Foiled the Germans' Diabolical Plan: Who Was Moshe Yaffe?

One of the painful stories related to the Holocaust is that of the Jewish policemen in ghettos and camps, who were forced to cooperate, to some extent, with the Nazi murderers. Many of them were controversial figures: did they really only try to save and buy time, or were they looking out for themselves? Few among them dared to resist the Nazis and sabotage their activities.

Today we will tell about one of these few, Moshe Yaffe, head of the Judenrat – the Jewish police in the city of Minsk in Lithuania.

In the forests of Lithuania, partisans roamed, striking at the Germans. Among them were also Jews. Within the Jewish ghettos, underground movements worked and cooperated with the partisans. Members of the underground were always afraid of the Jewish police, knowing that Jewish policemen tended to hand over underground fighters, claiming that they endangered all the hundreds of thousands of Jews in the ghetto. But Moshe Yaffe acted differently. He supported the underground members. As the head of the Jewish police, he collected taxes and various goods from the public, and some of them he regularly allocated to the underground. Coats from the ghetto went to the partisans to keep them warm in the forests. So did sums of money and food.

The Germans, suspecting him of collaboration, entered his office one morning and informed him that if he did not hand over the underground member Hersh Smolar, he would be hanged by sunset. It was not an idle threat; the previous head of the Jewish police, Elia Mishkin, was indeed hanged for less. When the Nazis returned to his office that evening, they found him disheveled and dirty, with Hersh Smolar's identity card stained with blood on his desk. He said he had a hard chase after the partisan, managed to fatally wound him, but the underground members stole his body and buried it. He took the identity card as proof. The Nazis left him alone for the moment. It was all a play, and Hersh Smolar was smuggled out of the ghetto, fought against the Germans, survived the war, and lived to old age in Kibbutz Shefayim in Israel.

On July 2, 1942, the Nazis gathered all the Jews to murder them in gas trucks. They ordered Moshe Yaffe to convince them to assemble. Moshe Yaffe received a microphone, and large loudspeakers were placed in the town square. He was supposed to read stories from a script about 'dispatch to the east' and say that those who behaved nicely would be treated well, etc. Instead, he warned the Jews: 'The gas trucks are here, the cursed murderers want to kill you, run for your lives'. The Germans, furious with rage, sprayed him and any other Jew they saw with machine guns. He pushed his son, Zelig, to escape, and indeed, his son managed to escape and survived the war as well. Moshe Yaffe, along with many Jews of Minsk, was killed in this final attack, and was buried in a mass grave. May his memory be blessed.