Fighting Back: Memoir of Jewish Resistance in World War II

Fighting Back is more than a tale of survival, it is the extraordinary memoir of a survivor who outlasted Hitler's Holocaust not in a concentration camp, but in the woods of eastern Poland as a leader of successful Jewish resistance during World War II. Written to dispel the myth of Jewish passivity, Harold Werner recounts his experiences as a member of a large Jewish partisan unit, which aggressively conducted military missions against the German army in occupied Poland. The unit of young Jews, men and women, received air drops from the Russians, wiped out local German garrisons, blew up German trains, and even shot down German planes. In addition to their military sabotage, these partisans rescued Jews from ghetto imprisonment and slave labour detail and provided a safe haven in the Parczew Forest for other Jews who escaped the Nazi extermination camps. Few, if any, accounts of Jewish survival during the Holocaust describe such a rare combination of victorious military activities and humanitarian efforts in successful large-scale Jewish resistance against the Nazis.