Charles Gelman was a teenager when eternal night fell on his town in Poland. It was June 1941 and the Holocaust had finally reached Kurenits, near the Soviet border. Gelman lost his family, and felt the cold, dead hand of the "Final Solution" even as its victims continued to hope. But he had one chance many did not have, and he took it. Charles Gelman fought back. Gelman was part of the Russian resistance; very few partisans survived to talk about their experiences. It was a difficult task for Gelman to find the desperate warriors hiding in the forests. Food had to be begged for; shelter was scarce; weapons were nearly impossible to come by and were a condition for joining the partisans. Courage, ingenuity, and self-sacrifice were both shared and assumed in the underground. Gelman became part of an organized force and attacked German outposts, derailed trains, blew up bridges, ambushed tanks, and neutralized the occupation infrastructure. Neither side expected or gave a quarter. Gelman explains the scourge of anti-Semitism. He shows how and why so many outwardly decent Poles and Byelorussians became indifferent to the fate of their Jewish neighbors. He understands the psychology of the German plan and why so many Jews struggled silently or went in comparative quiet to their own destruction. But most of all, Gelman gives us a participant's story of the armed resistance to Nazi genocide- and the story of those who did not go gentle.
About the Author: Referring to the Holocaust, Charles Gelman writes in his memoir Do Not Go Gentle, "to know and understand fully, you had to live through it." And yet Mr. Gelman has created a permanent memory of his armed resistance of the Nazis during the Holocaust. Mr. Gelman was born in 1925, in Kurenits, which was then part of Poland, as the youngest child of Yitskhok and Feyge, and sibling to sisters Sarah, Ethel, Minna and Dina. Studying in a yeshiva in Vilna, he trekked back home after Germany invaded Poland, only to be sent to a work ghetto in a neighboring town. Upon learning of the massacre of all his family except Dina, who had married and moved to Russia before the war, he fled to the forests of White Russia and eventually joined the Russian Partisan resistance. Charles Gelman gives us a first-hand testimony of the collection and slaughter of Jews in the initial phase of what would become the Final Solution, and how a young man, groomed to study Talmud and the cantorial arts, found the means to survive the harsh conditions of the Byelorussian forests. His story is one of perseverance, armed resistance and most of all, memory for the family, shtetl life and Jewish ethos that the Nazis sought to annihilate. After the war, Mr. Gelman fled Soviet Russia and spent many years in a Displaced Persons camp in Bavaria, emigrating to the U.S. in the early 50's, meeting and marrying Sydonie Tanenbaum in 1955. They eventually settled in New Haven, CT to be near Charles' distant relatives, the Zimmermans, who had emigrated after World War I from Kurenits. Along with Sydonie and their two children, Phyllis and Irwin, the Gelmans made a home in New Haven where Charles worked as an agent for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, and as well, served as the Cantor at Congregation Keser Israel and then Temple Beth Shalom in Hamden, CT. Charles passed away in 2004 and is buried in New Haven.