About the Film

Boyarski

To the haunting question: “Why didn’t Jews fight back?”
This film will answer: “They did.”

While dramatizations like Defiance and Inglorious Basterds have come out of Hollywood, there is a true story that urgently needs to be told. FOUR WINTERS will tell it, revealing through a new lens, an alternative portal through which to explore and understand the Holocaust. This new documentary film tells the story of those courageous Jewish fighters who, against unimaginable odds, fought back fiercely against Hitler’s war machine as it raged across Eastern Europe.

Partisan

In Their Own Voices

FOUR WINTERS features interviews with the last living Partisans who are the centerpiece of this film. By also using personal photographs, letters, journals, rare archival film footage, historic war records, photographs, and artifacts shared with the filmmakers from Partisans’ personal collections, the documentarians weave together many strands to tell this layered story that shatters the myth of Jewish passivity. The film illuminates the many ways in which Jews resisted the Nazis -- and celebrates the soulful bravery, cleverness, and leadership, of the Partisans.

“Our history must not contain only tragedy. We cannot allow that. It must also have heroic struggles, self-defense, war, even death with honor."

Chayele Palevsky

Jewish Partisan

This is 11:59 pm

“This is the final hour if we are to make a film with the actual participants in the Partisans. We are losing Holocaust survivors day by day."

Michael Berenbaum

Professor and Founding Director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

Oscar, Emmy, Sundance, Cannes, and Peabody Award-Winning Filmmakers

Julia Mintz, Dan Sturman, Tricia Reidy, along with a distinguished board of advisors bring a depth of experience and a passion to the subject that ensures an outstanding and historically accurate documentary.

“It was inevitable that we would die but death would come on our own terms."

Gertie Boyarski

Resistance Fighter/Survivor

Featured Partisan Memoirs

"A Partisan's Memoir: Woman of the Holocaust" – Faye Schulman

"The Defiant: A True Story of Escape, Survival & Resistance" – Shalom Yoran

"Rather Die Fighting: A Memoir of World War II" – Frank Blaichman

"Resistance and Survival" – Sarah Ginaite-Rubinson

Other websites of interest