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Nissan Reshef self portrait- officer in the Red Army. (near Moscow-Russia) 1944.
An English resume of an interview in Hebrew that took place in Israel, as a part of the Polish Roots in Israel Project. Interviewee name: Nissan Reshef
Father's name: Asher Prahodnik
Mother's name: Dina Prahodnik, born Shmushkevitz.
Name of spouse: Aliza (Frida) Reshef, born Seidenfeld
Children: Asher (Financial Director), Arye (Certified Accountant)
Nissan was born in 1922 to Dinah and Asher Prahodnik in the city of Baranowicze, Poland. The family was composed of the parents and six children: Hanka, Masha, Betzalel, Chava, Jacob, Nissan.
The father was an independent businessman and the family was financially well off. The children studied in regular schools. Young Nissan graduated from elementary school "Tarbuth" and continued his studies in the Russian professional textile school, Politechnika.
The city of Baranowicze was located several kilometers from the German border.
Before the War the population was approximately thirty thousand inhabitants, including Polish, Germans -"Volksdeutsche" and twelve thousand Jews.
The people of the Jewish community dealt mainly with commerce and crafts. The languages used were Polish and German. Amongst them, the Jews talked Yiddish.
A Hebrew school named "Tarbuth" was active in town. All the political Zionist and Religious parties, as well as the Socialist and Communist "Bund" were active and many youngsters received a Pioneer Zionist education in the different organizations.
There where many youngsters who had received legal entry Certificates to Eretz Israel (then Palestine) and could leave town before the war broke out, saving themselves from the horrors of the Nazi occupation. Amongst them were Hanka and Masha, Nissan's sisters. Hanka immigrated to Palestine in 1933 as a member of the "Hechalutz" movement and Masha in 1939. Hanka's husband was killed in the Arab attacks against the Jewish population, in the year 1936 and she remained alone with her children. She applied to the British Governor in Palestine and he granted her Certificates to bring over all her family from Poland, but since her brother Betzalel was recruited to the Polish army, they decided to wait for him and immigrate all together and in the meantime the war broke out. They could have been saved from the Holocaust if they would not have waited.
When the Second World War broke out on September 1st 1939, the Soviet Army entered in Baranowicze and occupied the town without any resistance from the Polish army's side.
According to a secret treaty, signed a few months before the war, between the Foreign Russian Minister Molotov and the German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, the entire Polish country was divided in two occupied zones.
On September 17 the Soviet army invaded Baranowicze and conquered it.
Life under the Communist regime was tough. There was shortage of food and day-to- day consumer goods. Intellectuals and Zionist activists were exiled to Siberia.
The Jewish community was compelled to pay a high ransom and all the food storage rooms were confiscated.
On June 22, 1941 Germany broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement and invaded the Soviet eastern areas, including Poland. Baranowicze was bombarded from the air.
The air-strikes of the German Air-force were directed to the civil population with the intention to spread terror and fear. Two days later, the German army entered the town without any opposition, including the S.S. special Sturm troops, which had the task to "deal" with the Jewish population.
The German Occupation Authorities immediately imposed restrictions and ordered
the Jewish population to transfer to them all their property, money and food stocks. Jews were also kidnapped from their houses and from the streets, and were taken to forced labor units. Jews were forbidden to buy food products and within several days, hunger spread over the town.
Young Nissan Prachodnik was sent to work in a military bakery, which supplied bread to the occupying army. He had the opportunity to eat at work and even to smuggle some bread for his family.
The Germans started to kill the Jewish population with all kind of excuses.
They simply ordered a group of Jews to march outside town, dig their own burial holes and the soldiers shot them so that they shall fall inside the holes. Then Polish workers covered the corpses with earth and lime, in order not to leave traces of their horrible acts.
On December 1941, the Ghetto of Baranowicze was established. The Jews were cramped in a small area and had to live in very difficult conditions, without any privacy and no sanitary toilettes. As a result of the cold winter and the shortage of food, sicknesses and epidemics like Typhus, dysentery, neumonia, etc., spread around the Ghetto.
In 1942 the Gestapo and the S.S. carried out rides in which they murdered elderly and sick people and children.
Rumors spread about the extermination of Jewish communities in the surrounding villages and it was clear that Ghetto Baranowicze will not be different and, in due time, they will also be murdered.
Groups of youngsters, members of the Pioneer Youth Movements, started to get organized to oppose against the Germans and, as they expressed it, if they had to die, at least they would die holding arms in their hands.
They received encouragement and some help from the Jewish Fighters Committee, headed by Mordechai Anielewicz, the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
Revolvers, guns, bullets and hand grenades, bought from the Polish underground and from greedy Germans, were smuggled into Ghetto Baranowicze.
In one of the "actions", the Judenrat was ordered to supply to the Nazis, thousands of men and women for forced labor. The rumor was spread that they were going to take everybody to be killed in the dead holes in the woods, and the Judenrat could not gather enough workers as requested.
The Germans concentrated a small number of high-ranking police forces, Lithuanian policemen and Belorussian guards with weapons and hunting dogs.
Tens of Jewish underground members of the Ghetto, including Nissan, entrenched themselves in several hidden bunkers. They had 73 guns, bullets and a number of hand grenades.
When the German forces appeared at the gates of the Ghetto, the Judenrat and
the community Rabbis, sent an urgent note to the underground, begging them not to open fire, to avoid that the Nazis should take revenge and murder all the Ghetto inhabitants.
Nissan and his friends felt frustrated and decided to hide in the bunkers until the end of the "action". At night, 18 boys and 4 girls succeeded to leave the Ghetto and escape to the woods. They waited near the gate for hours, until the way was free. One of the girls asked where they were going and Nissan remembers that somebody answered out of the dark: "We are going to die in another way" and then they cut the wire with an iron cutter, and sneaked outside. They took with them 13 guns and hand-grenades.
Nissan Prahodnik and his group joined the partisans in the forests of Polesie, an empty area full of swamps, in Belorussia, on the West border of Russia.
In this area there were already groups of Polish partisans and Belarus gangs, which were mostly anti-Semitic. They used to attack the Jewish refugees and robbed them and killed them without any compassion.
Nissan's group settled down in a deserted area, they dug hiding trenches in the earth and prepared them for dwelling. All the time they were watching if someone was coming near. At night they went in small groups to the surrounding villages and persuaded or threatened the Polish farmers to give them food, beverage and other needed products.
The Polesie area was full of swamps and woods and was almost impossible to reach for those who did not know the ways and paths. Therefore, the German army preferred to let the partisans stay there, as long as their activities were limited to stealing food or belongings from the farmers. Even in cases when the Germans gathered forces with the intention to attack the partisans, in the end their soldiers not really went into the forest, but only patrolled in the open areas under cover of the armored forces.
After the war, Nissan had testified that things changed when the Soviet Guerrilla fighters arrived to the area. They organized the different groups of partisans in the woods, into regular fighting forces and assigned military tasks, which they had to fulfill. The operations in the Polesie forests where part of a coordinated military effort of the Red Army to attack the German soldiers in this area and others, in order to keep them busy and tire out the German forces which were needed for the battles in the front. There was a stage in which hundreds of thousands of partisans were active in the rear of the Eastern front. This was coordinated with the Red Army Commanders and the partisans' participation was of great help to the final victory against Nazi Germany.
Nissan also testified that his group received equipment, arms, and ammunition.
They also were trained as guerrilla fighters and received assignation of targets to attack. Every night they went out of the woods and performed sabotage operations against railroads, trains and other military means of transport on the roads and paths. They attacked police stations and killed small units of German soldiers, which fell in their ambushes. Nissan demonstrated time and again his audacity and resourcefulness, advancing in his way to become a Commander.
At the beginning of 1943 he was annexed to a Russian Commando Unit and returned with them to Moscow and after a training period of three months, he got a rank and was annexed to a special unit of the Red Army. Their task was to follow the attacking forces, enter in the industrial plants and factories of the enemy, to dismantle them and transport their contents and technology to the Soviet Union.
In the end of 1944, Nissan and his military unit reached the Berlin area. He was promoted to the rank of Captain in the Red Army. He entered together with his unit to the German Capital city and was one of the conquerors.
In the framework of his military tasks, he was inspector of the dismantling of German scientific and military devices and transference of the secret data to the Red Army Commandment. He discovered scientific archives and learned many important war secrets, which in the future served in the cold war between the Communists and the West.
He continued his service in the Red Army during one year after the end of the war.
At the same time he continued looking for information about his family, which remained in Poland and found out that all were murdered and perished in the Holocaust. Only he and his two sisters, who had immigrated to Palestina before the war, were alive.
In July 1946, when he was in one of the military night-clubs, he passed near a table where some soldiers with different uniforms were sitting. They were talking in a funny language, which somehow sounded familiar to him. Nissan stopped and listened to their conversation and recognized the language, which he had learned and forgot. They talked in Hebrew and he remembered a few words, from his childhood in Baranowicze, when he studied in the Tarbuth-school. He introduced himself and joined the group of soldiers, which belonged to the Jewish Brigade, annexed to the British Army. Nissan was excited when he noticed their ranks with the symbol of the Star of David.
The Jewish soldiers were part of the "Alyia Bet" Institution, which gathered the Jewish survivors around Europe, and helped them fulfill their dream of immigrating to Eretz Israel (then Palestine).
Nissan immediately decided to desert from the Red Army. The Jewish soldiers gave him a civilian suit and a big coat. He changed clothes in the lavatory and they escorted him on his way out of the nightclub.
Nissan Prahodnik volunteered to serve in the "Alyia Bet" organization.
He remained in Europe and took advantage of his knowledge of the Polish, Russian and German languages, since they helped him to negotiate with the different authorities' officials, like train directors and guards of the Border Police. He participated in smuggling refugees through the borders of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Austria and Italy. Thanks to his actions, thousands of Jewish survivors have been able to get to Eretz Israel (then Palestine).
In September 1947, the turn of Nissan to immigrate to the Promised Land, arrived. He boarded the ship named "Af-Al-Pi-Hen" as a member of the leadership.
The decks and the cabins were crowded with 430 Maapilim (illegal immigrants), and upon arrival to the shore, the ship was caught by the British Navy and all the people were expelled under threatening guns, to the detention camps in Cyprus.
Since Nissan was an activist of the Alyia Bet organization, he was taken good care of and after a month he was released from the detention camp. While being arrested in Cyprus, he met a young woman, Aliza Gerst, who was born in the Polish City of Lodz and was also a Holocaust survivor. Aliza was liberated from the Ravensbruck camp before the end of the war, by the Swedish Red Cross, which was lead by Count Bernadotte, a member of the royal family.
She was brought to Sweden for medical treatment and rehabilitation. After recovering, she immigrated to Israel.
Nissan arrived to the shores of the State of Israel in the year 1948. A few months later he married Aliza.
In Israel, Nissan enlisted in the I.D.F. He served in the Israeli Navy until 1971, as army instructor, teaching about Czech guns, a matter he knew very well, from the years he was a partisan in the woods of Polesie.
After his release from the army, Nissan was appointed as Director of the Tnuva branch in Hedera, where he worked until his retirement.
Nissan and his wife Aliza, have two sons: Asher (a financial administrator) and Arye (a Certified Accountant) and six grandchildren.
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