But life wasn’t always sorrowful for Aron—or for the many Jews who lived in Poland before the German occupation. The Bielskis had a good life. They owned a mill, and Aron has happy childhood memories of riding horseback, playing in the nearby forest, and even walking six miles to school. “I was a king,” he told me with a shrug. “I was beginning to be a king.”
But then, of course, life changed. “The Germans came,” said Henryka, “and everything turned upside down.”
In the heart of the Nalibocka Forest—the same forest where Yona spends much of the novel—the Bielskis set up not just a camp but a society. “They had their own hospital, their own jail, they had a place that was a kitchen, a sewing place where they were fixing clothing, because there were twelve hundred people,” Henryka explains. “They were self-sufficient. They had doctors, nurses, everything.”
But most of all, they had each other. They found community, and they survived the war because they found trust, life, and hope in the darkness.
* * *
After speaking with Aron, I found myself thinking often of his parents, who were taken away to a horrible fate, just as six million Jews were across Europe. Henryka told me that to this day, when Aron first wakes up in the morning, he often sees his father before him. “He was so scared in the forest,” she said. “But his father is always with him, always.”
When I thought about the guilt Aron has lived with his whole life—the guilt of surviving while so many others died—I wondered what his parents would have thought to know their youngest son has lived into his nineties. His very survival is a triumph over evil, and his whole life—as well as the existence of his three children, fourteen grandchildren, and thirteen great-grandchildren—is a testament to that.
During our conversation, Aron paused at one point and said, his voice trembling, “You have to remember one thing for the rest of your life: hardship teaches a person life.” I can’t think of a more important message as we emerge from the shadow of 2020, the year in which I wrote this book. I think many World War II novels remind us that there is always a light at the end of the tunnel, and that as a human race, we can all triumph over the darkness. But this year I needed to hear that—and to internalize it, to make sure it found its way into both my life and my writing—more than ever. To hear it from a survivor was even more impactful.
On a personal note, I’d like to add that much of the Jewish side of my own family, on my father’s side, actually hails from an area of eastern Europe not too far away from where The Forest of Vanishing Stars takes place—something I didn’t realize until my brother sent me a link to a family tree he was putting together on Ancestry.com. （Thanks, Dave!） It was amazing to discover that my great-great-grandparents—Rudolph and Rose Harmel—had in fact emigrated from Poland to the United States in August 1888, fifty-one years before Hitler’s army invaded their former homeland. Rudolph died in 1932, but Rose lived until 1941—long enough that she must have known of the horrors that were beginning to befall the people she’d left behind. I don’t know if I had distant relatives—perhaps sisters, brothers, or cousins of my great-grandparents—who were caught up in the Nazi terror, but I would imagine I did. It’s incredible to think about fate and how the decisions our ancestors made—mine’s decision to leave Poland in 1888, for example—affect us so much to this day.
In The Forest of Vanishing Stars, as in real life, many Jews in Poland made decisions that impacted the future, too. They stood up. They fought back. They survived. And when you think of the odds they faced in Poland, that’s truly incredible.
According to Yad Vashem, the world Holocaust remembrance center based in Israel, more than 3.3 million Jews lived in Poland on the eve of World War II—more than any other country in Europe. In fact, they made up 10 percent of Poland’s population, the highest percentage of Jews anywhere in Europe. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, between 2.8 million and 3 million Polish Jews were murdered during the war. That’s somewhere between 84 percent and 91 percent of the entire Jewish population of the country.
Think about that for a moment. Approximately three million Jewish people were murdered in a single country. Jewish casualties in Poland far outweighed those in any other country during the war—and yet people somehow found a way to survive against those staggering odds. It’s incredible and inspiring, and as I spoke to Aron Bielski, I felt almost as if I were having a conversation with a real-life superhero. He was young during the war, and it was certainly his older brothers who did the most to build their society of salvation within the woods. But Aron played a role, too, and he’s still here to talk about it. What a gift to us all.