Byline: LONA O'CONNOR, Palm Beach Post Religion Writer

She dragged herself out of the heap of bodies that had once been her family, shot to death by Nazi soldiers. Alone among the dead in the dark forest of eastern Poland, it would have been easy for a sickly 17-year-old girl to give up, to sink to the ground and die.

But she found the partisan fighters in that forest, and convinced them that a girl was strong enough to fight alongside the men.

Today is Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. This year, the commemoration focuses on extraordinary acts of bravery by European Jews.

"They risked their lives - deliberately and intentionally - for higher values," wrote Chavi Ben-Sasson of Yad Vashem, the international Holocaust remembrance organization in Israel. "Their deeds themselves bear witness to the power of the human spirit."

Fighting with the partisans was Gertrude Boyarski's act of resistance. By the summer of 1940, when she was 17, the Nazis had already stolen her family and her childhood. She spent the next four years fighting them.

Gertrude Salucki Boyarski, now 83, lives in suburban West Palm Beach. She brings out a small framed black-and-white portrait of her family, all wearing solemn expressions: her father, Israel Salucki; her mother, Riva; her grandmother Golda Shepshelewich; her sister, Bela; and brothers Avram and Moishe.

"This is my treasure," she says.

Taken in 1938, it's the only family portrait she owns from the old days.

Shepshelewich was shot to death in the ghetto, after Nazis made her watch them shoot her five sons and their wives, one after another. The rest of the family escaped to the woods outside their small town close to the Russian border.

Israel and Moishe Salucki joined the partisan fighters after proving their mettle by going on an unarmed raid to collect ammunition. Other mothers cried when they left, but not Riva Salucki.

"At least you will not get killed like sheep. You will get killed fighting," she told them.

Father and son returned with the ammunition, and the partisan group held the village for a month.

Then a large Nazi force stormed the village.

When the family ran into the woods to escape, Lithuanian soldiers started shooting. Boyarski saw her mother shot in the mouth.

"My brother fell underneath my mother. My sister was on her side. It felt like somebody was bleeding underneath me. I said to myself, maybe I am dead. Then my little brother pulled himself out. His face was full with my mother's blood. Then my sister says, 'Gertie, I'm alive, too.' She was wounded in the right arm."

They sat for a day hidden in the bushes, near their mother's body.

"We were three children in the woods. We didn't know where to go," Boyarski said.

Her sister was fainting from blood loss. They got her to the partisan camp, where she got first aid. Meanwhile, Moishe continued to go on missions.

Then the family's luck ran sour again.

"We ran into the devil's sons," she said, referring to Nazi soldiers. "My father, my little brother and sister were killed. I lay down in the snow. I felt the bullets all around me."

Once again, she was unharmed. But she could hear her little brother Avram moaning. He was wounded in the back of the head.

"Go, save yourself," he told her. "Just give me snow" to drink.

When she refused to leave him, he wrenched himself out of her arms and died.

"I was alone in the woods. There was nobody, just me. I didn't know where to go, I didn't want to live. But the power of life is strong."

She made her way back to the partisans.

A short time later, when she was asking about her other brother, someone blurted out that he was already dead, a fact their partisan leader had kept from her. Moishe had died of gangrene from an infected foot wound.

At the end of the war, she met and married another partisan, Sam Boyarski. They spent a happy time in an Italian camp for displaced persons, where their son was born. She still loves speaking Italian when she can. From Italy, they emigrated to Philadelphia, then Brooklyn and finally to West Palm Beach. Sam Boyarski died six years after they moved to Florida.

Boyarski's experiences in the decades since the Holocaust are common to many survivors, said Eva Weiss, who works with Boyarski and other survivors at the Alpert Jewish Family & Children's Service in West Palm Beach. As age creeps in and they reflect on the meaning of their lives, old fears can resurface. "How do you make sense of something that doesn't make sense?" Weiss said. That Gertrude Boyarski survived at all is a miracle. The odds against her were staggering, unimaginable. Between mass executions and the death camps, the Final Solution almost succeeded. The Nazis exterminated 90 percent of Polish Jews.

Poland was the site of a number of resistance actions against the Nazis, most famously the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 and the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. During the Ghetto Uprising, Jewish resistance groups decided to fight rather than die passively. After holding off the Nazis for 27 days, 350,000 Jews were dead.

Boyarski goes to survivor reunions and speaks to schoolchildren about the Holocaust. Her phone rings all the time.

"Thank God I have so much friends, my children are good, they are both professionals."

The most recent six decades of family photos are in color, showing family occasions, most recently the bris of her great-grandson Alex, now 2 months old.

She has her health and her family, but she also has her doubts.

And she still has the fears. At certain times, she will be attacked by an overwhelming impulse to run away, as if she was still in that far-away forest, instead of sitting safely on her balcony. She dreams of her dead father, or she dreams she is still running.

"I remained alive, but why?"

There is but one answer that feels right to Boyarski.

"I took revenge. I'm doing it for them. I have no cemetery to visit. I talk to them. I hope they listen."

lona_oconnor@pbpost.com

Candlelight ceremony

Gertrude Boyarski will be one of the speakers at a Holocaust Remembrance Day candlelight commemoration at 7 p.m. today at the Jewish Community Center, 3151 N. Military Trail, West Palm Beach.

Also today, Yom Hashoah: Memories of the Kindertransport will feature four local residents who were transported out of Germany as small children. It will take place at 3 p.m. in Room D of the Live Oak Pavilion at Florida Atlantic University Center. The discussion is part of the exhibit The Kindertransport Journey: Memory Into History, which continues through Sunday in FAU's Wimberly Library lobby. For information, call (561) 297-2116.

CAPTION(S):

GREG LOVETT/Staff Photographer

1. (C) Gertrude Boyarski (mug)

2. (B&W) Gertrude Boyarski joined partisan fighters at 17 after Nazis killed most of her family, pictured in the photo.\