Some who had survived the Second World War in the great woods would spend the rest of their lives trying to forget the things they had endured, the things they had lost. They started over, lost touch, tried to move on. Others stayed in place, forever conscious of the impossibility of ever righting the scales, of ever taking back the moments that had been stolen. All of them, though, were forever tied to the dark forests of eastern Europe—the forests that held their secrets, the forests that held their dead.
Many years later, well into the next millennium, children still told tales of the old woman who lived deep in the heart of the Nalibocka Forest, the one with one green eye and one blue. Some wondered if she was real at all, though others swore they had seen her singing to the stars, speaking to the squirrels, swaying with the trees. They believed she was a witch, and they whispered stories of terror and fright about her in the hallways of schoolhouses where children of all races and religions now learned side by side.
But they didn’t know the old woman at all. They did not know she had been the wife of a man whose heart had opened once more, jagged edges and all, and who had stayed by her side until his own peaceful, quiet death at the age of eighty-nine. They did not know that she was the mother of two children, well into their sixties now, who—though they had moved out of the forest long ago, one to Israel, one to France—loved her with all their hearts and visited her whenever they could. They did not know that she was a proud Jewish hero who had discovered who she was in the darkness and who had helped give life to many who might not have otherwise lived.
And that was just fine with her. She belonged there, among the trees, in the night that always embraced her, under a ceiling of sky splashed with endless stars. And on the sixteenth of July, 2019, she died quietly in the little cabin she had built with her own hands, both of her children beside her, under the light of the first full moon of her hundredth year of life, just as an old woman had promised she would, so many years before.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
On December 5, 1941, the life of Aron Bielski changed forever.
The youngest of twelve, Aron, then fourteen, was out doing chores in his small Polish village of Stankiewicze, when he saw a police vehicle pulling down the lane. Dropping everything, he ran and hid in the barn.
He had good reason to be terrified. The Bielskis were the only Jews in town, and the Germans—who had occupied Poland months earlier—had been hunting his older brothers for months, in conjunction with local authorities who collaborated with them. In fact, Aron hadn’t spoken a word since the day that summer when the police had tried to elicit his brother’s whereabouts by forcing the frightened boy to dig his own grave—and then lie in it—at gunpoint.
As he watched from his hiding place, the men arrested his parents, Beila and David, and took them away. It was a Friday, and by Monday morning, they were dead—murdered along with more than four thousand other Jews and dumped into a mass grave just outside the nearby town of Nowogródek. Also killed that day were the wives of two of Aron’s older brothers, as well as his baby niece.
“My husband cannot forgive himself,” Aron’s wife, Henryka, told me in July 2020, just days before Aron’s ninety-third birthday. “All were killed, and he survived.”
Aron fled into the woods, where he reunited with two of his older brothers. By March, there were seven others with the three Bielskis, and by the summer, their group had grown to thirty, including a fourth brother, Tuvia Bielski, the oldest among them.
For the next two years, as the Germans moved Jews first into ghettos and then to concentration camps, the group grew, moving deeper and deeper into the dense woods, until they numbered twelve hundred. Remarkably, almost all of them survived the war.
Their story unfolds in startling, breathtaking detail in the 2008 Edward Zwick film Defiance （starring Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber）， as well as in the 1993 nonfiction book of the same name by Nechama Tec, on which the film is based. Both were resources I used in writing The Forest of Vanishing Stars, which sets the main character, Yona, on a collision course with a group similar to the small Bielski group in the summer of 1942, before it grew in size. It’s important to note that though the fictional group in this novel is similar in location to that early Bielski group, the fictional characters are not directly based on any real people; in fact, I wrote the rough draft of the first half of the book before I ever spoke with Aron and Henryka.
Still, it was enormously important to me to get the details right, and that’s one reason why I did a huge amount of reading and research—and why I was so grateful to talk to Aron （who changed his surname to “Bell” after moving to the United States）。 The conversations I had with him—and with Henryka, also born in Poland—gave a beating heart to the vast collection of details I had accumulated. “Sorrow,” he told me in our first conversation, “teaches a person how to live, how to survive, what to do next.”