'Four Winters' Tells a Harrowing Story of Resistance

“Jews have a reputation as not fighters,” an elderly man can be heard saying as the film opens. “But there were many that did fight back.

“Our only way was to escape and take a chance.”

It is little known that during World War II, tens of thousands of Jews escaped from the Nazi regime in Germany, and its neighboring Eastern European countries, and fled to the forests to seek refuge, organize and mount a resistance. The fighters, known as partisans, escaped with little more than the clothes on their backs, but managed to plan and carry out numerous sneak attacks on Nazi targets.

Their story had gone largely untold until documentary filmmaker Julia Mintz came across a newspaper article that piqued her interest some 10 years ago. The article was like a loose thread that Mintz felt compelled to pull at and before she knew it, she was years deep into research and preparations for what would become the film “Four Winters: A Story of Jewish Partisan Resistance and Bravery in WW2.”

“I read an article about a young girl who dug herself into a ditch with a grenade and blew up a train headed for the front lines,” Mintz recalled during a recent interview about the movie. “I was fascinated and started doing some research and discovered there were 25,000 of these fighters who found their way past the Nazis and to each other in the woods and refused to give up.”

Mintz said she felt like she’d uncovered a long lost piece of history — of the collective shared history of one of the most tragic and impactful events of the 20th century. So, she produced, wrote and directed a documentary about it.

“Making this film became like a soul contract with myself. Once I got started I couldn’t let it go until it was done,” she said.

Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor will host a screening of “Four Winters” on Sunday, October 8, at 7 p.m. followed by a discussion with Mintz about the making of the movie and its subjects.

The film was included in the Hamptons Documentary Festival last year, and won the festival’s Human Rights Award. It also won the best documentary prize at last year’s Toronto Jewish Film Festival.

“Four Winters” presents historical World War II film footage along with interviews with eight of the Jewish partisans and numerous photographs from their personal collections. The film and photos capture the activities and living conditions of the fighters over the four years they spent in the woods. Some of the most striking still images came from partisan fighter Faye Schulman, who happened to be a photographer who took her equipment into the woods when she fled the Nazis.

“All I owned was a rifle, a leopard coat and my camera to take pictures to show, in case I won’t survive, there will be left some pictures … proof (of) what happened,” Schulman says in the film. “I developed the pictures in the woods.”

The film contains the largest collection of original historic archival footage of the partisans that’s ever been assembled and shown, according to Mintz, and it took a good bit of work to restore much of it. Collected from around the world over many years, the images were vital to illustrating how young the partisans were, how determined and what their lives were like during that time, the filmmaker said.

The Jewish partisans — a term that refers to an armed group that secretly fights an occupying force — derailed Nazi trains and established a kind of underground railroad between the Jewish ghettos and the forests. They did so with no training. They came from eastern Germany and what is now Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus. Most of their resistance began after Hitler invaded Poland, breaking a pact he’d made with Stalin to divide Poland between them.

Many of the partisans were women. That was due, in part, to the fact that the Nazis had rounded up many of the Jewish men first and either killed them or moved them to the concentration camps. Later, the women and children were killed or taken.

The film begins with the partisans describing life before the war, the way they were targeted and abused under the Third Reich and eventually the atrocities they were subjected to once the war began in earnest. One by one, the now elderly survivors explain how, as teenagers, they saw their families and friends executed or became separated from them, never to be reunited.

Terrified, hopeless and enraged, the partisans pushed back. They narrowly escaped, banded together in the relative safety of the forests and began confiscating weapons and learning to use them — quickly. Early targets were “the collaborators,” Germans, Poles and other Europeans in the towns surrounding the woods who were helping the Nazis hunt down the Jews. Then they took aim at Nazi lines of communication and transportation. They burned, sabotaged and blew up whatever they could to thwart the enemy.

Defying the odds, the partisans survived four winters in the woods, starving, cold and increasingly emboldened by the injustice of the war. When word of the war’s end reached them, the partisans in the film said they could hardly believe it. Looking back, most described their survival as a miracle.

“Four years in the woods I was a partisan and I survived. Why? Why me?” Gertrude Boyarski, one of the Jewish partisans, says in the closing minutes of Mintz’s film. “To tell the story maybe. To tell the story.”

“Four Winters” is Mintz’s first time writing, directing and producing. The filmmaker says she is drawn to activism, so the story of the partisans was a natural fit.

“I was raised on the public school education around the holocaust and … our traditional history is taught through the narratives of the conquerors, those that beat Hilter and through Hitler’s archives,” Mintz said. “This was a story I felt needed to be told as well.

“To learn there were so many women, young girls really, facing unimaginable odds and not only did they survive, they fought back and saved thousands of Jewish lives, was incredible,” Mintz went on to say. “They were heroes, each and every one of them, for manifesting in themselves the bravery to see another day.”

Finding some of the partisans to interview was not easy, and it took Mintz years to convince some of them to talk to her, let alone to appear in the film.

“People were not eager to speak to me about the experience. It was incredibly painful for them The tears, the sorrow and the pain they went through is very deep,” Mintz said. “It is unimaginable to you and I. What they’ve given us in these interviews is not only an important piece of our history, but a piece of themselves.”

“Four Winters” will screen at Bay Street Theater on Sunday, October 8, at 7 p.m. with a discussion to follow. Tickets are $18 at baystreet.org or by calling 631-725-9500. Bay Street Theater is on Long Wharf in Sag Harbor.