Resistance: They Fought Back

Around April, 1943, a decision was made to escape.

The decision in the end was a tunnel.

[tools scraping] They would take turns.

People who finished their work would come dig.

Some people would pretend to be sick so they could dig all day, and there was a group of-- of diggers, tough people.

[continuous gunfire] [shouting] "When I came out from the tunnel, it was dark.

There was shooting, which I could see lots of flashes of fire.

I could see people being killed.

[gunfire] This took place on September 26th.

It's already cold.

They were drenched.

Pitch black.

Didn't know where to go.

[thunder crashing] [shouting] [poignant music playing] My father, I remember him telling me that when he first arrived in the camp in the middle of the forest, and there was this man on a big white horse... with a gun on his shoulder.

My father's like, "Who is that?"

[laughs] And that was Tuvia Bielski, like-- just as in the film, right?

In the film, he has a gun slung over his shoulder, and he's a warrior.

My father wrote in his book that when he got to the forest, how did he feel?

And he said-- and here I quote... "I had come from a camp where thousands of Jewish people "were being killed by the Germans, and now there were all these fighters with guns."

"I felt very, very proud.

There was great camaraderie at the camp."

"We were unhappy because so many members "of our families had been massacred, "but we were happy because we were free and we were fighting back."

BATYA COHEN: Tuvia Bielski was responsible for saving 1,200 people's lives.

He accepted everybody-- small children, old men and women, solitary women who couldn't fight, like my mother-- everybody.

And Tuvia said he would rather save one Jew than kill a hundred Germans.

Bielski did something completely different, a completely different philosophy of, "We're all Jews.

We need to survive.

That's our resistance."

[fire crackling] <end subtitles>