Ann
owes her life to defiant brothers
From the May 2,2008 issue of the Jewish Telegraph
To view a .pdf file of the article please click here
James
Bond star Daniel Craig takes on the Nazis in his next film.
Defiance focuses on the Bielski Brigade, a group of underground
Jewish resistance fighters who saved more than 12,000 Jews
from the Nazis.
Ann
Monka — who features in the book
on which the film is based — was a young girl when she
was saved by the Bielskis and their band of heroic warriors. Born
Ann Stolowitzki in Lida, Eastern Poland, on August 27, 1929,
she was just 10 when war broke out in 1939.
Ann
was at a summer resort with her mother and siblings when her
father
unexpectedly showed up to announce that the war had started.
He told his young family that he had been drafted into
the army and their vacation was cut short. She
said: “Poland
was defeated in one week. We then lived for two years
under Russian rule. “
Everything
was confiscated and all the stores were closed. The system
was unacceptable to me because I wasn’t used
to it.“ I
was worried about my father and the Russians sent lots of families
to Siberia,
which was like a death sentence.”
One
day a Polish man from Lodz burst into Ann’s home claiming that the Germans
were killing Jews and sending them
all to concentration camps.“
We just couldn’t picture this being
true or real,” she admitted. “Then
my father showed up and he told us that he
had escaped from prison. Every hour that
night people came round asking my
father if he had seen this person or that.”
Ann
spent two years dashing in and out of bomb shelters until a
near-miss saw
her escape from her house just moments
before a direct hit. She
said: “All hell broke loose. We had
no where to go and remained in the
streets homeless. We went to stay on my
uncle’s small farm for two days while
the Germans occupied the city. “
As
children, we still didn’t fully understand
what was going on and were told
that it was a fun place to be. “ Then
rules came out that said Jews have to
go to concentration camps and
that is when the problems really started.” The
family was sent to Lida Ghetto, which Ann says was “not big enough for
the 10,000 people living there”.
She
added: “Mass graves were prepared,
the people were segregated and
6,700 people were shot. My grandma and my uncle were both killed
and my
first
cousin only survived because he
joined the wrong line by accident.
The rest of my family was
spared because my father
worked in a brewery that the
Germans wanted to use.“
We didn’t realise how close it
was all taking place to us. We
could just hear screaming and
crying and shooting.”
They
remained in the ghetto until 1943, when cattle carts were
prepared to take the families
of the brewery workers to Majdanek
concentration camp, from
where there were no survivors
on record. However,
Ann avoided the death journey by hiding in
an attic while German soldiers
searched the building below
her.
Ann’s
father, brother and sister weren’t so lucky, and were
boarded on to a train.
She said:
“ My brother, Michael, made his
mind up that he was going
to jump off the train once it got
going.”
“
The door was locked on the
outside, so he managed
to push himself through a small window
and forced the door open."
"But
only my brother, father, sister and eight others
jumped. Everyone else froze on their
spot. I consider my
brother one of the biggest heroes I’ve ever
met.”
Having
escaped from the ghetto by climbing down rope
from a second floor window, it was now
that Ann first came
into contact with the Bielski brothers, Tuvia,
Asael and Zus.
She said: “Three
brothers ran a partisan
movement and they
sent messengers telling
people to run away.
It was a difficult
journey as we were
in the woods for a
week before we managed
to
make contact with anyone.
“
But
as we prepared to go back to the city, a man
saw us and came running towards us, saying
that he had been
circling the woods looking for missing people. “
We weren’t alone any more. We shared their food and
made fires to
keep warm.”
The
Bielski brothers were the only rebel group who took
in the young and elderly and Ann was to live the
next two years of her life in
their makeshift
dwellings in
the woods. “They
built an entire city in the woods. They baked bread, had
skilled people to fix things and had their own
synagogue. “ The
three brothers had a regular army of 300 set up to go
on missions as a way to obtain ammunition and
German uniforms.”
She
added: “Each brother was a hero
and it is only because
of them that I am alive today. It is just too bad that too
many people in the
ghettos ignored their
message. The spirit
and mood in the woods was so great and all I did for two
years was sing and
dance and try and raise people’s spirits.
“
As we all sat around the fire, I’d pretend
we weren’t in
the woods and would
tell people to raise
their heads and pretend
the stars were our
chandelier. I tried
to dream and hoped
that I’d survive
so that I could tell
the world our story.”
She
added: “My mother had been crying
constantly for three
months because we
thought my father,
brother and sister
had been killed. “ Then
one day I saw my sister, who came
running towards me and said
that my father and brother were still
alive.
“
She told us the story
of how they had escaped
from the train and
she ended up becoming a
liaison for the brigade
because she spoke such
perfect Polish and
German.”
Although
she lived in the group, Ann was
too young to be an active
member and admitted “
there were a lot of
things going on that
[she] didn’t
understand”. After
the war, Ann settled in the US,
where she met her husband, Paul,
who had also been a Polish underground
fighter.
In
1994, author
Nechama Tec, who was writing a book about
the Bielski brothers titled Defiance: The
Bielski Partisans, approached
Ann to capture her memories.
And it is this book that provides the basis
of Defiance, directed by Edward
Zwick.
The
film will open later this year.
She said: “The
world has to see this
movie. They were the
only Jews that were
able to save other
Jews and it should
go into history that
they didn’t all
follow like sheep to
their deaths.”
Craig will portray Tuvia Bielski, while
the other two brothers,
Zus and Asael, will be played by Liev Schreiber and Jamie
Bell, respectively.
Ann
lives in Montville, New Jersey and has three children and seven
grandchildren.
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