Aron Bell, a Holocaust survivor and the last remaining brother of the famed Bielski partisans who saved more than 1,200 Jews from the Nazis during the Holocaust, has died at 98.
Their story was told in the book and the movie of the same name, Defiance.
Bell, who changed his last name from Bielski, was born in 1927 in Stankiewicze, part of present-day Belarus, as the youngest of 10 brothers and two sisters.
After the German army arrived in Stankiewicze in July, 1941, the town’s Jews were imprisoned in the Novogrudok ghetto.
Two of Bell’s siblings, Abraham and Yankel, were murdered in the village. His parents, David and Bella, were murdered in a mass killing there in December, 1941.
The older Bielski brothers — Asael, Tuvia and Alexander or “Zus” — took their siblings’ and parents’ deaths to mean that there was no possibility of Jewish survival in the ghetto, so they fled to the nearby forest, and Aron joined them.
Only very gradually forming the Bielski Brigade, one of the largest rescue efforts of Jews during the Holocaust, the Bielski brothers eventually provided refuge for more than 1,200 Jews — two of whom lived in Denver for decades, Cantor Isaac Koll and the late Paula Burger.
The Bielskis were anti-Nazi partisans who slowly accumlated weapons, but their killing of Nazis and the disruption of Nazi operations were only part of the Bielskis’ goal. The Bielskis wanted to save Jews, even those entirely unable to join in military operations, and whose maintenance sharpened the risk of being discovered and complicated the search for food.
“If you were in the company of those three brothers, you felt like you had a whole army behind you, you were fearless,” said Aron Bell in his 1996 testimony to the USC Shoah Foundation.
At the forest settlement, where the group gradually established workshops, a bakery, a school and a hospital, Bell, who was only 11 or 12 at the time, played a key role in sneaking into the nearby ghetto to encourage fellow Jews to escape to the forest.
It was a tough sell because the forest offered no known shelter or food.
Even when Jews imprisoned in the ghetto wanted to escape, the whole enterprise was laced with tragedy. For example, Zus Bielski’s wife wanted to flee, but she was many months pregnant, and could not. Then, shortly after she gave birth, the Nazis murderered her. Zus Bielski never saw his own child, and never saw his wife again.
In his diary, Tuvia Bielski wrote, “It is Aron who brings life into the community. He finds other survivors and introduces them to our district.”
Bell was the last surviving brother of the brigade. Asael died in 1945 after being conscripted into the Soviet Red Army. Tuvia died in 1987, followed by Zus in 1995.
Cantor Isaac Koll, formerly at Beth Joseph, and his late sister Paula Burger survived the Holocaust in the Bielski encampment. Koll remembers little, as he came to the forest at age three, but Burger’s memory was full, as she came to the forest at age eight.
Paula Burger wrote an autobiography, with former longtime IJN Senior Writer Andrea Jacobs, Paula’s Window, that covered her experiences in the Bielski forest camp.
The brothers’ tale of defiance inspired the books The Bielski Brothers by Peter Duffy and Defiance: The Bielski Partisans by Nechama Tec, which was later made into the 2008 film “Defiance” with actor George MacKay portraying Bell.
Following the war, Aron Bell immigrated to British Mandate Palestine and served in the army during Israel’s War of Independence in 1948. In 1954, he moved to the US where he married his first wife, Judith, with whom he had three children.
A decades-long resident of Palm Beach, Fla., Bell frequently spoke to schoolchildren about his experiences in the Holocaust, and wrote two books, including Forest Scout: Reminiscences and Between Hitler and Stalin.
In 2007, Bell and his second wife, Henryka, were charged with exploitation of the elderly, theft and scheming to defraud after they convinced a 93-year-old Catholic Holocaust survivor to give them power of attorney and began withdrawing her money. The next year, the charges were dropped after the couple agreed to repay the woman $260,000 in stolen funds.
Bell is survived by his wife, his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
