A historical injustice: The case of Masha Bruskina

Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Volumn 11, Issue 3, 1997, Pages 366-377

  Tec, Nechama ^a   Weiss, Daniel ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT   (United States)

^b JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 63849160039     PISSN: 87566583     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/hgs/11.3.366     Document Type: Article

References (48)

1. See for example the 11th Army's "Memorandum on Use of Troops Against Partisans," of 15 December 1941 in Matthew Cooper, The Phantom War: The German Struggle Against Soviet Partisans 1941-1944 (London: MacDonald and Janes, 1979), p. 184
2. The testimony of Nina Antonovna Zhevzhik was given to Lev Arkadiev and Ada Dikhtiar
3. In Lev Arkadiev and Ada Dikhtiar, "The Unknown Girl: A Documentary Story," Yiddish Writers' Almanac 1 (1987), p. 187
4. This photo appears in Michael Berenbaum, The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Museum (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), p. 174
5. Zhevzhik
6. The directive appears in "Memorandum on Use of Troops Against Partisans," p. 181
7. On the history of the photos, see Arkadiev and Dikhtiar, pp. 161-204
8. Arkadiev and Dikhtiar have generously provided copies of this material to the authors and to the Archives of the Research Institute at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
9. Although reluctant to support Masha's recognition before the authorities, Zair Azgur provided sworn testimony first in 1968 and then shortly before his death more than twenty years later. The latter is an emotional elegy to his cousin in which he writes, "The brilliance of her eyes faded, the unspoken supplication never left her lips. And all her dreams entered into another world. . . . Among my most dear people, she is the dearest."
10. Hersh Smolar, The Minsk Ghetto: Soviet-Jewish Partisans Against the Nazis (New York: Holocaust Library, 1989), pp. 32-33
11. Arkadiev and Dikhtiar
12. See J. Miller, One by One, by One (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), pp. 171-85
13. and B. Keller, "Echo of '41 in Minsk: Was the Heroine a Jew?," New York Times, 15 September 1987
14. For example, Raisa Chernoglazova, Director of the Partisan Division of the Belorussian State Museum of the History of the Great Patriotic War, published in 1996 and 1997 a series of documents entitled The Tragedy and Heroism of the Jews of Belorussia During the Years of the Great Fatherland War 1941-1944 (in Russian) and has made important progress in presenting to the Belorussian public the contribution of Jews to the war; yet she considers the question of the woman's identity in the photos unresolved, maintaining at the Minsk conference that the issue remains open pending further evidence
15. See for example, Berenbaum, 174-75; Miller; and Keller
16. For example, a report of the Belorussian KGB in June 1972 on the question of the unknown girl concluded that she was a nurse named "Anna," between 22 and 24 years old, presumably from Moscow. This identification is based on evidence gathered by the KGB following the publication of Arkadiev and Dikhtiar's work. Yet the KGB report acknowledges that "no more precise identification proved possible because it was impossible to locate any surviving colleague from the captured hospital." The authors wish to express their thanks to Dr. Leonid Smilovitsky of Tel-Aviv University for making this source available to them. For a discussion of the "Anna" i.d., see also Arkadiev and Dikhtiar, pp. 161ff
17. Among the contrasting views are those of A. Litvin and M. Shumeiko, "The Minsk Underground: Facts and Myths of One Search," Zvezda, 14 April 1988 (in Russian). The authors cite other possible candidates and challenge the findings of Arkadiev and Dikhtiar, arguing that the collected documents contain "no verified facts" and no testimony from witnesses to the execution. Prior to the 1996 conference in Minsk these scholars had been unwilling to examine the documents of Arkadiev and Dikhtiar, and thus may have been unaware of the consistency of the testimonies on Bruskina from widely disparate sources, including witnesses to the execution
18. Arkadiev and Dikhtiar, p. 177
19. While some of these Soviet soldiers might have been willful deserters, others were unable to find escape routes and still others simply found themselves abandoned. See Yitzhak Arad, Ghetto in Flames: The Struggle and Destruction of the Jews in Vilna in the Holocaust (New York: Holocaust Library, 1982), p. 30
20. and Smolar, pp. 4-8
21. One Soviet source estimates the size of the evolving Belorussian partisan movement as follows: by late 1941, 5,000; by 1942, 73,000; by 1943, 243,000; by 1944, 374,000. The partisans included Belorussians, Russians, Jews, Poles, Slovaks, and others. See "Partisans," in Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (New York: Macmillan, 1990), v. 3, p. 1113
22. Another estimate for the summer of 1942 counts 150,000 guerrillas in the entire occupied Soviet Union; Earl Ziemke, "Composition and Morale of the Partisan Movement," pp. 141-96
23. in John Armstrong, ed., Soviet Partisans in World War II (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1964)
24. It is estimated that during the first six months of this war the Germans captured 3,000,000 Soviet prisoners. See Ziemke, p. 143
25. Nazi policies toward Russian POWs consisted of economic exploitation and outright murder. According to Christian Streit in Keine Kameraden: Die Wehrmacht und ie Sovietischen Kriegsgefangenen, 1941-1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1978), p. 9, the number of dead Soviet POWs totalled 3.3 million out of 5.7 million captured, a mortality rate of 57.8%
26. Ainsztein, p. 279
27. Nicholas P. Vakar, Belorussia: The Making of a Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), p. 192
28. J. K. Zawodny, "Soviet Partisans," Soviet Studies 17:3 (January, 1966), pp. 368-77
29. Obedience to rules does not fit well into the lives of partisans. See John A. Armstrong and Kurt DeWitt, "Organization and Control of the Partisan Movement" in Armstrong, Soviet Partisans, pp. 73-139
30. Henri Michel, "Jewish Resistance and the European Resistance Movement" in Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust: Proceedings of the Conference on Manifestations of Jewish Resistance (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1972), pp. 365-75
31. Henri Michel, The Shadow War: European Resistance, 1939-1945 (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 13
32. Jack Nusan Porter, ed., Jewish Partisans: A Documentary of Jewish Resistance in the Soviet Union During World War II (New York: University Press of America, 1982), p. 9
33. See Martin Gilbert, The Second World War: A Complete History (New York: Henry Holt, 1989) pp. 398-410
34. Israel Gutman, Fighting Among the Ruins: The Story of Jewish Heroism During World War II (Washington: B'nai B'rith Books, 1988), p. 219
35. Michel, p. 185
36. Even after the turn in the war, it took quite a while before the Soviet partisans became an effective force. Some argue that the partisan warfare was much less extensive than officially claimed (for example, Pinchas Boldo in personal interviews with Nechama Tec, Tel Aviv, 1987-1988)
37. Michel, pp. 278-79
38. Porter, p. 9
39. Nechama Tec, In the Lion's Den: The Life of Oswald Rufeisen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 201-202
40. J. K. Zawodny, "Guerrilla and Sabotage: Organization, Operations, Motivations, Escalations," Annals of the American Academy of Political Science 341 (May 1962), pp, 8-18
41. See Ziemke, p. 147
42. There was a discrepancy between the official pronouncements about women in the partisan movement and their actual fate. See Jack Nusan Porter, "Jewish Women in the Resistance" in Isaac Kowalski, ed., Anthology of Armed Resistance to the Nazis, 1939-1945 (New York: Jewish Combatants Publishing House, 1986), v. I, p. 292
43. and Fanny Salomian-Loc, Woman Facing the Gallows (Amherst, MA: Wordpro, 1981)
44. The latter is a personal account of the discrimination a female Jewish partisan had to face. See also Sefer Hapartisanim Hajehudim (The Jewish Partisan Book) (Merchavia: Sifriat Poalim, Hashomer Hatzair, 1958), v. 1, p. 442
45. Ziemke, p. 147
46. Nechama Tec, Defiance: The Bielski Partisans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 156-57
47. Tec, Lion's Den, p. 195
48. and, "Women in the Forest," Contemporary Jewry 17 (1996), pp. 34-47