Jewish partisans

They were most numerous in Eastern Europe, but groups also existed in occupied France and Belgium, where they worked with the local resistance.

[2] The partisans engaged in guerrilla warfare and sabotage against the Nazi occupation, instigated ghetto uprisings, and freed prisoners.

[5] Jewish partisans had to overcome great odds in acquiring weapons, food, and shelter and in evading capture.

[2] Nazi reprisals were brutal, employing collective punishment against their supporters and the ghettos from which the partisans had escaped,[8] and often using "anti-partisan operations" as pretexts for the extermination of Jews.

[10][11][12] As Allan Levine noted, "That Jewish partisans and fugitives were guilty of stealing food from Polish farmers is an uncontested fact.

As the war progressed, the Soviet government occasionally airdropped ammunition, counterfeit money and food supplies to partisan groups known to be friendly.

These individuals and families contributed to the welfare of the group by working as craftsmen, cooks, seamstresses and field medics.

[17] Thirty-two Jews from the Mandate for Palestine were trained by the British and parachuted behind enemy lines to engage in resistance activities.

[24] Eventually the Armia Ludowa (AL) was founded as the main communist-affiliated partisan group in occupied Poland.

[25] Independent partisan groups also operated in these forests, working to liberate Jews from local ghettos without outside support or coordination.

Notably, the Swirz partisans, founded by brothers Isidore and Hersch Karten, liberated over 400 Jews in Eastern Galicia.

The group within the Minsk ghetto was supported by the Jewish council which allowed them to organize a mass escape into the surrounding woods.

The partisan group left the ghetto because of a lack of support and went through the sewers to escape to the eastern Lithuanian woods.

[29] 1,318 Jews fighting for the partisans were killed during the war, ten Jewish members were awarded Yugoslavia's highest medal at that time, the Order of the People's Hero.