Jewish partisan who fought the Nazis battles to preserve forest fort where resistance group lived

in 1943, 21-year-old Fania Brantsovsky escaped from the Vilnius Ghetto through a gap in a wall and fled to a forest 12 miles away. For the next year, she lived with 100 other Jews in a wooden bunker deep in the woods, from where they launched attacks against the Nazis.

Today, Mrs Brantsovsky, who turned 100 in May, is the only surviving member of the group of partisans led by the poet Abba Kovner who called themselves the Nokmim, Hebrew for “Avengers”.

Now Mrs Brantsovsky has called for the now rapidly disintegrating fort in the swampy Rudnicki Forest to be preserved as an international Jewish heritage site.

“It’s my dream that this place be preserved for my grandchildren and great grandchildren,” said Mrs Brantsovsky, who lost almost her entire family in the Holocaust. “They should be able to come here and know about the resistance of the Vilna Ghetto escapees.”

Partisan Fort at Rudnicki Forest2

A bunker at the fort

The fact people even know about the rotting structure where the partisans slept and fought is already thanks to Mrs Brantsovsky, says her long-standing friend Dovid Katz, a Yiddish scholar, who told the JC that until last year the centenarian would regularly guide tourists through the woods to the underground hideout.

“Fania usually wears a dress or skirt. When she put on trousers for the forest’s thorns and bugs, we knew it was a fort day. Far-right historians determined to smear the Jewish resistance against Hitler want this last remnant of that period to disappear from memory,” he said.

“It is because of Fania that knowledge of this fort has already persisted 30 years longer than it might have.” This Holocaust survivor is no stranger to smears, however.

In 2008, she was under investigation by Lithuanian authorities for alleged war crimes against Lithuanians.

She strongly denied that the Nokmim ever targeted local people and no charges were ultimately brought.

Partisan Fort at Rudnicki Forest3 (2)

The fort is sinking into the swampy forest