On this day in 1922, Jewish partisan Ephraim “Frank” Blaichman was born in Kamionka, Poland. By the time he was 16 years old, Blaichman’s home country was invaded by the Nazis. With the invasion came the discriminatory decrees against the Jews of Poland, numbering at about 3.3 million at the time. By the end of the war, Blaichman would be a member of an all-Jewish partisan fighting force living in the forests of Europe. From the early days of the war, Blaichman refused to wear the Star of David armband. Although there were strict regulations on the Jewish movement, he took great risks by riding his bike to and from nearby farms to buy and sell goods to provide for his family. Upon hearing that the Jews of Kamionka were ghettoized, he hid in the forest where he met other Jewish runaways. Encouraged by Blaichman, the group organized a defense unit and attained weapons by pretending to be Polish policemen. The unit killed German collaborators, ambushed Nazi patrols, sabotaged telephone lines, and went after factories that fed the German war effort.They soon joined more Jewish fighters who had connections to the Polish underground and Soviets. At one point, 200 Jews were living with them in the partisan forest encampment. Blaichman was only 21, the youngest platoon commander of the unit, and was involved in the escort of a future prime minister of Poland to meet secretly with the Soviets. He once said of his experience, “I’m very proud of what I did all those years… The reality was we had nothing to lose, and our way to survive was to fight.”In 2009, Blaichman released a memoir titled, Rather Die Fighting. He passed away in 2018 at the age of 96.