie, he was played by actor Daniel Craig, perhaps better known as the latest James Bond.

"He was the commander and most famous," he said. Tuvia Bielski declared they would save every single Jew they could find: "the sick, the old, the young, the rabbi — everybody. It didn't make a difference. That was the goal."

Bielski's father was played by actor Liev Schreiber, whom Zvi thought did a wonderful job.

It was in the forest that Zus met his future wife, Sonja, who was 17 then.

Zus Bielski wanted her to sleep with him, but she negotiated for him to save her parents first from a ghetto. He did and lived to be 83.

Before coming to Palm Harbor, Bielski asked his mother, now 89 and in failing health, for something special to share with the audience.

She thought for a time then said, "Tell them I was a very, very, very pretty girl."

The line drew lots of laughs and Bielski passed around copies of her picture at 17 so people could judge for themselves.

Food was scare for those hiding in the woods, but the partisans eventually built communal kitchens, living quarters, a school and synagogues — even a bakery.

The brothers also met and befriended members of the Russian army.

The Russians loved the Bielskis, Bielski said, for reasons other than that they were both fighting a common enemy.

"One, they were tall, big, strong guys that walked around with machine guns and they knew the area," he said. "Two, they could drink more vodka than them. Third, they had more girlfriends."

Before his death, Zus Bielski told his son he had only one regret.

"I wish I could have saved more," he said.

It was Zus' obituary that ran on Aug. 23, 1995 in the New York Times that would inspire the movie's screenwriter and director to collaborate on the film.

Tuvia Bielski's grandson, Brendon Rennert, 41, lives in Tampa and serves on the board of directors for the Florida Holocaust Museum.

He was there for Tuesday night's presentation.

"I've heard lots of stories all my life from people that the brothers saved," he said.

Raphael Cohen, 70, lives in Indian Rocks Beach, along with his mother-in-law, Mini Friedman. She's 95 and a concentration camp survivor.

He said the Bielski brothers did what no one else could.

"They had the courage to establish a small army to save their own," he said.

Brian Rocklin, 74, of Palm Harbor said the presentation was inspirational.

"It reminds us how precious the freedom we have in America is," he said.

"We have to have the strength and resolve to protect that freedom."

Crafting Beauty From Despair: Violins of Hope
Music

AMNON WEINSTEIN
Master Luthier: Weinstein at work in his Tel Aviv atelier.

By Peter Duffy
Published April 29, 2009, issue of May 08, 2009.

Soon after landing in Tel Aviv a few years ago, I found myself in the atelier of Amnon Weinstein, a renowned violin maker on Shlomo Hamelech Street. I had come to Israel in search of Jewish partisans, those exceptional individuals who had not only risen up against Hitler in Eastern Europe, but also, soon afterward, had defended an Israeli state struggling for life. Weinstein, as it happens, married into partisan royalty: His wife, Asaela — or Assi, as she is known — is the daughter of Asael Bielski, the second of the three Bielski brothers (made famous by Edward Zwick’s recent film “Defiance”) who saved 1,200 Jews in the occupied Soviet Union during World War II.

While my mission was to find Assi, I couldn’t help but be enchanted by the aura of Weinstein’s workshop: the scent of varnish, the instruments in various states of construction, the steady succession of friends and musicians. At the center of it was the distinctive figure of Weinstein himself. With his bushy mustache flecked with bits of wood shavings, and glasses perched at the end of his nose, he looked every bit the master craftsman, right down to his brusque disinterest in suffering fools. “Are you serious about this project?” he asked me bluntly.

Indeed, his credentials as an artisan are impeccable. He learned his art at the side of his father, Moshe, who was born in Vilnius (known also as Vilna) and began servicing Bronislaw Huberman’s newly established Israel Philharmonic Orchestra when he arrived in Tel Aviv in 1938. Moshe Weinstein provided the first violins for youngsters with names like Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman and Shlomo Mintz. Amnon then went to Europe, where he was tutored by such masters as Étienne Vatelot of Paris and Pietro Sgarabotto of the northern Italian city of Cremona, birthplace of the Stradivarius violin. He took over his father’s shop the day the old man died.

When I met him, Weinstein was in the midst of a project, begun in 1996, to locate and restore violins played by Jews in the ghettos, camps and forests during the Holocaust. In Israel, the effort has recently received a fair amount of attention. In September 2008, 16 of the instruments — Weinstein has found some 20 in all — were played at a gala concert at the foot of the walls of the Old City in Jerusalem, featuring the Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic and the Ra’anana Symphony Orchestra. The Jerusalem- and Paris-based agency BluePress has chronicled Weinstein’s project with a sumptuous book of photographs by Lucille Reyboz and a just-completed documentary film by Jean-Marie Hosatte. The company is currently negotiating to have the film, “Amnon’s Journey,” shown in the United States.

“If you have very good ears and you are listening, it’s unbelievable what you can hear when these violins are played,” Weinstein said. “You can hear the suffering.”

Perhaps the most celebrated of Weinstein’s violins is one that relates to the tradition of resistance embodied by his wife’s family. It was brought to him in 2000 by Seffi Hanegbi, a tour guide in the Negev desert who is also of celebrated partisan lineage: He is the grandson of Moshe Gildenman, the Jewish partisan commander in Ukraine renowned as “Diadia Misha” or “Uncle Misha.” Gildenman, a native of the town of Korets, led a unit with his son (Seffi’s father), Simcha, primarily in the Zhitomir region, conducting a wide variety of guerrilla missions against the German occupiers and their collaborators.

Hanegbi arrived at the workshop with an unremarkable German-made violin in a battered case, an artifact that had been gathering dust in the family home for decades. “It was a common instrument for all the Jewish people,” Weinstein said. “Simple, not expensive, nothing special.” Hanegbi described to Weinstein how the violin belonged to a partisan, the youngest member of Gildenman’s group, a blond-haired boy known as Motele.

LEFT: AMNON WEINSTEIN; RIGHT: YAD VASHEM ARTIFACTS, GIFT Of YOUSEF HANEGBI, ARAD AND ZAHAVA SHANNI
Master Luthier: A transformation his labor wrought.

Motele’s story is the stuff of legend. Gildenman’s fighters discovered him one day, sleeping in the woods. The 12-year-old son of a miller from the village of Karsnovka, Mordechai Schlein had fled to the forest after his parents and younger sister were killed in an aktion. After joining the Jewish outfit — one of several detachments within a 1,500-strong Soviet partisan brigade — Schlein was selected by Gildenman to travel with several other partisans into the village of Ovruch on August 20, 1943, according to Gildenman’s memoirs.

Armed with false papers in case he was questioned, Schlein was instructed to join a crowd of beggars in front of the church and to play Ukrainian folk tunes on his violin. His mission was merely to keep an eye out for his fellow partisans and alert his commanders if anything happened to them.

But the boy had talent. Soon a crowd gathered to hear the melodies he remembered from his neighbors back home. Among the spectators was a German officer, who plucked him from his spot and took him to a restaurant favored by the occupiers. He was told to perform with an elderly piano player, who spread out sheet music for Paderewski’s Minuet, a popular but difficult piece written by the Polish composer. Schlein played so well that he was offered a job to perform there every day.

One day, he noticed large cracks in one of the restaurant’s storage rooms, and he hatched a plan to place explosives in the fissures. Since it was now harvest time, and there was frequent traffic between village and countryside, Schlein was able to sneak into the woods and, using his violin case, gradually transport 18 kilograms of incendiary material into the building, shoving the explosives into the cellar walls during breaks in his playing schedule.

Then he waited for the opportune moment to strike. It came when members of an SS division visited on their way to the front. After playing deep into the evening with his accompanist, Schlein adjourned to the basement as the drunken Germans took over the piano. “In the dark he found the end of the bomb wick and ignited it,” Gildenman wrote. “When he came to the exit, he slowed down and approached the German guard and allowed himself a joke. He held up his right arm and called out, ‘Heil Hitler!’” Schlein was 200 yards away when the bombs detonated, killing an unknown number of Germans. Upon reaching his fellow partisans, Schlein raised a clenched fist to the sky and said, “This is for my parents and little Bashiale.”

Schlein would not survive the war. He was just 14 when he was killed during a German bombardment in 1944. Gildenman took possession of his violin, carrying it with him to Berlin, then Paris and finally Israel, where he died in 1958.

After Weinstein completed restoration work on the violin — it was in relatively good shape, he says — Hanegbi donated it to Yad Vashem with the stipulation that it be available for performances. Last September, a teenage boy named David Strongin played what is known as “Motele’s violin” during the concert at the walls of the Old City, joining the great Mintz on “Hatikvah” to conclude the evening. On Monday, April 20, Strongin played it again during the opening ceremonies for Yad Vashem’s commemoration of Yom HaShoah.

“I cry,” Hanegbi said when asked how he responds to hearing the instrument produce music. “It’s true, really. Every time I hear the violin play, I have tears in my eyes.”

Peter Duffy is the author of “The Bielski Brothers” (Harper Perennial, 2004).
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Sharon Rennert, granddaughter, Robert Bielski, son, and Ruth Bielski Ehrreich, daughter of Tuvia Bielski