Aron Bell, a member when he was a teenager of a daring brigade of Jewish partisans that during World War II attacked German troops in western Belorussia and rescued some 1,200 Jews from near-certain death, died on Sept. 22 at his home in Palm Beach, Fla. He was 98.
His son, Alan, confirmed the death.
The Bielski partisans, run by three of Mr. Bell’s older brothers, formed after the arrest and murder of the siblings’ parents in December 1941. The charismatic Tuvia Bielski was the commander; Asael Bielski was his deputy; and Alexander, or Zus, Bielski ran reconnaissance. They were all much older than Aron, who was the last survivor in a family of a dozen children.
“If you were in the company of my brothers, you felt like you had an army behind you,” Mr. Bell, who changed his name after moving to the United States in 1952, said in the documentary “Resistance: Untold Stories of Jewish Partisans,” which aired on public television in 2002.
“They knew how to survive,” he continued. “How to throw fear on people.”
On its website, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington calls the Bielski partisans “one of the most significant Jewish resistance efforts against Nazi Germany during World War II.”
For Mr. Bell, the perilous life he lived hiding in the vast Naliboki Forest meant freedom from living in a ghetto or from being imprisoned in a concentration camp.
“You saw the sunshine,” he told the Jewish News Syndicate in 2020. “All we needed was food and we won. If you wanted to sleep, you slept. If there was no bed, you slept on the snow.”
He carried a rifle, but his brothers would not let him fight on the front lines. Instead, he served as a scout finding sources of food and as a courier who carried warnings about German plans to Jews living in the nearby Novogrudok ghetto.
Me. Bell’s youth and slight stature kept him from raising alarms as he moved around without a yellow Star of David patch that Jews were forced to wear by the Nazis. He was able to “walk into places where no Jew could,” he told the Jewish News Syndicate.
Some Jews heeded his warnings and fled to the woods, where the Bielskis created a nomadic encampment that had to move regularly within the enormous forest to avoid German detection.
Rescuing Jews — rather than only fighting the Germans, as other Jewish and Soviet partisan groups did — was Tuvia’s idea. He sent men to the ghettos to bring people into the forests; even though he needed more battle-ready partisans, he welcomed as many Jews as possible to his wooded camp.
“I would rather save one old Jewish woman than kill 10 Nazis,” Tuvia was quoted as saying by Peter Duffy, who also wrote “The Bielski Brothers: The True Story of Three Men Who Defied the Nazis, Built a Village in the Forest and Saved 1,200 Jews” (2003).
It was not the first book written about the Bielskis. “Defiance: The Bielski Partisans” (1993), by Nechama Tec, herself a Holocaust survivor, was adapted by American filmmaker Edward Zwick for his movie “Defiance” (2008), which starred Daniel Craig as Tuvia, Liev Schreiber as Zus, Jamie Bell as Asael and George MacKay as Aron.
After the release of “Defiance,” Mr. Bell began to speak to schools and other organizations about his experience.
“He was committed to spreading the legacy of the Jewish partisans and to dispelling the myth that Jews went like sheep to the slaughter,” said Sheri Rosenblum, the director of operations, development and programs for the Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation.
“He ensured that people knew that Jews resisted in every way possible,” she added.
Aron Bielski was born on July 21, 1927, in Stankiewicze, a rural Belorussian village where the Bielskis were the only Jewish family. His father, David, was a farmer who milled wheat, and his mother, Beila (Mandel) Bielski, managed the home. The farm was on the outskirts of the Naliboki Forest.
In June 1941, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union — which by then had incorporated Belorussia, now Belarus — authorities recruited by the Nazis came looking for Aron’s brothers. They had refused orders to report to the local police station and had gone into hiding. Officers beat their father to get him to give up his sons’ location.
When officers interrogated Aron, they forced him to dig his own grave. He lay silently in the pit, refusing to reveal where his brothers were. “I froze,” he told The Miami Herald in 2003. “I was cold like ice.”
But he was freed.
Later that year, Aron watched as his parents were loaded onto the back of a pickup truck on their farm and taken away. They were killed in a massacre with many other Jews.
Soon after, Tuvia, Asael and Zus started the partisan brigade, first to protect their family and friends, then to provide a haven for other Jews.
Mr. Bell said in the documentary “Resistance” that he was proud of giving the Nazis “a hell of a time,” and described the partisans’ tactics.
“Look, if you go from one city to the other, somewhere along the line there has to be a bridge, or a train, right?” he said. “The Nazis used that. You go, you burn up the bridge; you go, you sabotage the railroad. Or if they were accumulating cows, for their food, you’d go and burn up their food. Like a terrorist group: hit and run.”
By the time the Soviet Army liberated Belorussia in summer 1944, the Bielski partisan community included at least 200 fighters and more than 1,200 rescued Jews.
After the war, Mr. Bell emigrated to what was then the British Mandate of Palestine, where he fought in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. He moved to the United States in 1952, settling in Manhattan. He drove a taxi and later owned a fleet of about 25 cabs. (In the United States, Tuvia drove a truck, and Zus ran a trucking and taxi company. Asael died in battle in Germany in 1944 after being drafted into the Red Army.)
Late in life, Mr. Bell received a flurry of unwanted attention when he and his wife Henryka were arrested in Palm Beach in 2007 on charges of kidnapping, fraud and other crimes.
The police said they had swindled a neighbor, a 93-year-old Polish-born woman, out of more than $250,000, then had taken the woman to Poland and left her in a nursing home there. In a plea deal, the Bells — whose lawyer said that the woman had dementia and had asked them to take her back to Poland for her final years — agreed to repay the money.
In addition to his son, Mr. Bell is survived by two daughters, Brenda Weisman and Susan Abrams, from his marriage to Judith Weinstock, which ended in divorce; his wife, Henryka Zaworska; two stepchildren; 12 grandchildren; and 20 great-grandchildren.
Mr. Bell returned several times to Belarus, where he visited the forest in which a plaque memorializes his parents and the many others buried there in a mass grave. And in 2019, he was invited to the unveiling of a monument to Jewish resistance in Moscow, where he embraced President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
“My father said to him, ‘I want to thank you for taking the time out to see me,’” Alan Bell said. “And Putin said that his father had told him what the Jewish partisans had done, and told my father, ‘I couldn’t have done what you folks did.’”
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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