The Bielskis were the only Jewish family in their tiny village of Stankevich, and while Jews in Belorussia were persecuted under tsarist rule, the family managed to maintain a successful mill. In June 1941, when Nazi Germany invaded its former ally the Soviet Union, conditions for Jews worsened immediately. Jewish ghettos were established in the nearby cities of Novogrudek and Lida, which early in the war were the sites of several mass killings of Jews. Nazis combed the countryside, and the Bielski parents and two siblings were taken to their deaths. As the gravity of the situation dawned on them, three Bielski brothers, Tuvia, Asael and Zus, who had been finding shelter with sympathetic gentiles, decided that their only hope for survival lay in the dense surrounding forests that they knew so well. Once theyd gathered their remaining relatives, the brothers, under Tuvias leadership, staged daring rescues in Novogrudek and Lida in an effort to bring as many Jews as possible to the forest with them. While they procured weapons and supplies to kill enemy soldiers and sabotage their operations, the Bielskis priority was the preservation of their people. Tuvia often declared that he would rather save one old Jewish woman than kill 10 Nazis. Their mobility was facilitated by the fact that in addition to their native Yiddish, they could speak Russian and German; Tuvias less-recognizably-Jewish appearance enabled him to pass as a gentile. They were also aided by non-Jewish peasants with whom theyd grown upone in particular put his own family at great risk by providing food and shelter to Jews who had escaped the ghettos and were searching for the rumored Jerusalem in the woods. As more skilled workers arrived with their supplies, the once-primitive encampment evolved, complete with a kitchen, a mill, a bathhouse, a medical facility and other institutions of civil society. By the time Red Army troops overran the Germans, in the summer of 1944, the Bielskis had around 1,200 men, women and children in their charge, making theirs easily the largest rescue of Jews by Jews during World War II. During their two and a half years in the forest, the group endured several German raids and lost only 50 members of their unit. The Bielskis estimated that they killed more than 250 enemy fighters. The groups astounding ability to overcome dire circumstances makes one wonder how much simple luck played a part in their survival. Tuvia felt that God was guiding him somehow, but they had their fair share of luck,