Background
The Bielski family were millers and grocers in Stankiewicze (Stankievichy) near Nowogródek, an area that at the beginning of the Second World War belonged to the Second Polish Republic and was recovered by the Soviet Union in September 1939 (cf. Polish September Campaign and Soviet invasion of Poland (1939)) in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union.
The Bielski family took part as low level administrators in the new government set up by the Soviets which strained their relations with the local Poles, to whom the Soviet Union was an occupier. Following the Germans' Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Soviet Union that began on June 22, 1941, Nowogródek became a Jewish ghetto, as Nazis took over those lands and implemented their genocidal policies (see Holocaust in Poland and Holocaust in Belarus).
Read more about this topic: Bielski Partisans
Famous quotes containing the word background:
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“They were more than hostile. In the first place, I was a south Georgian and I was looked upon as a fiscal conservative, and the Atlanta newspapers quite erroneously, because they didn’t know anything about me or my background here in Plains, decided that I was also a racial conservative.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“... every experience in life enriches one’s background and should teach valuable lessons.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)