Book Description

Charles Gelman was a teenager when eternal night fell on his town in Poland. It was June 1941 and the Holocaust had finally reached Kurenits, near the Soviet border. Gelman lost his family , and felt the cold, dead hand of the "Final Solution" even as its victims continued to hope. But he had one chance many did not have, and he took it. Charles Gelman fought back.Gelman was part of the Russian resistance; very few partisans survived to talk about their experiences. It was a difficult task for Gelman to find the desperate warriors hiding in the forests. Food had to be begged for; shelter was scarce; weapons were nearly impossible to come by and were a condition for joining the partisans. Courage, ingenuity , and self-sacrifice were both shared and assumed in the underground. Gelman became part of an organized force and attacked German outposts, derailed trains, blew up bridges, ambushed tanks, and neutralized the occupation infrastructure. Neither side expected or gave a quarter. Gelman explains the scourge of anti-Semitism. He shows how and why so many outwardly decent Poles and Byelorussians became indifferent to the fate of their Jewish neighbors. He understands the psychology of the German plan and why so many Jews struggled silently or went in comparative quiet to their own destruction. But most of all, Gelman gives us a participant's story of the armed resistance to Nazi genocide- and the story of those who did not go gentle.