Rozka Korczak

Jewish resistance fighters after the Soviet occupation of Vilna (July 1944), third from the right Rozka Korczak, in the middle standing Abba Kovner , far right Vitka Kempner

Rozka Korczak or Różka Korczak , later Rozka Korczak-Marla (also Reyzl Korczak , Ruzka Korczak or Różka Korczak-Marla ; born April 24, 1921 in Bielsko ; † March 5, 1988 in Kibbutz En HaChoresch , Israel ) was a Polish - Jewish partisan during the Second World War and member of the Bricha organization founded for the escape of Jews to Palestine . After the war she was an Israeli historian .

Life

Rozka Korczak was born in Bielsko in 1921 as the daughter of a Jewish cattle dealer . She grew up in Płock , where she experienced strong anti-Semitic prejudices, and there she became a member of the Jewish youth organization Haschomer Hazair . After the attack by the Wehrmacht on Poland in September 1939, she managed to flee in time on foot to the Soviet-occupied Vilna ( Yiddish Vilne) in what is now Lithuania , but in June 1941 the Wehrmacht also marched into Vilna during Operation Barbarossa . All of the city's Jews were rounded up in the Vilna ghetto in 1941 . Here Rozka Korczak met Vitka Kempner , with whom she shared a bedroom, and Abba Kovner , and heard that their family had been kidnapped and that their father Gedaliah had been murdered. Her sisters Teibel (* 1924) and Rachel (* 1927) as well as her mother Hinda were also killed in 1942.

Rozka Korczak, Vitka Kempner and Abba Kovner built a resistance organization and in January 1942 they took part in the founding of the Jewish United Partisan Organization ( Fareinigte Partisaner Organisatzije , FPO), which was initially headed by Jitzchak Wittenberg , and after his death by Abba Kovner. In the ghetto, Rozka Korczak looked after orphans and worked in the library. When the Vilnius Ghetto was liquidated in September 1943, Rozka Korczak escaped with Abba Kovner, Vitka Kempner and several hundred FPO members through the sewer system into the forests around the city, escaping with the last 80 to 100 partisans on the last day . The partisans Sonia Madeysker (1914–1944) and Vitka Kempner arranged for the refugees to be accommodated in prepared hiding places at the exit. A small number of partisans were tracked down and killed by the Gestapo and SS , but most of them managed to get into hiding - in contrast to the majority of the ghetto population, who did not survive the war and the Shoah . Rozka Korczak, Vitka Kempner and Abba Kovner reached the forests of Rudniki (Rudninkai) with their partisan unit on September 27, 1943, where they continued the fight under the name Nokmim ("Avenger"), sabotaged several Wehrmacht transports and as Part of the Red Army took part in the capture of the city of Vilnius in July 1944.

Rozka Korczak worked in the Bricha organization at the end of 1944 and helped bring several thousand Shoah survivors illegally to Palestine , where she arrived on December 12, 1944. Here she was one of the first to report on the crimes of the National Socialists against the Jews. Towards the end of the war, Abba Kovner asked them to take part in the Nakam ("revenge") acts of revenge against the Germans, which they refused.

In 1946 Rozka Korczak settled in Kibbutz En HaChoresch and married Avi Marle, with whom she had three children. They were direct neighbors of Vitka Kempner, Abba Kovner and their two children. Rozka Korczak became a historian and published two successful works in the Hebrew language : Flamme in der Assche , which appeared in 1947, and with other editors in two volumes The Book of the Jewish Partisans . She succumbed to cancer on her kibbutz shortly after the death of her neighbor Abba Kovner in 1988.

literature

• Arno Lustiger , On the struggle for life and death. The Book of the Resistance of the Jews 1933–1945 . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1994, ISBN 3-462-02292-X . Rozka Korczak, the partisan , pp. 268–305. Herein according to their descriptions: The Jewish partisans in the Narocz forests (p. 269–283) and Jewish fighters in the Rudniki forests (p. 284–305).
• Stephen K. Stein: Korczak, Rozka (1921–1988). In: Bernard A. Cook (ed.): Women and War , Volume 1. ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara (California) / Denver (Colorado) / Oxford (England) 2006. p. 346.

Web links

• Rozka Korczak (1921–1988) , Memorial Sites Europe 1939–1945
• Neima Barzel: Rozka Korczak-Marla (born 1921). The Encyclopedia of Jewish Women, 2009.
• Vitka Kempner (1920–2012), Avenger of the Holocaust ( graphic novel ), Rejectedprincesses.com. Scenes from the life of Vitka Kempner , many of them together with Ruzka Korczak