In 1942 the underground of the Minsk Ghetto had to be headed by women – by that time most of the male members of the resistance had been killed or had gone to join the partisans. The women managed to hold out for another year thanks to distinctly female ingenuity: it never occurred to the fascists to look for wounded Communists in typhus barracks, or for weapons in pots with double bottoms. An active participant in the women’s resistance was Rosa Lipskaya – she, one of the few, lived to see victory.
Panic reigned in Minsk. At 9:40 a.m. on June 24, 1941, the fascists began bombing the city. The massive bombardment continued until late evening. Crowds of refugees rushed out of the city, but most of them were forced to return. The Germans were already standing outside Minsk: those trying to evacuate were turned back.
The city froze in anxious ожидание. Elderly Jews tried to calm their families with stories about the First World War: in those days the arrival of “cultured” Germans meant an end to Jewish pogroms. However now no one believed in “kind” Germans – the men in steel helmets were clearly not in a joking mood.
At 5 p.m. on June 28, German tanks and motorized infantry entered the capital of the Byelorussian SSR. “Juden kaputt!” the motorcyclists guffawed as they sped through the streets of the Jewish quarters, for added effect running their fingers across their throats. Neighbors from among “Russians” and “Poles,” despite the chaos reigning in the city, hissed maliciously: “Your time is over, the Communists will not return.” Many believed it – eyewitnesses spoke of hundreds of Red Army soldiers who were being driven northwest from Minsk, to Drozdy, where a prisoner-of-war camp had been set up.
Amid all the chaos and despair, however, there were people who not only kept their heads but also tried to help those who were in danger. One such person was a resident of Minsk, Rosa Afroyimovna Lipskaya.
Rosa was born into a working-class family in the Belarusian small town of Svisloch in 1907. She was one of those Jewish women for whom the revolution became a deliverance – from the patriarchal life of the shtetl, from religious foundations, and from the fate preordained since childhood. At 21 she joined the Party, and a few years later the promising activist was sent to study at the Communist University of the National Minorities of the West in Moscow. In Moscow Rosa met her first husband – the Polish Communist Yakov Meerovich Shlensky.
Soon after the wedding the couple moved to Minsk, where Yakov found work as a correspondent at the newspaper Tribuna Radetska, published in Polish. Rosa took up Party work. And in the dreadful year of 1938 Shlensky, then no longer a correspondent but a worker at a shoe factory, was sentenced to 10 years in the camps for espionage in favor of Poland. His wife and newborn son Felix miraculously avoided repression. Rosa even managed to move up the Party ladder – by the start of the war she was already deputy director and Party organizer of the May 1 Glass Toy Factory.
When the war began, no one gave Lipskaya any Party assignments. However, she immediately joined the fight against the fascists – at her own risk. After the occupation of Minsk, Rosa and her three friends – Slava Gebeleva, Rakhil Kublina, and Tsilya Botvinnik – decided to help Soviet prisoners of war. With bundles in their hands they went to the camp where Red Army soldiers were being held, bringing clothes and food. While the pregnant Tsilya Botvinnik distracted the guards of the Drozdy camp, Lipskaya, Gebeleva, and Kublina looked for officers, commissars, and Jews crowded behind the barbed wire – they were in the greatest danger – and passed them food and civilian clothes. Having changed, the Red Army soldiers could quietly “leak” into the nearby filtration camp for civilians, where the Germans had driven all local men from 15 to 45 for screening. And from there it was possible to go into the forest and beyond the front line.
The women did not help the Red Army soldiers for long. Soon they themselves needed help. On July 19, 1941, all Jews in Minsk were ordered to move to the southwest of the city, into a new Jewish ghetto. It was a large area, comprising about 40 streets and lanes, which the Germans enclosed with barbed wire. The Minsk Ghetto was built in haste and without the thoroughness characteristic of the Germans – the Nazis did not intend to delay the liquidation of all its inhabitants. The Minsk Ghetto became the first where the fascists immediately resorted to the practice of mass murder.
After the creation of the ghetto, roundups began in the city. Any man could be stopped in broad daylight and have his trousers cut open with a razor – prove you’re not a Jew. In the ghetto itself people were caught and sent to gas vans. In one such roundup Rosa Lipskaya nearly died. Rosa and her son Felix were detained on the street and pushed into a gas van. But the fascists left, and the men inside, seizing the moment, struck the door hard, knocking down the guard who stood behind it, and everyone who was in the gas van managed to escape. But few were so lucky. Before the war almost a third of Minsk’s population, about 66,000 people, were Jews. By the autumn of 1941 another 40,000 Jews from Germany and other European countries had been added to them. Of nearly 100,000 people, fewer than five thousand survived until the end of the war.
The inmates of the Minsk Ghetto tried to resist. In the very first months underground Party groups appeared in the ghetto, and Rosa Lipskaya was among the first to join the resistance. The main goal of the underground was to establish contact with partisans in the forests near Minsk: the underground hoped to transfer Jews from the ghetto to them. But there were also everyday, urgent tasks: to find medicines, to obtain weapons (the partisans did not take people without weapons), to find out about impending pogroms and warn people. In the ghetto 22 underground Party groups were organized. Each group, the so-called “ten,” consisted of about ten people—altogether about 300 Jews operated in the underground. At the head of the organization were the Polish Communist Girsh Smolyar, and Minsk residents Mikhail Gebelev and Motya Pruslin.
Almost all employees of the Judenrat organized by the Hitlerites were members of the underground—the head of the Jewish police, the head of the labor exchange, secretaries, and heads of the economic department. Thanks to their work, members of the resistance managed to establish contacts with the “Russian” part of the city and with partisan detachments in the forests.
Rosa Lipskaya became a member of the third “ten,” and when the Nazis killed its commander, she took his place.
Rosa’s group dealt with several matters that were important for the ghetto. First, its members obtained and delivered medicines to the ghetto. Medicines were bought in pharmacies in the city’s “Russian” districts and stolen from the Germans. Some doctors working in city hospitals also helped Rosa—they wrote an inflated number of patients in the documents and gave surplus pills to the underground; issued forged certificates necessary to free underground members from forced labor; or, and this was very difficult and dangerous, hid in hospitals people whom the Gestapo was seeking.
The second duty of Rosa Lipskaya’s group was collecting weapons. Girsh Ruditser, the head of the labor exchange and the official responsible for assigning Jews to work outside the ghetto, was a member of the underground: thanks to him, Rosa’s “ten” was assigned to work in a weapons workshop. It was impossible to take weapons out from there—workers were searched, but Rosa came up with a way to outwit the guards. She and her comrades made false bottoms in soup buckets and hid the stolen rifle bolts and magazine boxes under them. Small parts the underground members carried out of the workshop in the shafts of rubber boots.
There were many women and children in the Minsk underground. The Nazis feared them much less, so they managed to carry out the most dangerous assignments. Raya Mashkleyses, who worked in the ghetto passport office, obtained blank passport forms for Rosa, which were filled out for the necessary people. Khasya Pruslina brought from the city the Sovinformburo bulletins, which Rosa then distributed in the Minsk ghetto. The ghetto’s children were guides. They escorted Jews leaving with medicines and weapons into the forest to the partisans.
By the summer of 1942 Rosa Afroyimovna and her friends had to take the leadership of the underground into their own hands: in May 1942 one of the leaders of the Minsk underground—engineer Isai Kazinets—was executed, in July 1942 Mikhail Gebelev was arrested and killed, the commander of the 1st “ten,” Girsh Smolyar, went to the partisans, the secretary of the 3rd “ten,” Matvei Pruslin, and the commander of the 6th “ten,” Zalman Okun, were killed… The women managed to hold out for about another year…
At the beginning of 1943 it became clear that the Germans were preparing a final solution to the Jewish question within the Minsk Ghetto. Workers were no longer allowed to go home overnight, work columns left and never returned, people were searched on the streets several times a day. The situation worsened after Hauptscharführer of the Gestapo Adolf Ryube (Ribbe) arrived in Minsk. In April–May 1943 Ryube organized the destruction of the inmates of the home for the disabled and the children’s home, and destroyed the “German” and “Russian” hospitals of the ghetto.
In the summer, the messenger of the former commander of the 1st “ten,” Smolyar, who had gone to the partisans a year earlier, passed on an order to Lipskaya’s group—to take the weapons and medicines and go into the forest to the location of the Kutuzov Partisan Detachment. Twenty-four members of the underground from Lipskaya’s group left Minsk in July 1943. And already in October 1943 the ghetto was completely liquidated, and those who still remained in it were killed or sent to death camps.
Rosa Lipskaya’s comrades, she herself, and her son Felix ended up in the Jewish family partisan detachment No. 106. This detachment was led by Sholomo Zorin, a former inmate of the Minsk Ghetto, and unlike many others, this partisan unit admitted children and women. Zorin’s fighters were based in the Naliboki Forest, in the area of Baranovichi and Novogrudok. They supplied other combat units in the Naliboki Forest with qualified specialists: weaponsmiths, printers for underground presses, tailors, shoemakers, bakers, doctors, and nurses. Rosa worked in Zorin’s detachment as a nurse. In July 1944, Detachment No. 106 linked up with advancing units of the Red Army, and Rosa Lipskaya and her son were able to return to Minsk.
After the Victory, Rosa married her comrade from the underground and partisan struggle, Aron Hertselevich Fiterson, who had been widowed during the war, and returned to the May 1 Factory. After the war, she often recalled and told people about the heroes of the Minsk Ghetto who had perished at the hands of the punishers. Rosa Afroyimovna lived to the age of 73 and died in Minsk in 1980. Her son Felix became a well-known Belarusian surgeon. He is the author of publications on the history of the Minsk Ghetto and the Jewish partisan movement in Belarus, and the president (now honorary president) of the Belarusian Association of Jews—former inmates of ghettos and Nazi concentration camps.
20.11.2020
Translated by Lena Lores
Bibliography and sources:
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Rosa Lipskaya
1907 – 1980
