Rachel Margolis

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Rachel Margolis (born October 28, 1921 in Vilnius , Poland ; died July 6, 2015 in Rechovot , Israel ) was a Polish-Lithuanian-Israeli biologist and Holocaust survivor.

Life

Rachel Margolis grew up in a middle-class Jewish family in Vilnius, which after the German-Soviet conquest of Poland in 1939 was added to the state of Lithuania, which in turn was incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1940 . After the German occupation in 1941, a forced ghetto was set up in Vilnius . Margolis was housed under a false identity with a Christian family, but in 1942 she voluntarily went to the Vilna ghetto and joined the Jewish resistance group Fareinigte Partisaner Organisatzije, founded by Abba Kovner . This tried to organize an armed uprising of the ghetto inmates, but it did not succeed. When the ghetto was dissolved in 1943, Margolis was able to flee to the woods with her fiancé and a few other Jews, where she joined the armed resistance. All of her family members were victims of the Holocaust.

Margolis studied biology after the war, received her doctorate and worked as a teacher in Vilnius until the end of the 1980s. She later moved to Israel and only stayed in Lithuania for the summer. She helped to set up the State Jewish Gaon von Vilnius Museum and, as a contemporary witness, accompanied city tours on Jewish history in Vilnius. Margolis and other surviving Jewish resistance fighters were attacked by nationalist Lithuanians in Lithuania in the 2000s, and prosecutors investigated them for their partisan activity, which also killed bystanders. Margolis was in Israel during this time.

In 1999 Margolis published the found fragments of the diary of the Polish journalist Kazimierz Sakowicz , who had recorded the mass murders of the Jews by German police officers and Lithuanian auxiliary police officers in Ponary and hid these records; he himself died in 1944. In her own memoirs, published in 2005, she describes the activities of the Fareinigte Partisaner Organisatzije, the escape from the ghetto and their activity among the partisans.

Fonts

  • Wspomnienia wileńskie . Żydowski Instytut Historyczny , Warsaw 2005.
    • As a partisan in Vilnius: memories of the Jewish resistance in Lithuania . Translated from Polish by Franziska Bruder, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-596-17343-3 .
  • with Jim G. Tobias (ed.): The secret notes of K. Sakowicz: Documents on the destruction of Jews in Ponary . Translated from Polish by Elisabeth Nowak. Antogo, Nuremberg 2003, ISBN 978-3-9806636-6-3 .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ulrich Gutmair: Lithuanian Partisan Massacre. Public prosecutor's office on the wrong track , in: taz , August 24, 2008
personal data
SURNAME Margolis, Rachel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish-Lithuanian-Israeli biologist and Holocaust survivor
DATE OF BIRTH October 28, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Vilnius , Poland
DATE OF DEATH July 6, 2015
Place of death Rechovot , Israel