Page 13 - LEIBY

Chapter 2 13

need you, the best scout in the area, to help us,” Pesach, an
eighteen-year-old, dark-haired young partisan turned to him.

“But the war,what about the war? We have to fight the Germans.
When we defeat them, all the Jews of the ghetto will be freed,
and we won’t need to smuggle out anyone at all!”

“Listen to me, and let me tell you what our commander Tuvia
always says. Saving just one Jew’s life is worth more than killing
even ten Nazis!” Pesach was adamant and persuasive.

But Leiby wasn’t having any of it. “Cowards! Scaredy-cats!” he
sputtered, appalled.

Pesach was unmoved by Leiby’s scorn. “One day the war will
end, with our help or without it. Germany will never defeat
the entire world, and in another two or three years, perhaps a
little more, they’ll either surrender or be totally demolished.
But until that happens, they’ll kill every Jew they can get their
hands on. They have a clear agenda for that. But we have our
own agenda – to save! To rescue as many Jews as we can. Your
mother and sister are in the ghetto. If you don’t get them out,
no one will. We can’t stand idly by. And when the accursed
war finally ends, no one will count the number of Germans we
managed to kill – we’ll count the number of Jews we managed
to rescue, and we’ll know that we did our very best to save our
own people.”

Pesach’s obvious love and concern for his fellow Jews did more
to persuade Leiby than anything he could have said, and Leiby
found himself following him to Tuvia Bielski’s family camp.
Other partisans battled to be absorbed into the Soviet combat
units, but Leiby went on his own volition to the family camp.

Leiby was surprised to see the astonishing number of Jews
crowded together in the swampy clearing of the forest where
they were camped.

“How do you provide food for so many people?” he asked
Pesach.

“We buy the huge, round Belorussian bread loaves,” Pesach