Partisan Song
Partisan Resilience, Resistance, and Revenge Book review by Dr Anne Sarzin
While the Holocaust encompasses six million tragedies, there are redemptive glimmers of light and hope amid the darkness. In Partisan Song: A Holocaust story of Resilience, Resistance, and Revenge, author James A. Grymes reanimates the spirit, courage and valour of the Maccabees in the life of Moshe Gildenman, who led a highly successful Jewish partisan group against the Nazis in Ukraine during the Second World War.
Moshe was an engineer and a family man focused on the wellbeing of his wife Golda and thirteen-year-old daughter, Feigela; and a philanthropist meeting the needs of his community in Korets, a small town in Ukraine. A gifted musician and violinist, he contributed to the town’s cultural life, conducting a choir and orchestra and creating a mandolin ensemble. One of his most prized possessions was his copy of Joseph Gladstein’s Freedom’s Songs, a collection of 30 Yiddish songs published in 1919 in Warsaw.
On 21 May 1942, with 2200 of their Jewish compatriots, Golda and Feigela marched four miles from the Korets ghetto to a forest outside the neighbouring village of Kozak, where the Nazis shot their naked victims in rows of six at a time in mass pits, aided by Ukrainian collaborators. Neither the Germans nor the Ukrainians showed remorse for the atrocities they perpetrated.
Overwhelmed by his family’s unimaginable fate and unable to process a loss of such magnitude, Moshe experienced an apotheosis that transformed his pain into a plan for action. He confided to a friend, ‘I want to die with Shema Yisrael on my lips and a gun in my hand’. At this time, he composed a song with lyrics that expressed his objectives:
And the heart full of pain
Cannot find peace anywhere
It desperately wants to live and, above all, to live to see
The joyous hour of revenge.
Less than two weeks after Germany invaded the Soviet Union, in a broadcast on 3 July 1941, Stalin announced the creation of partisan units to disrupt the German rear by blowing up roads and bridges, destroying communication lines, burning down forests and stores and terrorising the Germans and their collaborators. When Moshe escaped from Korets, together with his son Simcha (Lionka) and 16-year-old cousin Siomke, he tried desperately to locate Russian partisans in the forest, despite the antisemitism prevalent among Soviet partisans, who believed Jews were cowards and unfit for combat. Although the Russian partisans welcomed them, eventually Moshe adopted the pseudonym ‘Uncle Misha’ and formed his own group of Jewish partisans, who distinguished themselves for their bravery under his leadership. By February 1943 Uncle Misha’s Jewish Group also included 31 men and women, many of whom had no military experience. He trained them as combatants and told them it was their sacred duty to avenge the murders of their innocent brothers and sisters.
The author describes vividly the difficulties of life in the forest, and the challenge of waging war against the Germans, enduring starvation, dehydration, disease and exposure. ‘But even in the worst of times, the Jewish partisans felt proud and optimistic,’ he states. ‘Knowing that they were taking up arms against Judaism’s greatest enemy fortified their spirits and convinced them that they would be victorious…. It was worth all of the suffering to witness every moment of revenge.’
Rich in memorable characters, the author describes acts of immense courage, daring and strategic brilliance. These are stories that deserve to be remembered and, indeed, celebrated. None more so than the all too brief life and times of 12-year-old Motele Schlein, a violin prodigy and a brilliant, resourceful and brave combatant, whose commitment to the challenges he faced surely merit his being inscribed in our history books alongside our most celebrated warriors. James Grymes brings to life this touching portrayal of a young and vulnerable boy thrust into an adult role that he fulfills beyond all expectations.
The author presents a multiplicity of deeply touching vignettes, describing interrupted lives, shattered hopes and paralysing fears, which convey to the reader the protagonists’ emotional destitution and sorrow. He demonstrates skilfully how these traumas prove foundational to the quest for revenge, powering the partisans’ campaign to avenge the murders of those they loved and lost. As this is a book for the general reader, Grymes weaves these stories into the broader historical context, without weighting the text too heavily with political analysis. He conveys enough for us to understand the major currents of war and the events that shape the destinies of the characters we get to know with a degree of intimacy and a large measure of admiration. We are told that the Red Army’s victory in the Battle of Stalingrad signalled a major turning point in the war, both militarily and psychologically, with the Red Army distributing leaflets that warned Ukrainians collaborating with the German occupiers to cease their ‘traitorous activities’. Grymes states simply, ‘The Red Army was advancing, and their Day of Judgment was looming’. We learn, too, of the convergence of the armies from the Western and Eastern Fronts, an important milestone in the war against Germany.
We follow ‘Uncle Misha’, now a member of the Red Army, as he liberates a labour camp for ‘Eastern workers’ in Torgau, a satellite camp of Buchenwald concentration camp, one of more than 44,000 prisoner of war camps, ghettos, transit camps, labour camps, concentration camps and killing centres that Nazi Germany and its allies established from1933 onwards. As the author states, ‘The proudest moments of his [Moshe’s] life were when he, a son of the “inferior Jewish race”, opened the gates of German camps and brought liberation to thousands of people’. We follow Uncle Misha as he walks the streets of Berlin, ‘after the Aktion in Korets, he had fulfilled the promise he had made to himself on that day to avenge the murders of his wife and daughter’. In a final and personal demonstration of victory, he scrawls in Russian, German and Yiddish a message on the wall above Goebbels desk in the Reich Chancellery: ‘Hitler and Goebbels! I Moshe, son of Asher ha-Levi of Korets, have outlived you and your ridiculous racial theory’. His mission was complete.
Some might judge this book is not for the faint-hearted. However, it is a fascinating saga told simply and clearly and is thoroughly engrossing from beginning to end. It holds up a mirror to the human condition at a time of immense suffering and persecution for the Jewish people and, in these pages, there are lessons to be learned about humanity, strength, resistance and resilience. In many ways, these stories reflect the heroic resistance of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto and in other less known and less celebrated places. These fighters dispel the image of Jews going like lambs to the slaughter. Moshe Gildenman and those he led were in the forefront of those descended spiritually and emotionally from the Hasmonean warriors of old and, as such, need to take their place among the true heroes of the Jewish people.
Partisan Song: A story of Resilience, Resistance, and Revenge
By James A. Grymes
Citadel Press Books, Kensington Publishing Corp, New York
2026
