In the winter of 1941, a Jewish doctor named Yosef Karpovich fled into the Naliboki Forest in Belorussia with his wife, his eight-year-old son, and his three-year-old daughter, Rivka. When a farmer wife finally told them to run, the family ran.
Karpovich joined a group of approximately 200 Jewish partisans who were forming in the forest. They survived by raiding German supply convoys and taking whatever weapons they could. But Karpovich was not a soldier. He was a doctor. And he had a three-year-old daughter.
The other partisans told him to leave the child. They said she would slow them down, that she would be captured and killed. Karpovich did not listen. He carried his daughter on his back for two years. When she was sick, he used his medical knowledge to treat her. When she was hungry, he gave her his own food. When she asked why they lived in the forest, he told her, Because the world is not kind to Jewish children right now. But the forest is kind to children who are brave.
Rivka was liberated in July 1944 when the Soviet army reached the Naliboki Forest. She was five years old when she emerged from the trees, one of the youngest partisan survivors in the history of the war. After the war, she emigrated to Israel, became a schoolteacher, and has told her father story to every class she has ever taught.
When asked in 2005 why she carries her father story, she said, Because my father carried me. And I will carry him forever.