The Partisans
When Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812, he captured Moscow; but Russia’s men and women, banding together behind his lines, turned the French invaders’ lives into a living hell. The same thing happened in 1941 when Hitler’s legions smashed into the Soviet Union and vast areas of Russian land fell into their hands. Like mushrooms after a rain, a people’s underground sprang up to attack Nazi formations, to blow up their ammunition dumps and to wreck their trains. The partisans operated everywhere — in the marshes and deep forests of Belorussia, in Odessa, where they set …