Fighting Back: Lithuanian Jewry's Armed Resistance to the Nazis, 1941-1945

Fighting Back chronicles the activities of those Jews who joined the Soviet Army and of those who during World War II fought the Nazis in the forests, in the ghettos of Vilna, Kovno, Shavli, and Svencian, and in the concentration camps. This landmark study, the first comprehensive account of organized resistance against the Nazis by Lithuanian Jews, now with a new preface that includes findings from the archives of independent Lithuania, is the product of decades of research. A former member of the Kovno ghetto underground and later a fighter with the Lithuanian partisans, Levin brings personal experience as well as sophisticated scholarship to this richly detailed account of battles fought on a little-known front. The author draws on a wide range of original sources-memoirs, trial transcripts, military documents, ghetto and battlefield diaries, and contemporary Jewish accounts published outside Lithuania-to show how Lithuanian Jewry's strong sense of cultural unity shaped its desperate anti-Nazi struggle. His interviews with 165 surivors and on the history, motives, organization, and methods of clandestine resistance units. Fighting Back represents an important chapter in the literature on the Holocaust, a much-needed contribution to modern studies of Jewish resistance during the war.