Essie’s Story, Partisan and Teacher

All through the time I was writing Escaping Into the Night, I wondered if there was anyone out there who was part of the Bielski Partisans whom I could speak to. I made a few inquiries at the National Museum of the Holocaust, and heard about people who lived in trees, people who wandered the forests, but no one who was actually there, so I had to piece together details from various memoirs I read about other survivors’ experiences, and historical accounts about the Bielskis.

Imagine my surprise, then, when a friend of mine in response to a review she had posted of Escaping on my Amazon site forwarded me a short letter she had received from Esia Shor, a cousin of Tuvia Bielski and one of the original members of the partisan group.

Esia has written a detailed and compelling account of her life during the war. The story tells how the Germans took over her home town of Norwogrodek, and in one day, killed 4000 Jews in the town, miraculously sparing Esia and her father, but not her mother and sisters. Esia and her father were driven open army trucks to the ghetto, where each “old and dreary” house had four rooms, with twelve people to a room. Food was scarce, just one ration of soup per day, and people stood by the fence that separated the ghetto from the outside world, waiting for a moment that a guard wasn’t looking, then quickly making whispered exchanges through the wooden slats. A Polish couple for whom Esia did domestic work for helped in her first escape, giving her clothes in which to disguise herself and taking her to a cornfield, where she spent the night hiding, but when she stopped at a house the next morning to request a drink of water, she found the Polish police. Esia ran, then jumped into a deep ditch, where she hid for two days. As she tells it,

“I lay in the cold dirt, holding my legs close to my body for warmth and to still the trembling of my body. I kept hearing gunshots and menacing Polish voices repeating, ‘Come out, come out, we’ll find you anyway!’ It was like some nightmarish game of hide-and-seek only with death as the consequence.”

While she was able to avert the police, this escape attempt ended in failure, and Esia returned to the ghetto. However, several months later, she escaped with her cousin and two others who cut a hole in the fence, and made her tortuous way over fifteen miles into the woods to join the Bielski partisans. She was one of the first twenty-five people in the group, which later grew to over 1200 people. There, like my character, Halina, she carried a gun, went on guard duty helped with cooking, and went on missions to procure food from neighboring villages. The group was constantly on the move to avoid being discovered by German soldiers. She lived in the forest for two years. Eventually, after the war was over, she came to the United States, where she became a teacher.

Esia writes, “While it is true that I believed in myself and managed to survive through a combination of courage and chance, the fact is that others, also courageous, died simply because of bad luck.” When I read those words I thought of my characters Halina and Reuven coming to terms with the same issue, how they were brave because they had to be, and how they recognized that they were also lucky. As they set off to try to rescue Batya, Reuven carrying a gun and Halina carrying nothing but her lucky stone, they think about bravery, and how others were just as brave but less lucky. Halina says, “I wasn’t sure if I could believe in God and I didn’t really believe in the stone, either, but I could believe in luck.”

As I read parts of Esia’s story over and over, I am inspired and awed by her bravery, and her luckiness, but even more by her generosity in taking the time to share and, in essence, relive some of the horrors of her experience. Her story, like the stories of so many other survivors, in Esia’s words, “shows us that there is something remarkable about human beings, how they can start over and keep on going. Memories dim, but we should never forget what happened so long ago. This kind of horror should never happen again.”