Nahum Kohn

Nahum Kohn was born to a large Jewish family in the small town of Sieradz, Poland. His father owned a hardware store. When World War II began in 1939, he was in Warsaw, and served briefly with the Polish Army until its surrender. He then returned to Sieradz to be with his family. After a month of seeing the treatment of Jews by the Nazi occupiers, Kohn decided to escape into what was then Russian-occupied Poland. He settled in the Lutsk area of what is now western Ukraine. Following Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Kohn tried to retreat with the Soviet troops but failed and returned to the Lutsk area. He began urging his fellow Jews to arm themselves and escape to the forests of Volhynia, as he knew the fate in store for them under Nazi occupation from letters he had received from relatives in Poland. Before long, he went into the forest himself and began to organize a Jewish partisan group to fight the Nazis and Ukrainian fascists. In 1942, he and his group were allowed to join a large Soviet partisan group under the leadership of Aleksander Felyuk. After a serious injury and convalescence, Kohn joined an even larger Soviet partisan group led by Dmitri Medvedev that specialized in espionage and subversive activities. He became a comrade-in-arms of the legendary Soviet intelligence agent Nikolai Kuznetsov. Kohn left the forest for a short time to work as a watchmaker in Rovno (Rivne) and act as an information drop point for the network of Soviet agents working in the area. He later returned to armed partisan activity in the forest and fought until the end of the war. Kohn stayed and worked in Ukraine afterwards. With Howard Roiter, he wrote a memoir about his experiences during the war, A Voice From the Forest: Memoirs of a Jewish Partisan, published in 1980.