Chiena Borowska

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Chiena Borowska (born January 1, 1914 in Vilnius , Russian Empire ; died after August 1997) was a Jewish partisan and nurse during World War II .

Life

Chiena Borowska was born in 1914 to a Jewish family in Vilna, Russia. When Vilna was part of Poland , Chiena Borowska was an active member of the banned Communist Party from 1932 . After the Wehrmacht marched into Vilnius during Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, Chiena Borowska organized an underground communist group in the Vilna ghetto together with the two long-time Vilna members of the Communist Party of Poland, Sonia Madejsker and Jitzchak Wittenberg, as well as others Three resistance groups participated in the founding of the Jewish United Partisan Organization ( Fareinigte Partisaner Organisatzije , FPO). In contrast to the other groups, the communists in the FPO propagated partisan struggle in the woods from the start. Chiena Borowska and Jitzchak Wittenberg were the liaisons to the head of the Vilna Jewish Council , Jacob Gens , who tolerated the resistance groups until October 1942. This state of affairs ended when Gens, on behalf of the occupiers, sent the ghetto police to the smaller ghetto in October 1942 to select 1,500 of 4,000 Jews living there for extermination: in the end, 400 people were killed at the mass execution site in the forest of Ponary that day shot. The resistance of the resistance in Gens was now completely shattered, and Chiena Borowska and her comrades directed their efforts to cooperation with the Soviet partisans . In July 1943 Wittenberg was arrested and died in Gestapo custody. When the Vilna ghetto was liquidated in September 1943, Chiena Borowska led one of the groups escaping from the ghetto through the sewer system.

In the partisan brigade "For Victory" (За победу) commanded by Shmuel Kaplinski (1914-2000) in the forests of Rudniki, Chiena Borowska served as one of very few women in the partisans and in the Red Army with a leadership role political commissioner . As part of the Red Army, the brigade took part in the capture of the city of Vilnius.

After the war, Chiena Borowska and Shmuel Kaplinski married in Vilnius, where they lived until their death and were buried in the Jewish cemetery.

literature

  • Yitzhak Arad: Ghetto In Flames - The struggle and destruction of the Jews in Vilna in the Holocaust . Yad Vashem, Martyrs 'and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, Jerusalem 1980. pp. 189f., P. 455.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Chiena Borowska, interviews in Vilna, September 1991 and August 1997, about the Wittenberg affair, partisans, and the forest. In: Dina Porat: The Fall of a Sparrow: The Life and Times of Abba Kovner . Stanford University Press, Stanford (California) 2009. p. 391.
personal data
SURNAME Borowska, Chiena
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Soviet partisan and nurse in World War II
DATE OF BIRTH January 1, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Vilna
DATE OF DEATH after August 1997