Sonia Madejsker

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Sonia Madejsker (also Sonia Madeysker ; born 1914 in Wilna , Russia ; died March 1944 near Wilna, Reichskommissariat Ostland ) was a Polish communist and Jewish partisan in World War II .

Life

Sonia Madejsker was born in Vilna in 1914 as the daughter of the teacher Helena and the teacher Hessel Madejsker . In her hometown, which was part of the Russian Empire, also called "Jerusalem of the East", mostly Yiddish- speaking Jews made up the largest ethnic group with 40%, followed by Poles, Russians and 2% Lithuanians. In 1918 the newly founded Republic of Lithuania claimed the city ​​as its capital, but it was occupied by Polish troops and in 1922 it was part of Poland . As a young woman, Sonia Madejsker became an active member of the banned Communist Party of Poland , which is why she was imprisoned for a total of eight years in Łukiszki prison in Vilnius and in other Polish prisons. When the Red Army marched into Vilna as a result of the Hitler-Stalin Pact , Sonia Madejsker was released.

After the Wehrmacht marched into Vilnius during Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, all of the city's Jews were rounded up in the Vilna ghetto in 1941 . Sonia Madejsker went underground with her comrades from the Communist Party and played an important role as a scout and courier. In January 1942, like her comrade Chiena Borowska, she participated in the founding of the Jewish United Partisan Organization ( Fareinigte Partisaner Organisatzije , FPO), which was headed by Jitzchak Wittenberg, a long-time member of the Communist Party of Poland, and, after his death, by Abba Kovner .

Since Sonia Madejsker spoke Polish without an accent, she was disguised as a Catholic Polish woman, traveling a lot outside the ghetto, maintaining contacts with the resistance in Poland, Lithuania and in the ghettos and organizing hiding places for FPO members. During a courier trip together with her comrade Cesia Rozenberg, who wanted to lead her through the front lines to the Red Army, the two were arrested three times without being recognized as Jewish, and each time escaped. The escape to the Red Army failed, but the two women returned safely to the ghetto. When the Vilna ghetto was liquidated in September 1943, Sonia Madejsker played a decisive role in accommodating those who had fled the ghetto through the sewer system in prepared hiding places. Some of these hiding spots had been set up in the army vehicle park with the approval of its commander, Wehrmacht officer Major Karl Plagge . He employed several hundred forced laborers and their families there and thus prevented their liquidation . Additional accommodations organized by Sonia Madejsker and Vitka Kempner helped several hundred FPO members to escape into the woods around the city. However, Sonia Madejsker's parents were shot in the mass execution site in the forest of Ponary as early as 1942 . In March 1944, the Gestapo found Sonia Madejsker's hiding place and surrounded it. Sonia Madejsker opened fire and fatally hit three Gestapo officers, but she couldn't fight the overwhelming odds. She tried to take her own life, was seriously wounded and severely tortured for many days in Łukiszki prison in Vilnius, without the Gestapo being able to extract any useful information. Sonia Madejsker died shortly afterwards in prison.

Not long after, Vilna was retaken by the Red Army in July 1944, in which several of their comrades from the FPO were also involved. None of her family survived the Shoah: Her three sisters, who were active in the resistance in Minsk and Białystok, and her brother did not see the end of the war either.

literature

  • Shloma Kovarski / שלמה קאווארסקי: Sonye Madeysker, di Heldin fun Vilner Geto / סאניע מאדייסקער, די העלדין פון ווילנער געטא [Sonia Madejsker, Heroine of the Vilna Ghetto]. National Yiddish Book Center, New York 1992. Yiddish text in Internet archive.
  • 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. 433-435, 456f.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Yitzhak Arad (1980): Ghetto In Flames , p. 190.
  2. ^ Yitzhak Arad (1980): Ghetto In Flames , p. 253.
  3. ^ Yitzhak Arad (1980): Ghetto In Flames , p. 456.
personal data
SURNAME Madejsker, Sonia
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Madeysker, Sonia
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish communist and Jewish partisan in World War II
DATE OF BIRTH 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Vilnius , Russia
DATE OF DEATH March 1944
Place of death near Wilna, Reichskommissariat Ostland