ABSTRACT

This chapter presents a comparative study of how and why Jewish "resistance" took different forms in three of these ghettos in West Belorussia: Baranovich and Pinsk in present-day Belarus, and Bialystok, today in Poland. The most important difference in the ghettoization process in Belorussia was that between areas that were in Poland before 1939 and areas that were in the USSR before 1939. Christopher Browning notes that among the Nazis, "'productionists' attempted to harness and profit from ghetto labor" and often prevailed over "'attritionists' who were eager to decimate the incarcerated Jews through starvation and disease." The chapter shows that there was considerable variance in the time elapsed between the capture of the city and the first killings, and between the killings and the establishment of ghettos. As the editors of the Holocaust Encyclopedia note, Well before the famous April uprising in the Warsaw ghetto, Jews revolted in many of the ghettos of Belorussia, including Nesvizh, Kletsk, Derechin, and Lachva.