In May 1942, the Nazis murdered 2,200 Jews in the Korzak forest outside Korets, Poland (today in Ukraine). In one day, virtually the entire centuries-old Jewish community of the Volhynian town was wiped out in a mass shooting.

Only 186 Jewish skilled laborers and a few who succeeded in hiding were spared, including Moshe Gildenman and his teenage son, Simcha, and nephew Siomke Geifman. Among the dead were Gildenman’s wife, Golda, and young daughter Feigela.

As the survivors met in one of the remaining synagogues in the Korets ghetto to recite the Kaddish memorial prayer and mark the Shavuot holiday, Gildenman rose and declared, “Know that we’re all going to die, sooner or later. But I will not go like a sheep to the slaughter!… I am not afraid of anyone! I’m not even afraid of death.”

So, when the Nazis entered the ghetto for its final liquidation in late September 1942, Gildenman, his son, nephew, and nine other Jews — armed only with two revolvers and five bullets, and a Yiddish songbook — escaped to join the Ukrainian partisans fighting the Germans and their collaborators before they would be massacred with the others.

The gripping story of how Gildenman, a mild-mannered civil engineer and cultural leader, transformed into a ruthless guerrilla fighter is told in James A. Gryme’s new book, “Partisan Song: A Holocaust Story of Resilience, Resistance, and Revenge.”

To the author’s knowledge, “Partisan Song” is the first work for a general reading audience not only about Gildenman, but also about the World War II partisans who operated against the Nazis in Ukraine.

Musicologist Grymes’s previous book, “Violins of Hope,” about violins played during the Holocaust and the Israeli luthier who restores them, won the National Jewish Book Award for 2014.

He first became aware of Gildenman (also known by his nom de guerre, “Uncle Misha”) when he learned of a musically talented boy named Motele Schlein. The boy, a prodigy violinist, had joined up with Gildenman’s Jewish partisan group after hiding and then fleeing when Nazis deported his family to Auschwitz from the Belarusian village of........

© The Times of Israel