Yakov Grinshtein had a chance to become a participant in almost all the most important events in Jewish history of the twentieth century. He was born into a religious Jewish family in Poland, became a socialist as a teenager, lost his family during the war, was a prisoner of the Minsk ghetto and an active participant in the Jewish resistance, fought in a partisan detachment, traveled half of Europe as part of Soviet troops, after the war he helped to transport Jews to Palestine and fought for the independence of Israel in the ranks of the Haganah. The book of memoirs by Yakov Grinshtein was published in 1968, and he died in 2010 at the age of 92.

Yakov Grinshtein was born in 1919 in the Polish town of Pabianice in the Lodz Voivodeship. His father Abram Grinshtein was a teacher of history, Tanakh and Hebrew at the local cheder. Abram Grinshtein was a freethinker by local standards. Studying the history of the ancient Jewish wars, he came to the conclusion that the Jews should live in Eretz Yisrael. So he became a member of the “Mizrahi” – the movement of religious Zionists. His sons Yakov and Shmuel, after him, joined “Hashomer ha-dati” – the youth wing of “Mizrahi”.

In September 1939, the Germans came to Yakov's hometown. Yakov recalled this day many years later: “At 12 o'clock in the afternoon, German planes appeared over the city and immediately the first bomb fell. Panic began in the city. The market is empty. Factories stopped working. It seemed that the city died out. Two days later, on Sunday, the city was filled with refugees. They shouted to us: “Jews, run!” Yakov and a group of young friends set off on foot to Warsaw. Nine days later, the Nazi army overtook them. They had to return home, where the Germans were already in charge.

Jews were driven out of their homes, beaten, and sent to forced labor. The religious ones got it worse: their clothes and sidelocks acted on the Nazis like a red rag on a bull. On the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah, the Nazis stirred up the community with the demonstrative demolition of the synagogue, on Yom Kippur they snooped around apartments in search of worshipers who were rushed to work. During Yom Kippur, knowing that raids were coming, Yakov hid in a safe place. But when he saw that the Nazis had taken an old neighbor out of the next apartment, he volunteered to go instead of him. He returned in the evening, beaten, exhausted, covered in blood.

He had to run. Upon learning that the Red Army had crossed the Bug, Yakov and his fellow communists, obtained passes for a trip to Grodno. They left in a hurry – a friend warned that the Germans were going to start arresting left-wing activists. On the fifteenth day, having walked across Poland, they reached Bialystok, where Soviet troops were stationed. Much later, Yakov recalled that the Jews who managed to leave here from the German-occupied Poland danced for joy in the streets.

In Bialystok, Yakov met a Jewish girl, Bella Shuster. The young people got married and soon moved to the town of Uzda near Minsk. Yakov entered the Minsk technical school to study as a car mechanic. His brother and sister also managed to escape to the Russians, but immediately after crossing the border they were sent to forced labor in Siberia - they came to their brother in Uzda only at the beginning of 1941.

On June 21, 1941, the family met near Minsk. The Grinshtein’s tried to go east, but did not have time. Moreover, by that time they already had a daughter, Rosa-Rachel, and it was much more difficult to move around with the child. A few days later, the Nazis entered the city. As early as July 15, 1941, all Jews were ordered to wear the yellow Star of David on their chest and back, and to move to the ghetto. Jews and Soviet activists from among Belarusians and Poles were shot daily at the Jewish cemetery. On October 14, 1941, a group of Lithuanian police and German soldiers in the city surrounded the ghetto. Fifteen Jewish families – artisans and specialists – were taken out of it. Yakov and Bella with their daughter were among them. Half an hour later, the prisoners heard machine gun fire. The next morning the commandant informed them that “the Jews of Uzda had been shot for collaborating with the bandits from the forest”. The survivors had to work for the Wehrmacht so as not to share the fate of their neighbors.

When Yakov entered his old dwelling to collect things, he heard a quiet voice coming from the attic: “Yankele, save us. We are alive”. These were his brother Shmuel, sister Sarah and eight other Jews who escaped the bloody massacre. In the evening, Grinshtein brought them food and warm clothes. They had to leave the city and hide in the forests. Three days later, Grinshtein received tragic news: the group stumbled upon SS men and was shot in the woods about fourteen kilometers from Uzda. Shmuel and Sarah were killed.

Several months passed. On March 1, 1942, at 4 a.m., the surviving Jews of Uzda were loaded onto trucks and taken to the Minsk ghetto.

“We were settled in the building of the Judenrat – 15 families from Uzda”, – Yakov recalled many years later. – Local Jews came to see us because we still looked like ordinary people: we were wearing real clothes, not rags, as they were. They were swollen from hunger, they looked at us with dull eyes, frightened and frozen – although there was a terrible frost, the houses were not heated. The air smelled of death”.

The new prisoners of the ghetto wondered where they would live – there was no free space in the ghetto. But the very next day, March 2, 1942, it became clear what the Germans were counting on. The Gestapo was ordered to crack down on 10,000 ghetto residents. All men who could not present a document stating that they work for the Nazis were subject to destruction. The Germans caught people on the streets, combed the premises and, in order to fulfill the plan, began to shoot at everyone in a row – however, by five o'clock in the evening, the “plan” had not yet been fulfilled. At 5 pm, all women and children, including Bella and Rosa, were kicked out of the Judenrat building into the street. They were lined up in a column, on which they immediately opened fire.

At 7 pm, when the Germans finally left, the men were able to go outside. Bella, who miraculously survived, was rushing about next to the pile of corpses, but Rose was dead.

Never have Yakov and Bella Grinshtein hated the Nazis so much. Yakov and Bella decided to live for revenge. Soon they became fighters of the Minsk underground. They had to get weapons and medicine, and recruit new members. Bella got a job in a German gunsmith, where she washed floors and polished weapons. In wide boots, she brought home cartridges, and in the wood – grenades, machine-gun locks and parts of machine guns. Yakov dug a cellar under the house. Weapons and medicines were hidden there – they were transported almost every week to the forest with the guerrillas' messengers.