According to the order # 001 from January 3, 1944 major-general Vasili Chernyshev separated the Bielski detachment into a fighting and a family detachments. An armed group of about 100 people formed a separate detachment named after Ordzonikidze. The detachment operated as part of the brigade named after Kirov under captain Lyashenko – a commander, Vasili Kiyan – a commissar, Podkovzin – chief of staff. In fact Zus (Sigizmund) Bielski exercised command of the detachment. The detachment grew in number up to 163 people by July 1944

The Bielski boys were not involved in tha Naliboki killings. Furthermore they never killed anyone who didn’t earn it.

Bielski never took part in direct fights against Germans. They’ve had too many children, woman en elderly, to be able to fight. Their sole purpose was to survive, to be dangerous enough for the Germans not to be pursued.

This very survival was however a very though goal to achieve! They area was very poor, robbed by Germans and by Soviets. Bielski’s had to search for food and rob Polish or Bielarusian villages. Those ‘economic actions” were so bothering locals that they’ve started to organize self-defense. One of such villages was NALIBOKI.

As an act of reprisal Soviets and Jews from Bielski detachment had killed 130 peasants and wiped the village completely.

So the only fights Bielski’s were involved in, were fights against local s, “food expeditions”, and, as in case of Naliboki, punitive expeditions.

I think that should be marshes, not marches!

Belarus has a museum about what the Bielskis did which is researched and done without any Jewish involvement. The website has some english in it. The second address is about Zus Bielski’s fighting unit.

The above is the Florida Holocaust Museum site that tells the Bielski Brothers story ‘the story of the largest armed rescue of Jews by Jews during World War II’, on which the Defiance movie is based (defiancemovie.com).

unlike other immigrant groups before and since, for almost all who came from that world there has long been no home to return to, to visit, to retire to, to take pleasure in: if the old home still stands, others live in it; if family graves are undesecrated, they are not tended… and the return is only to a museum.

This scar on the psyche is real, whatever genealogies may be created or missing relations found somewhere.

As a genealogist, I find this statement of “fact” to be ignorant of what is happening right now in the field, and it is in the same vein as the myth that “our names were changed at Ellis Island.” Not one documented case has ever been found of that happening.

Jewish genealogists around the world refute that sentence in the article very easily. Many have traveled to their ancestral shtetls, some have found their ancestors’ old homes, many others take that same opportunity to contact other descendants of that shtetl and together organize and fund cemetery restoration and preservation projects.

Jewish genealogists around the world continue to find distant cousins across Europe, South America, Israel and North America. Those who are interested only need to learn how to go about doing this. Numerous such “finds” are documented in the media every year.