Niuta Tajtelbaum

Niuta Tajtelbaum (born October 31, 1917 in Łódź , Poland ; died July 1943 in Warsaw , Poland) was a Polish-Jewish resistance fighter against National Socialism .

Life

Tajtelbaum was born in 1917 in Łódź into a Hasidic family. She attended high school there and entered the illegal communist cell of her school. When the police discovered her membership, she was expelled from school. Nevertheless, she was admitted to Warsaw University and graduated in history and psychology a few months before the war began in September 1939.

In the Warsaw Ghetto she was one of the first to join the Polish Workers' Party. Niuta was blonde and, because of her inconspicuous appearance, was entrusted with important services outside the ghetto. She worked under the name Wanda as a courier for the Jewish resistance, procured and transported weapons and instructed her comrades in their use.

Shortly before the big liquidation in the summer of 1942, she joined the People's Guard ( Gwardia Ludowa ), at whose request she left the ghetto and was now deputy commander of the combat department. She helped set up the first partisan units of the People's Guard and continued to work as a contact woman between the Polish Workers' Party and the anti-fascist bloc (the first resistance association of the individual groups in the Warsaw ghetto).

Reuben Ainsztein describes her as an intrepid fighter:

"Looking barely older than sixteen and with blonde pigtails long enough to sit on, she entered a well-guarded German building, shot a Nazi officer in his own office and left it with an air of innocence that only a murderer can see." Would trust 'Nordic racial traits'. "

- Reuben Ainsztein

On another occasion she broke into a Gestapo officer's bedroom and shot him in bed. Little Wanda with the braids became a household name among the National Socialists stationed in Warsaw, and a price of 150,000 złoty was offered for her capture.

On October 7th and 8th, 1942, Tajtelbaum's department blew up several railway lines that were important for the Germans for supplying supplies to the Eastern Front . The National Socialists retaliated by publicly hanging 50 Poles. The response from the People's Guard came on October 24th: three combat groups attacked a café in Aleje Jerozolimskie , the meeting place for high Wehrmacht and SS officers, the restaurant at Warsaw Central Station and the rooms of the Nowy Kurier Warszawski newspaper . Tajtelbaum was involved in the action at the café. The Germans then took 50 hostages and gave the city a contribution of one million zloty . On November 30, 1942, Tajtelbaum's department attacked the Polish municipal bank in the middle of the day and looted 1,052,443.00 zlotys without firing a single shot.

After the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising on April 19, 1943, Tajtelbaum was involved in an operation in which a unit of the People's Guard switched off an SS cannon position near Krasiński Square on the evening of April 20 .

In July 1943, the Gestapo surprised her at her accommodation. She tried to poison herself, but couldn't. She was arrested, tortured in custody, and eventually murdered. Despite severe torture, she did not betray any of her comrades.

With the law of the National Liberation Committee of the Provisional Government of Poland (dated December 23, 1944), on the second anniversary of the Warsaw uprising on April 19, 1945, fifty Polish ghetto fighters were honored with high military awards, including Tajtelbaum.

literature

• Ralf Höller: Niuta Tajtelbaum. The apocalypse in Warsaw. Same in: I am the fight. Rebels and revolutionaries from six centuries. Page 295 ff., Structure of TB Verlag, Berlin 2001.
• Arno Lustiger : To the struggle to the life and death. On the resistance of the Jews in Europe. 1933-1945 , Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1994, ISBN 3-89996-269-9 .
• Reuben Ainsztein: Revolt against annihilation. The uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto , Schwarze Risse Verlag, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-924737-19-3 .
• Ingrid Strobl : Niuta Tejtelbojm. "Little Wanda with the blond pigtails" The same in: "Never say you go the last way". Women in resistance against fascism and German occupation. Pp. 293-296, Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1989.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ REUNION 69: Dania - wspomnienia Geni Pocalun [1]
2. ^ Reuben Ainsztein: Revolt against annihilation. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising , p. 117.