ABSTRACT
As long as the ghettos still existed the Jews who had fled to the forest, and especially the members of the underground who had left the ghettos, considered it their first obligation to their conscience to attempt to bring other ghetto Jews to the forest. They did this regardless of whether they had already been accepted into partisan units or had still not established their own existential base. Jewish partisans visited the ghettos and sent letters via non-Jewish couriers to encourage the Jews to escape and even more important, to inform the members of the underground of the location of the partisan bases. The Jewish partisan units looked upon this activity of rescue as self-evident. Particularly outstanding in rescuing Jews from the ghettos was Bielsky’s unit, which operated in accordance with the principle that Bielsky himself had set down: any Jew reaching the forest would be accepted: rescuing Jews came before everything else.
