Officers beat their father to get him to give up his sons’ location. Aron was also interrogated, but like his father, refused to reveal their location despite being forced him to dig, and lie in, his own grave. “I froze,” he told The Miami Herald in 2003. “I was cold like ice.”
By the end of the year his parents and two of his brothers, Abraham and Yankel, were dead. His brothers, shot as they tried to evade capture; his parents, murdered in a mass killing along with 4,000 other Jews including Zus's wife and baby daughter, and Tuvia's first wife.
Recalling the moment he saw his parents being loaded onto the back of a pick-up truck, Aron said: “my mother asked a Gentile who worked for us if he would get her a pair of boots. This man, who had lived with us like he was a member of the family, said to her, 'Where you are going you will not need boots.'''
Although Aron carried a rifle throughout his time in the brigade, his brothers would not let him fight on the front lines. Instead they made the most of his youth and slight stature, sending him out as a scout or a courier – to find food, carry warnings about German plans to the 7,000 Jews living in the nearby Novogrudok ghetto, and recruit new members.
“For some reason or another, I never wore a yellow Star of David,” Aron said. “I don’t know why, maybe I was stupid. By the help of God, I don’t know why every Jew was wearing the star. Therefore, it gave me the opportunity to walk into places where no Jew could.”
By the time the Soviet Army liberated Belorussia in summer 1944, the Bielski partisan community included at least 200 fighters (Image: Wikimedia Commons)[Missing Credit]
Unlike many partisan groups, the Bielski brothers made it their mission to not just fight Nazis, but also actively rescue Jews. “I would rather save one old Jewish woman than kill 10 Nazis,'' Tuvia told Peter Duffy, author of The Bielski Brothers: The True Story of Three Men Who Defied the Nazis, Built a Village in the Forest and Saved 1,200 Jews.
For much of their time in the forest it was necessary for the Bielskis and their followers to keep on the move to evade capture. However, eventually they set up a camp which came to be known as Jerusalem or Shtetl Bielsk, and included a small hospital, a tannery, a synagogue, a bakery, a bathhouse and a school.
“Life in the forest was great,” Aron told Jewish News Syndicate (JNS) in 2020. “[There was] freedom. You saw the sunshine. All we needed was food, and we [felt that we] won. If you wanted to sleep, you slept. If there was no bed, you slept on the snow. Whatever it was, it was. It’s hard to believe, but that’s what it is.”
After the war, Aron immigrated to British Mandate Palestine and, in 1948, served in the army during Israel’s War of Independence. In 1954 he moved to the United States – where he started going by the name Bell – to join his brothers and the rest of their family. There he married first wife, Judith, with whom he had three children. In 1995, he married his second wife, Henryka, who he met three years earlier in the Catskills.
In 2008 the brothers’ story was told in the Hollywood film Defiance, which starred Daniel Craig as Tuvia and George MacKay as Aron, and was based on the 1993 book Defiance: The Bielski Partisans, written by fellow Holocaust survivor Nechama Tec.
However Aron was later quoted as saying: “What happened was much worse than what the movie portrays.”
Henryka elaborated, saying: “The movie did not show how they fought for their freedom. How Aron was running to the ghetto and bringing people there to the forest. How they were going to fight for the food and bring the food to the forest. How there was a cow in the forest, and the milk was only for children. Aron was 13-years-old and was helping younger children.”
Despite playing such a key role in the brigade, Aron said: “Don’t think for a moment that I was a hero in any way or matter. This was pure luck because there were stronger people than me, and they were butchered. But I was lucky enough to prevail.”
He is survived by his wife and children, two stepchildren, 12 grandchildren and 20 great-grandchildren.
Aron Bell: born July 21 1927, Died September 22 2025
