A Screening and a Talk Sponsored by Alaska Jewish Museum and Congregation Beth Sholom

On Monday, April 13 a screening of the acclaimed documentary Four Winters will be followed by a conversation with filmmaker Julia Mintz and Shlomo Bobrow, a survivor from the Polish partisans during the Holocaust. This will be held in Anchorage at the Wilda Marston Auditorium of the Loussac Library.

FOUR WINTERS tells the true story of over 25,000 Jewish partisans who courageously fought back against the Nazis and their collaborators from deep within the forests of WWII’s Belarus, Ukraine and Eastern Europe. Torn from their families by the ravages of Hitler’s armies, men and women, many barely in their teens, escaped into the forests, banding together in partisan brigades. The film features interviews with the last living partisans who are the centerpiece of this production. In addition, through using personal photographs, letters, journals, rare archival film footage, historic war records, photographs, and artifacts shared with the filmmakers from the Partisans’ personal collections, the director weaves together many strands to tell a layered story that shatters the myth of Jewish passivity.

“All I owned was a rifle, a leopard coat and my camera,” says Faye Schulman, whose clandestine photographs of Jewish partisans living in the forests of Eastern Europe documented their efforts to disrupt the Nazi killing machine by blowing up bridges, derailing trains,   smuggling Jews, burning electric stations, and attacking armed enemy headquarters. The image of Schulman with an ammunition belt slung over her fashionable shoulder is only one of many jaw-dropping moments in Julia Mintz’s riveting documentary. Some of the last surviving partisans tell stories of cold, hunger, and fear, but also of their capacity for courage, altruism, resourcefulness, and barbarism. Maybe you think you’ve heard it all before. You haven’t.