ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Jewish partisans’ experiences of resistance in the Generalbezrik Litauen (1941–1944) from the standpoints of materiality, gender, and ethnicity. A few hundred Jews who escaped the Vilnius and Kaunas ghettos fought the Germans and their local collaborators in the ethnically mixed borderland regions of south-eastern Lithuania. Based on archival sources (German and Lithuanian police reports, Communist Party directives, personal letters, and testimonies), as well as memoirs and wartime Soviet and Lithuanian press accounts, this paper examines the ways in which material objects, including the partisans’ own bodies, were used to carry out resistance activities, enhance one's social status within a partisan unit, perform violence, and break or strengthen ethnic stereotypes. The instances of Jews being robbed by their fellow partisans not only show that antisemitism prevailed in the partisan community but also that commanders both attempted to contain anti-Jewish prejudices in their brigades and reproduced themselves the stereotype of ‘weak’ and ‘unsoldierly’ Jews. The chapter also hints at the social differentiation in the partisan camps based on the possession of certain scarce objects such as boots, better food rations, and arms. The ways such objects were gifted, stolen, or distributed among partisans challenge the idea of a comradely cross-ethnic partisan community on which the partisan recruitment propaganda was based. Although partisan experiences of cold, hunger, fatigue, and injuries became a shared reality, narrowing pre-war differences in the ways partisans lived through their bodies, ethnic and gender factors remained important ways of differentiating individuals within the partisan community.
