T HAT FIRST proper gun Frank Blaichman did not forget. It was a rifle with straw still on it, because a farmer had fetched it from its hiding place in a barn. Not new, but polished, heavy, and with ammunition. It made him shiver from his head to his knees. More followed. One, dug from the ground, looked fresh out of a magazine. He had been told there were enough “to arm a company”. Well, not quite. There were six. But they changed everything.

Up to then, for two months, he had been hiding in the forest. There was a camp of 100 Jews who had escaped deportation from his town, Kamionka, south-east of Warsaw, in October 1942, living in bunkers dug in the earth. They would creep out for water or food, run back again. Enemies were all around. In his bunker at night he would tremble with fear that the deer running by were Germans. At 19, he felt he was dead and in his grave.

He had inner weapons, but they were all to do with disappearing. Since the Germans had arrived in 1939, he had honed them. Fluent Polish, picked up from customers in his grandmother’s general store. The look of a gentile, to blend in. Good local knowledge, from the bartering he did for other Jews, of which gentile farms had honey or chickens, and which might be friendly enough (resisting the general poison in the air) to hide him for a day or so. An uncanny sense of direction, and cunning too, so that he could slip into woods, ravines and even haystacks if people were hunting him. “Skinny Frank” was his nickname round the town.

Yet hiding was not his nature. When the Germans started to round up Kamionka’s Jews he refused to be deported with them. He already laughed at the travel restrictions for Jews, racing out of town on his bicycle to trade stuff, leaving his white Star of David arm-band at home. Meanwhile, his fury mounted. When he saw Hasidim rifle-butted as they dug ditches, or heard that Uncle Moishe had been shot on the spot for having fresh meat in his house, he felt like fighting. Most of his neighbours said it was God’s will. He did not agree. So on the eve of the round-up he vaguely wished his family Zeits geszunt, “Be healthy!”, and walked out with nothing but bread in his pockets.

So he had run away. But what could he fight with? That autumn 80 of his companions were slaughtered at their wretched campsite in the forest. It was not enough to bury them, say Kaddish and vanish. Jews had to defend themselves, and also avenge the dead. Even the pretence of a rifle—old farm forks with their outer teeth knocked out, slung on a shoulder-strap—made him feel stronger. With proper firearms, they would make an army of resistance.

What he realised more gradually was the sheer power of a gun over other people. The silent threat of force, which gave you whatever you asked for in the blink of an eye. On that great Night of the Weapons he’d gone to the farm with no idea what to say. But he had an old small-calibre pistol in his hand, no bullets, and the handle held on with a rubber band. Seeing it, the farmer immediately gathered all the rifles he had. In villages from which Jews were usually chased away, for fear of German reprisals if they were let in, they could now eat and drink confidently and try to make the point that they were not hoodlums, but gentlemen.

The guns’ message to the organised legions of Jew-haters was starker. If any of those bandits killed a Jew, they would be killed in turn. Harassers of Jews at roadblocks were now met with gunfire. Nazi collaborators who pretended to be picking mushrooms in the forest, looking for Jews to betray to the Germans, were arrested, interrogated and shot. (He continued to take revenge after the war, working briefly for the new communist government to hunt them down.) As his group grew more efficient it attracted more recruits, including ex-soldiers, and more weapons: hand-grenades, mines, machineguns. The Jewish Partisan Army that resulted, split up into scattered roving units, could now carry out proper ambushes and sabotage. And he, at 21, was its youngest platoon commander, with a small moustache that made him look more of a soldier.

His inner weapons, though, were never put aside. He and his comrades still trusted no one. For months he kept his pistol, a Polish Vis, chained unholstered to his belt so that he could draw it in a second, until it went off accidentally and killed a friend. Various groups of gentile Polish partisans, who often helped out, offered to join forces with them but he, for one, refused. Anti-Semitism ran too deep in Poland, he wrote later. Any Pole could recognise a Jew among a thousand gentiles. Even once the war was won in the east, Jews could never be safe in that country. The place was one huge cemetery of Jewish life as it had been.

He therefore left in 1948, and three years later settled in New York. In America at least he could bring up his family peacefully with Torah and among Jews. There, where he worked as a builder, he joined the campaign to get a memorial to the Jewish partisans erected at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Everyone had to know that Jews fought too, in an organised and disciplined way.

When historians came calling, he went through his life with almost no emotion. Impassively, he told how relatives had vanished and how he had said goodbye. Two stories, though, he relished telling. One was the time his partisans went to disarm 2,000 Germans on a farm estate, shooting for hours, until they gave up for lack of reinforcements. The other was the time he shot a German officer at almost point-blank range, above the belt-clasp. He fell down like a tree. And his killer, 50 years later, allowed himself a smile.