Survivors Ann Monka, left, and Fanya Gonsky confer before the start of the March 13 Holocaust Council of MetroWest program. Behind them, Barbara Wind, director of the Holocaust Council, left; and Jan Greenfield, outreach coordinator of the Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation.
Photo by Robert Wiener
March 20, 2008
As World War II raged in Europe and Jews were being slaughtered by the millions, some 20,000 to 30,000 Eastern European Jews managed to join the one million people in the resistance.
Only one in 10 of the Jewish partisans was female.
“It was very hard to be a woman in the partisans because most groups wouldn’t accept them,” said Barbara Wind, director of the Holocaust Council of MetroWest. “Children were a handicap. They were living hand-to-hand, day-to-day, for the most part. They didn’t have food. They didn’t have arms. They had nothing….
“The men tried to survive as best they could and tried not to accept women, not to accept children, because that would be a burden.”
In observance of Women’s History Month, the council joined the Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation on March 13 to present a program on the little-known stories of the women partisans — those who took up arms as well as those who fought back in the very act of survival.
The two groups assembled some 30 Holocaust educators from New Jersey’s public and private schools at the Alex Aidekman Family Jewish Community Campus in Whippany to discuss the partisans’ legacy.
Also attending the event were two women who represent living links to that legacy — Ann Monka, who lives in Montville, and Fanya Gonsky, a resident of the Lester Senior Housing Complex in Whippany.
Together with her mother and sister, Gonsky fled from the ghetto in her hometown of Yanov, Poland, after her father and the town’s other men were seized by the Nazis and hanged.
The women hid with a group of Jewish partisans in the nearby woods until they were rescued in 1944 by members of the Russian army. Five years later, they reached the United States, settling in Clifton and Passaic.
Gonsky was just 13 when the German army invaded Yanov, and 67 years later, she told NJ Jewish News, her teenage memories are indelible.
“It was a terrible thing what happened,” she said. “It is a surprise that we survived. It is good to survive.”
Ann Monka of Montville recalled being a young member of the Bielski Brigade, a group of underground warriors who committed many acts of sabotage against the Nazis and helped save some 10,000 Jews.
Born in the town of Lida, also in Poland, Monka was one of 10,000 Jews forced to live in a two-block ghetto after the Nazis invaded the country.
Monka recalled the horrors. “There were mass graves prepared,” she said, “and they shot 6,700 people.
“We lived in fear daily. We were hungry, and we waited to be killed. How did I survive? By going into hiding when the Germans came to put us on trains to send us to concentration camps.”
With gender roles rigidly defined in wartime Europe, women partisans mainly “were seamstresses and cooks and launderers, and the men went out on missions of stealing food and acts of sabotage,” said Wind.
Guest speaker Jan Greenfield, outreach coordinator of the Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation, told the gathering of educators about the distinct types of resistance.
“The definition of a partisan was an armed enemy combatant behind enemy lines, but there were other types of resistance, and this is important to emphasize,” Greenfield said. “We don’t need to glorify just the armed resistance.”
With the aid of a 10-minute video presentation, Greenfield shared oral history recorded by several Jewish partisans. They tended to emphasize the risks they took in wartime.
“I fought many battles with the Germans face-to-face,” says one woman in the video. “Sometimes they were 100 feet away. Luckily, I survived.”
“I started to organize an escape,” a man recalls. “From the 65 who tried, 13 were killed. Without the forest, we couldn’t survive. The moon was our biggest enemy, because if there was a moonlit night, we couldn’t move. The night, the blizzards, the heavy snows — these were our friends.”
To Fanya Gonsky, the concept of survivors and partisans sharing memories is vitally important.
“The young people should know about history,” she said. “God forbid they don’t know. Another Hitler could be born somewhere. That would be a dangerous thing.”
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