An extraordinary phenomenon in the ghetto was the continuity and the growth of the Tel Chai kibbutz (commune). This kibbutz, which was founded before the war, was enlarged and strengthened by the arrival in the ghetto of member-refugees from other places. The com- mune consisted of young people of various pro-Zionist organizations and was supported by the Labor Zionist Party. Members of the kibbutz secured an abandoned house in which to carry on their activities. In time, the commune organized its own kitchen, and planted a garden that generated a significant quantity of vegeta- bles. The kibbutz in the ghetto also continued training exercises, just like before the war, preparing its members for eventual settlement in Israel. Moreover, seminars and indoctrination sessions were conducted. One writer described the kibbutz as a “‘bright corner of the ghetto in which people sang in the evenings, joined together in gatherings and managed to forget their trou- bles for a while.” The driving force behind the Tel Chai kibbutz, who later would be one of the heroes in the Bialystoker re- sistance against the Nazis, was Mordechaj Tenenbaum- Tamarof. He came to Bialystok during the war from Wilno, Warsaw and other places where he had been active in organizing and leading resistance campaigns against the Nazis. The kibbutz boasted of other young leaders and several scores of members committed to make Aliyah who later demonstrated tremendous hero- ism against the Nazi oppressors. They included: Cwi Hersz Mersik of Melnice, near Kowel; Herszl Cwi Rozental of Jaszynowka; Ruwen Rozenberg of Sucho- wolja; Chanoch Zelaznagora of Szedliec; Jochewed Wajnsztein of Knyszin; Gedalja Petljuk of Knyszin; Cypora Birman of Rozyszcze; Tema Sznajderman of Warsaw, and others. Jewish youth in the ghetto, representing all politi- cal parties and persuasions, did not permit themselves to crumble under the terror and brutality of Nazi occu- pation. They, as well as most of their elders, coped with the fearsome circumstances to the best of their ability, continuing to study and to draw inspiration from their Jewish traditions. The Nazis failed to destroy Jewish honor. Nonetheless, the spiritual as well as the physical dimensions of Jewish life followed a thorny path in the ghetto. It was impossible to carry on an extensive cultural program. Zionist, Socialist, and Communist activities, which blossomed in Bialystok before the Nazi occupa- tion, now could only be carried on underground, their main purpose opposition to the Nazis. These groups fashioned the beginnings of the later resistance in the Bialystok ghetto and maintained contact with other opposition cadres in the Wilno and Warsaw ghettos. A few individuals — including Pejsach Kaplan, A.S. Herszberg, the historian, and Jehoszua Heszl Klemen- tynowski, founder of the Linas Hatzedek and senior Zionist activist in Bialystok — clandestinely advanced 66 Jewish culture in the ghetto. They wrote about other tragic episodes in Jewish history and chronicled the daily atrocities in their own environment. The days, weeks and months in the Bialystok ghetto seemed like an eternity to the inmates forced to . live in severely congested quarters, poverty, hunger and squalor. Thousands of men and women were let out daily to perform slave labor for the Nazis. Tragic news reached the ghetto in grim detail about the suffering and extermination of Jews in surrounding communities such as Slonim, Lomza, Bielsk, Grajewo, Tyktin and other places. These reports were brought to Bialystok by Jews who had managed to escape from these other liquidated towns. Many Bialystoker Jews had relatives in these places, and the news of their annihilation brought even more pain to their lives. THE BITTER TRUTH The people in the Bialystok ghetto hoped that although their circumstances were wretched and life was scarcely tolerable, they would be spared because the Nazis needed their labor. But rumors persisted that entire villages and towns in the vicinity of Bialystok were being systematically emptied of Jews, their desti- nation unknown but their macabre fate imaginable. Indeed, the Jews of Bialystok had already experienced the expulsion of thousands of their own citizens to unnamed places. No one wanted to believe the worst. After all, peo- ple thought, the Judenrat in Bialystok had thus far en- joyed modest success in restraining the Nazi savagery. Perhaps the council would be able ultimately to save the ghetto inmates. As it turned out, several of the Judenrat members secretly knew that the Nazis were making preperations to deport the Jews out of the ghetto. In fact, the Judenrat, from the very beginning of its existence, tried to delay this grim finale. But nothing could stand in the way of Hitler’s maniacal plan to exterminate the Jews, even those who had been forced to give up their last bit of energy to support the Third Reich and its war machine.

Word spread that the German command was about to remove a certain number of Jews from the ghetto on the pretext that conditions were overcrowded and that these “‘transfers’’ were necessary to prevent epidemics. Shortly thereafter, before Rosh Hashanah, 1941, the Judenrat received an order from the Gestapo that 12,000 Jews were to be moved out. The council was ordered to arrange for buses, for which the Jews themselves would have to pay. People were promised they would be able to take their belongings with them. An urgent session of the Judenrat was called. It turned out to be a painful and anguishing proceeding. Upon the council fell the nightmarish task of selecting The Bialystoker Memorial Book