A group of partisans featured in Four Winters.
A group of partisans featured in Four Winters. Credit: Faye Schulman / Four Winters Credit: Faye Schulman / Four Winters

A new action film is premiering at HOT DOCS this weekend. It’s the story of eight teenagers who steal guns and ammunition, blew up trains, set fire to bridges, never get arrested and live to tell the tale.

No! This is not some over the top, multi-million-dollar American extravaganza. It is, in fact, much bigger and better than that!

Four Winters: A Story of Jewish Partisan Resistance & Bravery in WWII, documents the heroics of eight youth who joined 25,000 other Jews fighting to end the brutal Nazi regime that killed their families, their loved ones and six million other Jews.

Filmed many decades later, these now-elderly Partisans share their astonishing stories of guerrilla missions to obstruct the Nazi onslaught, all from base camps deep in the forests of Eastern Europe, Ukraine, and Belarus. 

It is a part of WWII history that very few of us know about – but should, especially given the rise in anti-Semitism, racism and bigotry.

“I set out to make this film in search of an answer to my long-lasting childhood question: ‘Why didn’t the Jews fight back?’ What I discovered, through the survivor’s searing memories, were riveting stories of courageous and inspiring resistance – a chapter in our collective history about the Jewish Partisans that needed to be told,” said Julia Mintz Director Writer and Producer of Four Winters.

Five of the eight partisans featured in the film are women, two of whom, Faye Shulman and Sara Ginaite, chose to live in Toronto.

Shulman’s hometown was Lenin, Poland. She was a photographer by trade, but Faye served as a nurse and doctor’s aide for extreme surgeries, and participated in Partisan missions to find much-needed medical supplies.

“All I owned was my camera, leopard coat, rifle and a grenade in case I’m captured. The pillow was the rifle, the walls were the trees and the sky was the roof,” Shulman shares in the film.

During one mission, Shulman recovered her camera and developing chemicals. She went on to take photographs that she developed under blankets in the night. She painstakingly protected the images that chronicled the life and work of her comrades and held onto them after the war.  

Schulman eventually published her story, A Partisan’s Memoir: Woman of the Holocaust, chronicling her war experience. An exhibition of her selected photographs also toured internationally.

Against extraordinary odds, these young people escaped Nazi slaughter, transforming from young innocents raised in closely knit families to courageous resistance fighters.

As Schulman observed, “When it was time to be hugging a boyfriend, I was hugging a rifle.”

Sara Ginaite was born on March 17, 1924 in Kaunas, Lithuania. Ginaite survived the murderous Kaunas pogrom, when over 9,200 Jews were killed, only to be imprisoned.

During her imprisonment she joined the Anti-Fascist Fighting Organization, a resistance group. After her release she escaped to the forest and joined the Partisans establishing a military unit called “Death to the Occupiers.”

Twice Ginaite returned to the ghetto helping others to escape. Then, in 1944, she participated in the liberation of the remaining Jews in the Vilnius and Kaunas ghettos.

Ginaite became a professor of political economics at Vilnius University, Lithuania. It was after the death of her husband in 1983 that she moved with her two daughters to Toronto.

Her book, Resistance and Survival, was translated into English and won the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Holocaust History.

On many occasions, these youth were called to perform acts of sabotage that included demolishing Nazi supply trains, burning electrical stations, disrupting phone communications, and attacking armed enemy headquarters.

Luba Abramowitz lived with her husband and one-year old son in one big room of her parents’ home in Slonim, Belarus. On the second day of the invasion, her parents’ house was destroyed in what was to become daily air raids that systematically demolished the town.

She lost her husband, child and then her parents. The opportunity to join a Partisan unit was instrumental in pulling Abramowitz out of her deep depression.

She became expert at smuggling ammunition and guns out of a German facility where Jews were made to clean ammunition for the Nazis. She delivered her stash to the Partisans who came out of the woods to meet her. Three months later, she left Slonim to join the resistance.

Abramowitz took part in blowing up eight trains, and blew up a ninth train by herself. Her group also focused on destroying German ranks as well as liberating the ghettos including the Corsava ghetto.

The film offers a rare chance to hear the last surviving Partisans relive their journeys and share stunning narratives of heroism and resilience, that I guarantee, you have not heard before.

Michael Stoll, from Lida, Poland is the only surviving Partisan of the eight Mintz interviewed for her film. Born on February 21, 1926 in a town with a rich, vibrant cultural life and home to 7,000 Jews, Stoll grew up in a farmhouse that had three wings. It was home to his two sisters, his parents, grandmother, aunts, uncles and cousins. They kept a kosher home, spoke Yiddish and often hosted guests from local Yeshivas for Shabbos.

At 17, Stoll escaped into the forest and joined with the Bielski Partisan brigade deep in the Naliboki woods.

At the end of the war, Stoll emigrated to the United States with his surviving family members.

Because he was not a U.S. citizen, Stoll was unable to find work and was drafted into the army during the Korean War. He served as a Russian and German interpreter.

In 1957, he married Etta Greenblatt. The couple had two children and Stoll built a successful business in Brooklyn.

Stoll was president of the Lida Holocaust Memorial Foundation, which honours those lost in Lida while commemorating those who survived.

I could tell you that this is a must-see, riveting movie that is easily one of the best films of the year! I could go on about how it’s equal parts absorbing, emotional, brutal and altruistic. I could ply you with even more superlatives, but that would not do justice to just how important and lovingly crafted this film by Mintz is.

“I created the film to help all of us understand how fragile and spectacular a civil life we lead, and that we all need to protect one another from bigotry and hate,” shared Mintz. “Each of us holds within us more courage and resiliency than we can imagine and my hope is the partisans inspire us to tap into our own strengths to protect our humanity.”

Mintz provides a minimalistic, uncluttered space for sharing life-transforming memories of eight extraordinary people, embracing love, loss, and survival. Four Winters is awe inspiring in its simplicity – combining close encounters with the Partisans, the exceptional photography of Schulman, and stunning archival footage.

In short, Four Winters is a heartfelt narrative of heroism, determination, and resilience.

Mintz maintains, “I am not a scholar. I am a documentarian who believes in the goodness in each of us, and I pray that through this work I can contribute to inspiring the courage it takes to do the difficult and rewarding work toward peace – everywhere across the globe – for our collective humanity.”

Watch the credits right to the very, very end where rare hidden jewels and words of wisdom are shared.

Winner of Best Documentary at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival (2022), Four Winters: A Story of Jewish Partisan Resistance & Bravery in WWII is back in Toronto for its Canadian theatrical premier at HOT DOCS Cinema March 24, 25, 26, 29 and April 1 and 2 – with a live Q&A with Mintz after the showings on March 24 and 25.

For tickets click here.

A version of this article first appeared on Small Change.

Doreen Nicoll

Doreen Nicoll is weary of the perpetual misinformation and skewed facts that continue to concentrate wealth, power and decision making in the hands of a few to the detriment of the many. As a freelance...