Aron Bell, last of the Bielski brothers whose famed brigade saved 1,200 Jews, dies at 98

Aron Bell, a Holocaust survivor and last remaining brother of the famed Bielski partisans who saved more than 1,200 Jews from the Nazis during the Holocaust, has died at 98.

Bell, who later changed his name from Aron Bielski, was born in 1927 in Stankiewicze, part of present-day Belarus, as the youngest of 10 brothers and two sisters.

After the German army arrived in Stankiewicze in July 1941, the town’s Jews were imprisoned in the Novogrudok ghetto. Two of Bell’s siblings, Abraham and Yankel, were murdered in the village, and his parents, David and Bella, were murdered in a mass killing there in December 1941.

The older Bielski brothers — Asael, Tuvia and Alexander or “Zus” — fled to the nearby forest to escape the Nazis, and Aron joined them. Forming the Bielski Brigade, one of the la