ברנשטיין - הפרטיזן האחרון (2021)

The film opens with a battle scene in the Kyiv sector during the German blitzkrieg attack on Russia in 1941, at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa. Leonid (Yaroslav Kucherenko) is a lieutenant serving in a machine-gun regiment stationed there in an attempt to halt the German invasion. The Red Army is defeated in the battle, and Leonid, unconscious and wounded, is left on the battlefield among the dead soldiers. Some time later, he wakes from his faint and walks toward a nearby village, where a local farmer takes him into his home along with other soldiers who have found refuge there. After several days, Bernstein leaves the village and walks through the snow toward a forest, intending to join the partisans there. Leonid conceals his Jewish identity from his fellow partisans and takes the name Vladimir Vasiliev; apart from the battalion commander, no one knows he is Jewish. In 1943, as they prepare to cross the Dnieper River and liberate western Ukraine, the partisans receive orders to prepare the area for the arrival of Red Army forces. Leonid devises a mission behind enemy lines to locate maps of the German fortifications on the other side of the river. While they are staying in the forest, a partisan squad leaves without his permission for a nearby village to steal food, and one of them rapes a local woman. Leonid orders the squad members to be executed. In 1944, Churchill sends Stalin a secret telegram asking for his help in locating a secret missile factory in Poland where the Germans are manufacturing their advanced V-2 rockets. Bernstein and his partisans are sent on the mission. They parachute into German-controlled territory and walk 100 kilometers toward their target. On the way, they find a destroyed Russian prisoner-of-war camp, where a survivor tells them he was forced to work at the missile development site. The partisans struggle to breach the German security cordon around the factory, so they set up in the forest and try to pinpoint its location through patrols and intelligence gathering. At last, Bernstein comes up with an idea: he sends civilians along all the roads surrounding the factory to mark the locations of German checkpoints, and from that he deduces where the factory is. Around the same time, he receives intelligence that the Nazis are planning to liquidate Jewish prisoners, and decides to launch an operation to kill the Germans. The operation succeeds, but Bernstein loses several soldiers and is himself wounded. The film’s closing scene combines actual footage of Bernstein’s funeral at the cemetery in Kiryat Ata with a speech the young Bernstein gives to the Jews he has just liberated. In the speech, he says: “I am the commander of the Pozharsky partisan battalion. The gate is open. You are free to leave. Those who choose to stay will be given weapons. You will become partisans. You will fight alongside us. Perhaps this is true freedom. After all, not everyone is meant to be a fighter, but we were all born to be free. A free person chooses for himself how to live and how to die. Today we say goodbye to our brothers and sisters in arms, our closest friends, who gave their lives so that others could go on living. The whole world now owes them an infinite debt. It is our honor and our duty to preserve their memory, for those who come after us and those who come after them. My name is Leonid Bernstein. I am one of you. A yellow patch should have been sewn onto my shirt, too. And I made my choice as well. It may well be that soon, perhaps as early as tomorrow, our lives will come to an end. But what matters is not death, but who we will be when we meet it.”