Nechama Tec, Holocaust survivor who chronicled the resistance of Jews and Christians to the Nazis – obituary

Nechama Tec, who has died aged 92, was a Holocaust scholar and survivor who explored the varied experiences and responses of Jews – and Christians – in occupied Poland to Nazi barbarity; her work on the Bielski partisans – an organisation of Polish Jews who freed Jewish prisoners and fought against the German occupation – was made into the action thriller Defiance (2008), starring Daniel Craig.

Her book Defiance: The Bielski Partisans (1993) was, in part, an attempt to counteract the image of six million Jews passively going to their deaths – and as a response to the question that was often put to her: “Why didn’t they fight back?”

Based on interviews with survivors, it told the tale of three Bielski brothers – Tuvia, Zus and Asael – who grew up on a farm in Western Belorussia (now Belarus, then part of Poland), which was under Soviet control when the Nazis invaded in June 1941. In December 1941, their parents and other family members were killed in a mass execution while thousands of other Jews were corralled into ghettos. To avoid such a fate the brothers fled into the woods and formed a small resistance group.

To survive, they secured weapons and other supplies by killing German troops, Nazi sympathisers, and locals who had killed or betrayed Jews. They also sent scouts into nearby Jewish ghettos to persuade others to join them – not just the young and able-bodied but anyone, including old people and children.

Although they were forced to move many times, and more than 50 died of disease and cold, they tried to establish as normal a life as possible, building an underground village with a hospital, a mill, a metal shop, a bakery, a jail and, eventually, a theatre and a synagogue. Their exploits became so famous that the Nazis offered a reward of 100,000 Reichsmarks for the capture of Tuvia, the leader. Yet after the arrival of the Red Army, he led some 1,230 people out of the forest.

In 2013 Nechama Tec explored other ways in which people expressed their opposition to oppression in Resistance: Jews and Christians Who Defied the Nazi Terror. Beyond well-known acts of defiance like the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943, she showed that Jews – and some Christians – performed numerous less spectacular acts intended as resistance, such as smuggling food into the ghettos, preserving documents to tell the story of European Jews for future generations and infiltrating the ghettos in order to be able to provide eyewitness accounts of atrocities.

In a chapter devoted to couriers, both Jewish and Gentile, who aided resistance fighters by transporting documents, arms and money, she noted that Jewish couriers were almost always women, as Jewish men would be too easily identified in strip-searches.

Ironically, Nechama Tec observed, the term “sheep to the slaughter” first appeared in a 1942 Vilna ghetto manifesto calling on Jews to resist the Nazis and not to assemble for deportations that would lead to certain death.

Part of what made Nechama Tec such an effective interviewer, drawing out memories from people who had tried to close the door on the past, was that her own story of survival against the odds, told in Dry Tears: The Story of Lost Childhood (1982), was as extraordinary as any.

She was born Nechama Bawnik on May 15 1931 in the Polish city of Lublin, then home to some 40,000 Jews. Her father, Roman Bawnik, ran a chemical plant and the family was well off. When the Germans invaded he asked his foreman to take over, though he continued to work at the factory, and the family moved into hiding on the top floor.

As conditions for Jews worsened, in mid-1942 Nechama’s parents sent her and her older sister Giza to live, for a fee, with a Catholic family near Warsaw; Nechama was equipped with false identity papers in the name of Krysia Bloch.

As they emerged from their hiding place she recalled seeing prams in the streets of Lublin, their occupants killed: “There was no place for [the babies]. No one would allow them into hiding for fear they would cry and lead to the discovery of others.”

She witnessed an elderly Jew being beaten unconscious by two German soldiers. “He did not defend himself,” she recalled. “I only heard him plead, ‘Oh my God, oh my God.’ ” Even when he had passed out, “the soldiers kicked him again and again with their boots, but he continued to lie motionless. They finally stopped, shrugged their shoulders and left.”

In her new shelter Nechama recalled having to learn Roman Catholic prayers and customs – not a simple task because, as she explained, “the Polish Jews were not assimilated at all.” The sisters, who both had blonde hair and blue eyes, pretended to be orphaned nieces of the couple who took them in and were able to move around freely.

In the summer of 1943, they and their parents moved in with a family of poor labourers in Kielce in exchange for rent and food. Giza became “Danuta”, and worked in a club for German soldiers; as “Krysia”, Nechama traded bread made by her mother and vodka made by the Polish family on the black market.

“The worst thing for me,” she recalled, “was the exposure to anti- Semitism.” Her hosts would sometimes tell her not to be “a nosy Jew” or “clumsy like a Jew”, but her father observed that if their saviours realised that they really were sheltering Jews they would be unlikely to continue taking the risk.

By the end of the war Nechama’s family was one of only three from the pre-war Jewish population of Lublin to remain intact.

Her own experience taught her that the story of Christian rescuers and Jewish rescued was a complicated one, and in When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland (1986), she explored the often conflicted motivations of Polish helpers, many of whom, in interviews, admitted to being anti-Semitic themselves.

A Jew, she found, was most likely to be helped not by a friend but by a stranger. “They were usually people on the periphery of society... They were independent in the sense that they did not follow what society wanted. They followed their own moral precepts instead... To them, it didn’t matter whether they were helping a Jew or even a person they disliked. They extended the help because they were confronted with a suffering human being who needed it.”

After the war ended Nechama Bawnik emigrated and later moved to Israel, where in 1950 she married Leon Tec. In 1952 the couple moved to New York where Leon became a well-known child psychiatrist and Nechama gave birth to their two children and resumed her education.

She took bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in sociology at Columbia University and wrote academic books and articles in sociological journals. It was only in the 1980s that she turned her attention to the Holocaust, after moving to Connecticut, where she became a professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut at Stamford.

Into the Lion’s Den: The Life of Oswald Rufeisen (1990) was a biography of a fellow Polish Jew who, like her, had been sheltered by Christians, pretended to be a Catholic and worked as a translator for the gendarmerie in occupied Belorussia. By carefully changing certain words in his translations, Rufeisen had helped to save hundreds of Jews and Christians from persecution. Unlike Nechama Tec, however, he had converted to Christianity and, as Father Daniel, ended up living in a Carmelite monastery in Israel.

In interviews he recalled translating for a senior police official called Szymon Serafinowicz, a Belorussian, who allegedly led regular expeditions to kill Jews. Serafinowicz had moved to Britain after the war, settling in Surrey, where he worked as a carpenter, and in 1995 Rufeisen was scheduled to be a key prosecution witness in his trial for war crimes at the Old Bailey. In the event Serafinowicz was deemed not fit to stand trial because of dementia.

In Resilience and Courage: Women, Men, and the Holocaust (2003), Nechama Tec drew on memoirs and interviews with hundreds of survivors to draw conclusions about how sex and class affected the response of victims to persecution. Men saw themselves as providers and protectors, and when that role was removed they often felt defeated even before they were forced into the ghettos or concentration camps.

Upper-class men had the worst time as they had farthest to fall and were not used to co-operating with others; working-class men were more accustomed to humiliation and tended to fare better. Women, too, tended to cope better as they could continue their traditional role as nurturers, even in the ghettos and camps. “All the Jews were destined for death,” she explained. “But the road to their destruction was different.”

As for the Bielski brothers, Asael was killed in 1945, fighting with the Red Army. Zus and Tuvia fought in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and moved to America in 1956, settling in New York, where they worked as truck drivers. But Tuvia in particular found it hard to adapt and died in 1987 almost penniless.

Nechama Tec met him only once, a few weeks before his death. She recalled that when he remembered his time in the Belorussian forest, “He became the person that he was, this charismatic leader, that has this absolute power in the unit.”

Leon Tec died in 2013 and Nechama is survived by their son and daughter.

Nechama Tec, born May 15 1931, died August 3 2023