It it was miserable terrain.
The ground was water lobbed.
The mosquitoes were relentless.
Food was whatever they could scavenge from the forest floor or beg from isolated farmsteads.
And begging was dangerous because any farmer could report them to the Germans or the Ukrainian police for a reward.
During these first days, they found other Jews in the forest, escapes from other ghettos, other liquidations, other pits, individuals and small groups who had fled into the woods with nothing and were now slowly starving.
Some had been hiding for weeks.
Some had been hiding for months.
None had weapons.
Gildenman took them in.
He did not have the food or the shelter or the ammunition to support them, but he took them in.
By the end of the second week, the group had grown from 12 to approximately 20.
The weapons inventory had not changed.
Two pistols, five rounds, one knife.
Updated inventory, early October 1942.
Location Picia Marshlands approximately 80 km north of Coritz near the Sanne Rkitno railway line.
Two pistols, five rounds combined, one butcher knife, one pair of binoculars, approximately 20 people, including four women and three boys under 15, one song book.
The first weapons acquisition came from a forest guard.
The details vary in different accounts, but the outline is consistent.
Gildenman identified an isolated forest guard station on the edge of the marshland.
The guard was a Ukrainian employed by the German occupation authorities to patrol for illegal wood cutting and increasingly to watch for Jews hiding in the trees.
The guard had two rifles.
Gildenman’s group took them.
Two rifles was not an arsenal, but it changed the equation.
Gildenman now had four firearms instead of two.
He now had weapons that could be fired from a distance.
Not just at point blank range.
He had ammunition for the rifles, which was more common and easier to resupply than pistol rounds.
The second acquisition was larger.
Gilderman identified a Ukrainian auxiliary police patrol operating on one of the rural roads near the marshland.
These were not German soldiers.
They were local collaborators, Ukrainians who had volunteered or been conscripted into police units that assisted the German occupation.
They carried standardisssue rifles, pistols, and occasionally grenades.
They were less well-trained than German troops.
They were less alert, and they were frequently drunk.
Gildenman set an ambush.
The details of the ambush are sparse.
What is known is that Gildenman’s group attacked the patrol, likely at a bend in the road or near a bridge, and that the attack was successful.
The partisans captured six mouser rifles, two additional pistols, and three hand grenades.
They suffered no casualties.
The policemen were either killed or fled.
Updated infantry midocctober 1942.
Eight rifles, four pistols, three hand grenades, one butcher knife, one pair of binoculars, approximately 24 people, one song book.
The numbers do not sound like much, but they meant everything.
Each rifle was a statement.
Each grenade was a negotiating tool with the forest.
Each new weapon meant that the group was no longer a collection of refugees hiding in the swamp.
It was becoming something else.
Gildenman understood this.
He was an engineer.
He thought in systems.
He thought in logistics.
He understood that a partisan unit, like a factory, needed inputs and outputs.
The inputs were weapons, ammunition, food, intelligence, and recruits.
The outputs were operations, which generated more inputs, which enabled more operations.
The cycle had to keep turning or the unit would die.
He also understood something about psychology.
These men and boys had just watched their families murdered.
They had been hunted through the forest like animals.
They were starving.
They were terrified.
The worst thing Gildenman could do was let them sit in the swamp and wait.
Waiting was dying.
Action was survival.
Not because every operation would succeed, but because the act of fighting gave the unit its identity.
It gave the men a reason to keep moving.
It made them soldiers instead of victims.
So Gildenman kept the cycle turning.
In late October and November 1942, Gildenman’s group conducted a series of small raids on isolated targets.
German supply depots in rural areas.
The homes of known collaborators, small police stations in villages where the garrison was minimal.
Each raid served two purposes.
It generated weapons and supplies, and it generated reputation.
Word began to spread through the forest.
There was a group of Jews in the Plesia marshland who were fighting back.
They were led by an older man, an engineer, a civilian who went by the name Misha, Uncle Misha.
Diadia Misha in Russian.
He was 44 years old and he had gray in his beard and he was killing Germans.
Jews who were hiding in the forest began to seek out Gildenman’s group.
Some arrived alone.
Some arrived in pairs and threes.
Most had nothing.
A few had weapons taken from dead soldiers or stolen from farmhouses.
All were hungry.
All were desperate.
Gildenman took them all.
He also began to accumulate something that was not on the ledger, but was just as important as rifles.
Information, intelligence.
His unit began to develop contacts in the surrounding villages.
Not all Ukrainians were collaborators.
Some were sympathetic.
Some simply did not care and were willing to trade information for salt or other supplies.
Some were themselves afraid of the Germans and saw the partisans as potential protectors.
Gilden Man exploited these contacts.
He learned which roads the Germans patrolled and when.
He learned where supply convoys passed.
He learned the schedules of local police garrisons.
He learned which village headmen were loyal to the Germans and which were merely pretending.
He also began to write.
This is one of the stranger details of Gildenman’s early partisan career, and it speaks to the kind of man he was.
While hiding in a swamp, armed with captured police rifles, leading a group of starving refugees, Gildenman sat down and wrote leaflets.
He wrote them in Yiddish and in Ukrainian.
He distributed them to nearby villages.
The leaflets contained information about the war, about Soviet advances on the Eastern Front, about the crimes the Germans were committing.
They were propaganda of a kind, but they were also a signal.
They told the surrounding population that there were Jews in the forest who were organized, who were literate, who were not merely running but thinking.
Updated inventory, December 1942.
Location: Forest encampment, Pasia region, near the Sanne Roidnau railway line.
Approximately 30 men and women under arms.
22 rifles of various types and conditions.
Four pistols.
One light machine gun captured from a German supply truck in late November.
Six hand grenades, two horses acquired from a collaborator’s farm.
Approximately 50 additional refugees under the unit’s protection, including women, children, and elderly people who were not combatants.
Accumulated supplies, including several tons of salt, stolen from German depots, which served as the unit’s primary currency with local farmers.
One song book.
The light machine gun changed things.
Before the machine gun, Gildenman’s unit could conduct ambushes and raids on soft targets, police patrols, isolated guard posts, undefended supply depots.
With the machine gun, the unit could engage in defensive operations.
It could hold a position, at least temporarily, against a German or Ukrainian counterattack.
It could cover a retreat.
It could suppress fire from a fortified position while other fighters maneuvered.
Gildenman was not a trained tactician, but he was a fast learner.
He studied the weapons his men captured.
He figured out how they worked, how they were maintained, how they could be deployed most effectively.
He assigned specific roles within the unit.
Scouts, riflemen, a machine gun crew, a supply detail.
He imposed discipline.
He established watch schedules.
He insisted on physical training even in the freezing December cold.
The 50 refugees were a problem and Gildenman knew it.
Every mouth needed food.
Every person was a potential security risk.
Every child who cried could give away a position.
But Gildenman refused to abandon them.
He organized the refugees into a separate camp hidden deeper in the forest and assigned a rotating guard detail to protect them.
He used some of the salt and other supplies from raids to feed them.
This was not a universally popular decision.
Some of the fighters argued that the refugees were a liability, that they slowed the unit down, that they consumed resources that should be devoted to operations.
Gildenman overruled them.
He said that the entire point of fighting was to keep Jews alive.
If they abandoned the refugees to save the unit, they were no different from the Juden rat elders who had told him to be patient in the ghetto.
The winter of 1942 to 43 was brutal.
Temperatures in the Picia region dropped below minus 20°.
The marshland froze.
The forest provided some shelter from the wind, but not much from the cold.
Gilden man’s unit had inadequate clothing, inadequate shelter, and inadequate food.
Men developed frostbite.
Men developed pneumonia.
The horses, which were essential for transporting supplies and evacuating wounded, suffered from the cold and from lack of feed, and the Germans were hunting them.
By late 1942, the German occupation authorities in the Git and Rivo blasts were aware that a Jewish partisan group was operating in the Polia forest.
The Germans dispatched antipartisan units to locate and destroy the group.
These were not police patrols.
These were vermarked soldiers and SS units supported by Ukrainian auxiliaries who moved through the forest in force, burning farmsteads, interrogating villagers, and conducting sweeps designed to flush partisans out of hiding.
Gildenman’s group was nearly destroyed in at least one engagement during this period.
The details are not fully clear from the available accounts, but what is known is that a large German force located and attacked the Partisan camp in late 1942 or early 1943.
The Partisans fought a running retreat through the forest.
They suffered casualties.
They lost supplies, but they survived.
Gildenman learned from the encounter.
He began to move the camp more frequently.
He established multiple fallback positions.
He posted centuries further from the camp perimeter.
He developed a system of signals using bird calls and whistles to warn of approaching enemies and he continued to grow the unit.
Updated inventory January 1943.
Location forest encampment Pollesia region.
Approximately 60 people in the combined unit of whom roughly 30 to 35 were armed combatants.
The rest were refugees, including women, children, and elderly people.
Weapons inventory.
Approximately 25 rifles, four pistols, one light machine gun, assorted grenades, two horses, supplies dwindling, morale strained, but intact, one somuk.
In January 1943, Gildenman made the decision that would transform his group from an independent Jewish partisan cell into a component of the Soviet partisan infrastructure.
He joined the Subaru Brigade, part of the Partisan Federation commanded by Soviet General Alexander Saborov.
This decision was complicated and the reasons for it were not purely military.
By January 1943, the Soviet partisan movement in Ukraine and biola Russia had grown enormously.
Tens of thousands of partisans were operating behind German lines organized into brigades and federations that received instructions, supplies, and occasionally weapons from the Soviet government via airdrop or courier.
The partisans conducted sabotage operations against German supply lines, particularly railways.
They attacked German garrisons and police stations.
They gathered intelligence for the Red Army, and they were increasingly an arm of Soviet state power behind enemy lines.
Gildenman’s group, operating independently in the Polia forest, was small, isolated, and running low on supplies.
Joining a Soviet partisan formation offered several advantages.
It meant access to better weapons.
It meant access to Soviet intelligence and coordination.
It meant legitimacy in the eyes of the local population who were more likely to cooperate with a unit that was part of the official Soviet partisan structure than with an independent Jewish band.
But it also meant risks.
The Soviet partisan movement was not universally friendly to Jews.
Anti-semitism was common in the Soviet partisan ranks.
Some Soviet partisan commanders refused to accept Jewish fighters.
Others accepted them.
but subjected them to discrimination, assigning them the most dangerous missions, denying them adequate weapons or confiscating their supplies.
There were documented cases of Soviet partisans killing Jewish refugees who sought their protection.
Gildenman was aware of these risks, but he calculated that the alternative, remaining independent in a freezing forest with dwindling supplies and German antipartisan forces closing in, was worse.
He negotiated the terms of his unit’s integration into the Subverarov brigade.
The key condition was that Uncle Misha’s Jewish group would remain a distinct unit under Gildenman’s command.
It would operate under the overall authority of the Subaru brigade and Saburov’s Federation, but it would maintain its identity and its internal command structure.
The Soviets agreed.
Updated inventory February 1943.
Location Suvarov Brigade encampment Ztomir Oblast.
Uncle Nisha’s Jewish group approximately 31 combatants.
Weapons improved.
The Subarov Brigade provided additional rifles and ammunition.
The unit now had access to explosives which the Soviets supplied for sabotage operations.
The refugees were transferred to a larger Soviet partisan camp where they were somewhat better protected.
One song book.
The nature of the operations changed.
As an independent group, Gildenman had conducted small raids and ambushes.
As part of the Subaru Brigade, he was given targets, specific targets, bridges, railways, German garrisons, collaborators.
The Soviet Partisan Command identified objectives and assigned them to specific units.
Gildenman’s unit was assigned some of the most dangerous missions.
Partly because the Jewish fighters had proven themselves effective and partly because in the arithmetic of Soviet partisan warfare, Jewish fighters were considered more expendable than ethnic Russians or Ukrainians.
Gildenman did not complain.
He took the missions.
The first major operation assigned to Uncle Mish’s Jewish group after joining the Subarov brigade was the destruction of a bridge over the Tetariv River.
The Tetariv was a significant waterway in the Jutameir Oro blast and the bridge was used by German supply convoys moving material to the front.
Destroying it would force the Germans to reroute their convoys, adding days to their supply lines.
Gildenman planned the operation with the precision of an engineer.
He surveyed the bridge.
He calculated the amount of explosive needed to bring it down.
He identified the German guard detail and its patrol schedule.
He selected the men who would plant the charges and the men who would provide covering fire.
The bridge was destroyed.
The explosion severed one of the German supply routes in the dutir region.
German engineers would eventually rebuild or bypass the bridge, but the disruption lasted weeks.
For Uncle Misha’s Jewish group, it was a statement.
They had destroyed a piece of the German war machine.
They had done it with Soviet explosives and Jewish hands.
More operations followed.
A second bridge was destroyed near the town of Olfk.
A German cinema in the town of Narovia was blown up during a screening, though accounts differ on whether German soldiers were inside at the time.
The German district commisar of Chapovichi was identified, tracked, and executed.
Gilden man’s unit conducted raids on German storage depots, seizing food, ammunition, and medical supplies.
They sabotaged sections of the railway line between Sanne and Rocketau, derailing German supply trains.
The unit also conducted what the Soviet partisans called economic warfare.
They burned the farms of known collaborators.
They seized livestock.
They distributed confiscated food to sympathetic villages.
They continued to write and distribute leaflets, now with Soviet propaganda added to Gildenman’s own messages.
Updated inventory.
Spring 1943, Uncle Misha’s Jewish group, approximately 35 combatants.
Additional Jewish fighters and refugees continue to trickle into the unit from surrounding areas, weapons, 40 plus rifles, multiple pistols, two light machine guns, grenades, and access to Soviet supplied explosives, horses.
Six.
The unit had conducted approximately 30 confirmed combat operations since joining the Subaru brigade in January.
Confirmed enemy casualties difficult to verify but substantial.
The unit had destroyed two bridges, multiple railway sections, several German vehicles, and one cinema.
They had executed at least one German official and several Ukrainian collaborators.
One song book.
It was around this time that a boy walked out of the forest and into Gildenman’s camp.
His name was Morai Schline.
He was 12 years old.
He was carrying a violin, Motel as everyone called him, had been born in 1930 in the village of Carmonovka in Boer, Russia.
There were only two Jewish families in the village.
The Schlines were millers.
They were poor, their neighbors.
The Gernstein traded beet sugar and were better off.
The Gernstein had recognized Motel’s musical talent when he was 8 years old and had taken him in to learn the violin from one of their sons.
When the Germans invaded Bola, Russia, local residents had disclosed the locations of the two Jewish families to the occupation authorities.
Motel’s parents and his younger sister Bashial were killed.
The Gernstein family was killed alongside them.
Motel survived by hiding in the attic of the Gernstein house.
That same night, he fled into the forest with nothing except his violin.
He had been living in the forest for months.
He had survived by playing Ukrainian folk songs for food in villages, by hiding, by the kind of desperate improvisation that children are sometimes capable of when the adults around them have been murdered.
Word of Uncle Misha’s group had reached him.
He had walked for days through the forest to find them.
Gildenman took him in.
Sim had Gildenman, now 17.
Gildenman’s son befriended Motelli immediately.
They were close in age.
Both had lost nearly everything.
Both had been forced into a world of violence that no child should inhabit.
The two boys became inseparable.
Gildenman understood immediately that Motell had a unique asset.
The boy was blonde.
He did not look stereotypically Jewish in the way that the Germans and their collaborators defined such things.
He spoke fluent Ukrainian.
He was an extraordinarily talented musician.
He could move through occupied territory with a plausability that none of the adult Jewish fighters could match.
Gildenman decided to use him.
The first mission was reconnaissance.
The partisans needed intelligence on German troop movements in and around the Ukrainian town of Ovuch, which lay to the east of the Partisan operating area.
Over was a garrison town.
It had a German military presence, a Ukrainian police force and a population that was a mix of sympathizers and collaborators.
It also had a church with a crowd of beggars who gathered outside it daily.
Gildenman sent Motell to Oru with forged papers identifying him as a Ukrainian boy named Dmitri Rubina.
The instructions were simple.
Join the beggars outside the church.
Play your violin.
Keep your eyes and ears open.
report back on German troop movements, patrol schedules, garrison strength.
Motel did as he was told.
He played Ukrainian folk songs outside the church.
He was good.
He was very good.
Within days, a crowd was gathering to listen to him.
His playing was too accomplished for a street beggar, and it attracted attention.
One of the people who stopped to listen was a German officer.
The officer demanded that Motel come with him to a restaurant in Ovuch that had been converted into a soldier’s home, a dining and entertainment establishment for German troops.
The restaurant already had a musician, an elderly pianist.
The pianist, perhaps threatened by the competition, perhaps testing the boy, pulled out a sheet of music and demanded that Motell play it on the spot.
It was the Minuette by Ignasy Jan Padeski, the celebrated Polish composer.
It was a difficult piece.
Motel played it flawlessly.
He was hired on the spot to provide nightly entertainment at the restaurant.
Gildenman, when he received this report, understood what had fallen into his lap.
He now had a 12-year-old spy inside a German military establishment.
A spy who could listen to German officers talking freely over dinner and wine.
A spy who could observe troop movements, garrison changes, supply deliveries.
a spy who could walk in and out of the building every day without arousing suspicion.
But Gildenman was thinking beyond intelligence.
He was thinking about the violin case.
A violin case was the perfect container.
It was the right size.
It was never searched.
It was part of the boy’s identity.
It went where he went and it could carry something other than a violin.
Gildenman consulted with Popoff, the unit’s explosives expert.
Together they devised a plan.
Each day, Motel would carry his violin to the restaurant in the morning and play through the evening.
During breaks, he would go to the cellar of the building.
He had noticed deep cracks in the cellar walls in the foundation.
Each day, he would leave his violin at the restaurant and carry the empty case home.
The next morning, he would return with a case filled with explosives concealed beneath a false bottom.
During his breaks, he would pack the explosive material into the cracks in the cellar walls.
This went on for days, perhaps weeks.
The accounts vary.
What is consistent is that Motell transported approximately 18 kg of incendiary material into the cellar of the soldiers home trip by trip in his violin case.
Then they waited for the right moment.
The moment came in August 1943.
Word reached the partisans that a group of SS officers was being rerouted through Overach.
Railway travel in the region had become too dangerous because of partisan sabotage operations.
So the officers were traveling by road.
They would stop in Overach.
They would dine at the soldiers home.
On the evening of the SS officer’s arrival, the restaurant was full.
More than 100 German officers were eating and drinking.
They had been served dinner.
Wine was flowing.
The pianist was playing.
Motel was playing.
The atmosphere was relaxed.
The officers were enjoying themselves.
At some point during the evening, Motel excused himself.
He went down to the cellar.
He found the fuse that had been laid through the cracks in the wall.
He lit it.
He walked back upstairs.
He picked up his violin.
He walked calmly to the front door of the restaurant.
As he passed the German guard at the exit, he slowed down.
He raised his right arm.
He said, “Hile Hitler.
” The guard laughed and waved him through.
Motel walked out into the night.
He was approximately 200 m from the building when the explosion detonated.
The blast destroyed the restaurant.
The number of German dead was never precisely determined.
Some accounts say dozens, some say over 100.
What is certain is that a significant number of German officers, including SS personnel, were killed or wounded in the explosion.
Simka Gildenman was waiting for Motel with horses.
The two boys rode through the darkness back to the Partisan camp in the forest.
When Motell reached the camp, he raised his fist to the sky.
He said, “This is for my parents and little Bashial.
” Updated inventory, August 1943.
Uncle Misha’s Jewish group, approximately 40 combatants.
The unit had conducted over 80 confirmed combat operations, enemy casualties, significant and growing.
Weapons inventory substantial, including rifles, pistols, multiple machine guns, grenades, and a continuing supply of Soviet explosives.
Horses eight.
The unit had destroyed two major bridges, multiple railway sections, one cinema, one German military restaurant, and had executed numerous German officials and collaborators.
The unit had one 12-year-old spy, one violin, one song book.
The destruction of the soldiers home in Ovuch was one of the most dramatic single operations conducted by any Jewish partisan unit during the Second World War.
But for Gildenman, it was one operation among many.
The ledger kept growing.
In the months following the Alvaruk explosion, Uncle Misha’s Jewish group intensified its operations in the Jemiro blast.
They continued to sabotage railway lines.
They continued to attack German supply convoys.
They continued to execute collaborators and Germanappointed village headmen.
They continued to burn the farms of Ukrainian police auxiliaries and seize their livestock.
Gildenman also expanded his unit’s role in intelligence gathering.
He developed a network of informants across the Jetmir region, village contacts who provided information on German troop movements, supply routes, and planned operations.
This intelligence was shared up the chain with the Subarov brigade command and through them with the Soviet partisan headquarters.
The larger context was shifting.
By the summer and autumn of 1943, the war on the Eastern Front was turning decisively against Germany.
The Soviet victory at Stalingrad in February 1943 had broken the back of the German offensive.
The Battle of Kursk in July and August had destroyed Germany’s ability to launch large-scale armored operations.
The Red Army was pushing westward.
The front line was moving through Ukraine.
The Soviet partisan movement was a critical component of this advance.
By mid 1943, there were approximately 30,000 partisans operating across 17 federations and 160 independent detachments in Ukraine.
They were conducting a coordinated campaign of railway sabotage that was degrading German logistics.
Every bridge destroyed, every railway line cut, every supply convoy ambushed meant that German forces at the front received less ammunition, less fuel, less food, less reinforcement.
Uncle Misha’s Jewish group was a small part of this vast machine, but they were an effective part.
Their record of over 150 confirmed combat operations by the war’s end would place them among the most active partisan units in the Zutameir region.
Updated inventory.
October 1943.
The Jitomir Oblast had been liberated by the Red Army.
The German occupation was over.
Uncle Misha’s Jewish group, approximately 50 combatants, including recent additions from Jewish refugees who had survived the occupation in hiding.
The larger Subaru formation that Gildenman’s unit operated within had grown to approximately 1,400 men.
Total confirmed combat operations conducted by Uncle Misha’s Jewish group, over 120.
Bridges destroyed, multiple railway lines sabotaged, multiple German trains derailed, 12 confirmed, German officials and collaborators executed, numerous.
One restaurant destroyed, one cinema destroyed, one violin, one song book.
With liberation came a choice.
Marshall Climate Voracillof, one of the most senior Soviet military commanders, personally met with Gildenman after the liberation of the Jetmir region.
Vorilof was aware of Gildenman’s record.
He was aware of the man’s pre-war profession.
He offered Gildenman what should have been an attractive proposition, a civilian engineering job, a return to the life he had known before the war, a chance to build things again instead of destroying them.
Gildenman refused.
He told Vorilof that he intended to remain in the fight until the last German was defeated.
He was not interested in going back to civilian life while the war continued.
He had a debt to pay, not a debt of vengeance.
Though vengeance was certainly part of it, a debt of completion.
He had started this war as a hunted man with a butcher knife.
He intended to finish it as a soldier.
Vorosil accepted his decision.
Gildenman was sent to the Soviet officers training school in Pavlovsk near Lennengrad where he completed a formal military training course.
He was commissioned as a captain in the Soviet army’s engineering corps.
His role was to use his professional skills, his knowledge of construction and demolition in support of the Red Army’s westward advance.
His son Simka went through a similar process.
Simka, now 18, completed an officer’s training course and was commissioned as a company commander in the Red Army.
Father and son had gone from ghetto refugees to Soviet military officers.
Motel Schlin did not receive a commission.
In 1944, at the age of 14, Motel was killed.
The circumstances of his death are not entirely clear.
According to Gilderman’s account, Motelli was killed either in a German bombardment of a partisan position or while attempting to warn a Red Army officer of a German ambush.
He was running toward the officer to deliver the warning when he was shot dead.
He was 14 years old.
Gildenman took Motel’s violin.
He would carry it for the rest of the war and for the rest of his life.
Updated inventory 1944 to 1945.
Captain Moshe Gildenman, Soviet Army Engineering Corps.
The infantry now belonged to the Red Army, not to a partisan unit in a swamp.
Gildenman was no longer counting rifles stolen from police patrols.
He was operating within the largest military force on the European continent, a force of millions that was grinding its way westward across Poland and into Germany.
But Gildenman carried his own private inventory, one violin, one song book.
He carried them through Poland.
He carried them through the battles of the Vistula and the Oda.
He carried them through the final apocalyptic assault on Berlin in April and May 1945.
And when the war ended, when the guns stopped, when the smoke cleared over the rubble of the German capital, Captain Mosha Gildenman was among the first Allied soldiers to enter Adolf Hitler’s underground bunker.
He stood in the bunker.
The ceiling was low.
The air was stale.
The walls were bare concrete, the kind of material Gildenman had spent his professional life working with.
He knew concrete.
He understood its properties.
He understood how to pour it, how to reinforce it, how to shape it.
And now he was standing in a concrete box that had been built to shelter the man who had ordered the murder of his wife and daughter and 2,200 of his neighbors.
Gildenman took a piece of chalk or perhaps a pencil or perhaps a knife and he wrote on the wall of the bunker.
He wrote, “I, Misha Gildenman, am here despite enemy orders.
” That was all.
No elaboration, no speech, no manifesto, just a statement of presence.
I am here.
You ordered me dead.
I am here anyway.
The engineer had come a long way from the clearing north of the Corett’s ghetto.
Final inventory.
1945 Berlin, Germany.
One captain’s commission, Soviet Army Engineering Corps.
One Order of the Red Star awarded for saving a Soviet command staff headquarters during a German attack.
One violin belonging to a dead 14year-old boy from Ba Russia.
One song book containing 84 Yiddish folk songs carried from the ghetto to the forest to the Partisan camp to the Red Army to Berlin.
One son alive, Simhka Gildenman, now a Red Army Company commander, had survived the entire war at his father’s side or nearby.
One concrete factory in Carettes destroyed.
One wife dead.
One daughter dead.
One hometown emptied.
Over 150 confirmed combat operations.
Multiple bridges destroyed.
Multiple railway lines sabotaged.
12 German trains derailed.
One German military restaurant destroyed with the entire officer compliment inside.
One cinema destroyed.
One German district commisar executed.
Countless German soldiers, SS personnel, and Ukrainian collaborators killed in ambushes, raids, and firefights across two years of continuous partisan warfare.
Starting capital, one Mouser pistol, one Browning pistol, five rounds of ammunition, one butcher knife, and 12 men.
The arithmetic is the story.
After the war, Gildenman did not stay in the Soviet Union.
He went first to Paris where a significant community of Polish and Ukrainian Jewish survivors had gathered.
In Paris, he began to write.
He published four books about his experiences as a partisan, all in Yiddish.
He wrote for Yiddish language newspapers in Paris, in Israel, and in Buenosiris.
He wrote about the Jews of Koritz.
He wrote about the partisan operations.
He wrote about Motel.
His book about Motel titled Motel the Young Partisan was published in Paris in 1950 and became one of the best known accounts of Jewish partisan resistance during the Holocaust.
The story of the 12-year-old violinist who blew up a German restaurant was retold in numerous subsequent works, including novels and films.
In 2023, a German film school graduate named Andreas Kesler made a short film inspired by Motel’s story called Nackam, which is the Hebrew word for revenge.
The film qualified for the Academy Awards.
From Paris, Gildenman immigrated to Israel in the early 1950s.
He settled in the city of Reovot with his son Simcha.
He brought the song book.
He brought Motel’s violin.
Mosha Gildenman died on August 10, 1957.
He was 59 years old.
His death was unremarkable.
He died in his bed in Rehavot in the young state of Israel surrounded by his family.
He had survived a ghetto, a forest, a swamp, two years of partisan warfare, the final year of the Eastern Front, and the Battle of Berlin.
He had been shot at by Germans, hunted by SS antipartisan units, frozen in the Pacia marshes, and nearly killed on multiple occasions.
And then he had died quietly in a house of natural causes with Motel’s violin somewhere nearby.
Simha Gildenman survived his father by many years.
He married.
He had children.
He told his father’s story.
He told Motell’s story.
He ensured that the history of Uncle Misha’s Jewish group was not forgotten.
Motel’s violin survived too.
After Gildenman’s death, the violin passed through family hands.
Eventually, it came to Amnon Weinstein, a master violin maker in Tel Aviv, whose wife Assi was herself the daughter of Aselbielski, one of the three Bielski brothers who saved,200 Jews in the forests of occupied Berosia.
Weinstein restored the violin.
It was in relatively good condition.
Considering what it had been through, Gilden man’s descendants donated it to Yadvashm, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem with the stipulation that it remain available for performances.
In September 2023, a teenager named David Strongin played Motel’s violin at a concert at the walls of the old city of Jerusalem.
He was joined by the great violinist Pearlman for a performance of Hatikva, the Israeli national anthem.
The violin that a 12-year-old boy had carried out of a burning house in Biola Russia that had been used to serenade German SS officers in a restaurant in Ovous that had concealed the explosives that killed those same officers that had been carried by a Jewish partisan commander through Berlin and Paris and Rehavote was being played in Jerusalem in the open air in front of the ancient walls 80 years later.
There is a temptation when telling this story to make it about vengeance.
The title of this piece suggests vengeance and vengeance was certainly part of it.
Gildenman was a man whose wife and daughter were shot in a pit and whose coat he was forced to sort from a pile of the dead.
No human being endures that without rage.
No human being walks into a forest with a butcher knife without some measure of fury driving him forward.
But the evidence of Gildenman’s life suggests that vengeance was not the dominant motivation.
Survival was survival of his people.
Survival of his son.
Survival of the strangers who stumbled out of the forest with nothing and whom he refused to turn away.
Survival of the songs in the book he carried.
Survival of the culture that the Germans were trying to erase.
The inventory tells this story more honestly than any narrative could.
At the beginning, one pistol, one pistol, one knife, 12 men, one song book.
At the end, 150 combat operations, one captain’s commission, one order of the red star, one wall inscription in Hitler’s bunker, one son alive, one song book.
The kills were operational.
The growth was the point.
Gildenman was an engineer.
He built things.
Before the war, he built with concrete.
During the war, he built with people and rifles and intelligence and salt and leaflets and a 12-year-old boy with a violin.
After the war, he built with words, writing the story down so that it would not be lost.
The Curet’s Jewish community that Gildenman came from was one of the oldest in the Volhineer region.
Jews had lived there since the 16th century.
By the 1930s, approximately 4,900 Jews lived in Corets, constituting roughly 80% of the town’s population.
They were merchants, craftsmen, factory workers, sugar refiners, tanners, teachers, rabbis, musicians, engineers.
They had printing presses that had published nearly 100 books of Cabala and Hidic theology between 1766 and 1819.
They had a modern school, a large library, a cultural life that produced drama circles and orchestras and mandolin ensembles.
The Germans erased all of it.
By the end of 1942, the Jewish community of Corets had been reduced from nearly 5,000 people to a handful of survivors hiding in forests and farmhouses.
The great synagogue was destroyed.
The homes were looted.
The businesses were confiscated.
The printing presses were gone.
The library was gone.
The drama circle was gone.
What survived was a song book and the man who carried it.
After the liberation of Koritz on January 13th, 1944, approximately 500 Jewish survivors returned to the town.
They found their homes occupied by neighbors.
They found their businesses taken over.
They found the mass graves at Kak where the pits had been covered with earth and were already growing over with grass.
Most of the survivors left.
They went to Israel.
They went to the west.
They went anywhere that was not corit.
By 1970, the Jewish population of Corets was estimated at a few families.
The community that had been one of the largest and most influential in Volhinia that had printed hidic texts and sustained synagogues and produced engineers and musicians was effectively extinct in the place where it had existed for 400 years.
The memorial at Kak erected in 1994 consists of three stellies placed on three mass graves.
The graves are surrounded by a metal fence with stars of David on the gate.
The inscriptions are in Hebrew and Ukrainian.
They read in part, “Eternal and blessed memory to more than 4,000 Jews, residents of the city of Coritz, children, women, elderly, and men, savagely shot, buried alive by the fascists in 1942.
More than 4,000, the final count was higher than the 2,200 that Gilderman had witnessed in May.
The September liquidation and other killings brought the total higher.
More than 4,000 people from a community of fewer than 5,000.
The arithmetic is the story.
It always was.
Gildenman understood this better than anyone.
He was an engineer.
He worked in numbers.
He counted everything.
He counted the rounds in his pistol.
He counted the men in his unit.
He counted the rifles after every ambush.
He counted the bridges he destroyed.
He counted the trains he derailed.
He counted the dead.
He could not count the living because there were so few left to count.
But the ones he saved, he counted.
The refugees he took in when other partisan commanders would have turned them away.
The women and children he hid deeper in the forest.
The fighters he trained and armed and led into operations that pushed back against the machine that had murdered his family.
150 combat operations.
12 German trains.
Multiple bridges.
one restaurant, one cinema, one district commisar, an uncounted number of German soldiers and Ukrainian collaborators.
And on the other side of the ledger, an unknown number of Jews who survived because Gildenman refused to run.
There is one more detail that deserves mention because it speaks to the kind of man Gildenman was and because it captures something essential about the relationship between destruction and creation, between the inventory of war and the inventory of the human spirit.
When Gildenman walked through the ruins of Corets in 1945, after the war, after Berlin, after the bunker, he visited the sites of the Jewish homes and businesses and institutions he had known.
He stood where the great synagogue had been.
He stood where his concrete factory had been.
He stood where the Tarbert school had been, where he had conducted the school orchestra and the mandolin ensemble.
Everything was gone.
At the song book was in his pocket.
84 folk songs in Hebrew and Yiddish.
Songs about labor and love and exile and return.
Songs that Gildenman had performed in the drama lovers circle in chorets before the war.
songs that he had carried through the ghetto and the forest and the partisan camp and the Soviet army and Berlin.
During the war in the forest camps, Gilden man had used the song book on quiet nights when there was no operation planned and no German patrol approaching.
The partisans would gather around a fire and Gildenman would lead them in singing Yiddish songs from the book Russian songs, songs that Gildenman himself had written in the ghetto and in the forest.
songs that urged Jews to take up arms, to resist, to fight.
This was not a sentimental gesture.
It was a strategic decision.
Gildenman understood that a partisan unit needed more than weapons and food and intelligence.
It needed cohesion.
It needed identity.
It needed a sense of purpose that transcended the next ambush.
The songs provided this.
They connected the fighters to their past, to the communities they had come from, to the culture they were fighting to preserve.
They gave the unit a soul.
The man who counted rifles also counted songs.
The man who tracked the inventory of weapons also maintained the inventory of culture.
The man who built an army from nothing also built something less tangible, but no less real.
A continuity of memory.
A thread from the Jewish drama Lovers Circle in Corets to a campfire in the Polia marshes to a concert at the walls of Jerusalem 80 years later.
One Mouser pistol, one Browning pistol, five rounds, one butcher knife, 12 men, one song book, 150 combat operations, one violin, one wall inscription in Hitler’s bunker, one captain’s commission, one son alive, one life.
The ledger is closed.
The arithmetic speaks for itself.
Gildenman started with nothing.
He built something.
He carried what mattered.
He counted what he could.
And when the war was over and the dead were buried and the survivors were scattered and the songs were fading, he sat down in Paris and then in Rehavote and he wrote it all down.
every operation, every ambush, every raid, every name he could remember, so that the next generation and the generation after that would know what happened in the forest north of Caretses, in the swamps of Polia, in the burning streets of Overuk, on the railway lines of in the concrete bunker in Berlin, so that they would know that 12 men with one knife and one song book had stood up in the dark and walked into the forest and come out the other I so that they would know the inventory.
