Born in the Polish town of Kamionka in 1922, Frank Blaichman died last month in his Manhattan home. In 1942, three years after the start of the Nazi occupation, Blaichman fled Kamionka for the forests, where he found fellow Jews eager to fight back against the Third Reich. Neil Genzlinger writes:

[Blaichman soon] organized a defense force, though at first its main weapon was illusion created with pitchforks. “We broke off all the teeth, left one tooth on, and put a strap on the shoulder,” he said in [his] oral history. “From far away it looked like a rifle.”

Illusion of a sort also helped them acquire real weapons in the winter of 1942-43. His group learned of a farmer who had a stash of guns. He and another man went to see the farmer and convinced him that they were Russian paratroopers under orders to establish a resistance unit to battle the Germans. The ruse worked. “When we headed back to the forest, we had eight weapons,” Mr. Blaichman wrote. “Finally we could defend ourselves.”

The group grew more sophisticated and better armed, and Blaichman eventually commanded more than 100 armed Jewish partisans. His group linked up with other Jewish partisans, as well as groups like the [Polish] Communist partisan force Armia Ludowa, and spent the war disrupting German supply lines and communications and ferreting out Poles who were collaborating with the Nazis.

After the war Blaichman was assigned to the Polish Security Police, a unit of Poland’s new government, and given the job of tracking down Nazi collaborators. [In his memoir], Blaichman [depicted] certain other resistance groups as being severely anti-Semitic. That anti-Semitism . . . continued in postwar Poland. “As part of my job, I had interviewed many Poles who, unaware that I was a Jew, made no attempt to conceal their feelings about Jews,” he wrote. “As a result, I had come to realize the depth of Polish anti-Semitism.”

Blaichman and his wife, also a partisan veteran, quickly decided Poland was no place for Jews and emigrated to the U.S. Besides writing a book about his experiences, he was also active in efforts to commemorate Jewish resistance, and was instrumental in the creation of Jerusalem’s memorial to the partisans.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.