Life stories as testament and memorial: The short life of the Neqama Battalion, an independent Jewish partisan unit operating during the Second World War in the Narocz forest, Belarus

By late 1942, as the ghettos in eastern Poland, Belarus and Lithuania were being gradually annihilated, large numbers of Jews began escaping into the woods. These were, generally, young men and women, some of them members of the ghetto underground movements, who sought to take part in the fighting against the Germans and regarded the woods as a path to potential survival. Jewish candidates wishing to join a partisan combat unit were required to prove themselves in battle, battle readiness and volunteering, in addition to the uniquely Jewish missions of revenge and survival. Out of this combination was born the Jewish partisans' wish to form independent Jewish units that would take revenge on the Germans and save Jews incarcerated in camps and ghettos. This paper will study the history of the Revenge (Neqama) Battalion-an independent Jewish partisan battalion that was formed in the Narocz woods in Belarus in July 1943. It will also address the question of whether an independent Jewish battalion could exist at all within the Soviet partisan forces. The paper employs historical perspectives when describing the daily life of the Jewish partisans in the woods, and relies on life stories, testimonies and memoirs of surviving Jewish partisans from the Narocz woods.