Tschajka Vatenberg-Ostrowskaja

Tschajka Semjonovna Vatenberg-Ostrowskaja ( Russian Чайка Семёновна Ватенберг-Островская ; born 1901 in Zvenyhorodka ; executed on August 12, 1952 in Moscow ) was a member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAFK) .

Life

Tschajka Vatenberg-Ostrowskaja was born in 1901 in the Shtetl Svenyhorodka in the Ukraine . Her father died shortly before she was born. The remaining family emigrated to the USA in 1914, where they completed their schooling. She then studied and worked for the Jewish Socialist Union, the Jewish Workers' Union, and for the Yiddish editorial team of the Jewish Telegraph Agency .

Watenberg-Ostrowskaja married Ilya Watenberg in 1922 and traveled with him to the Soviet Union in 1926 , where the couple finally moved in 1933. Because of her language skills, she immediately got work as a typist in the office of the Association of Scientists and later in the state publishing house for foreign language literature. After the German attack on the Soviet Union and the founding of the JAFK, she worked there as a typist and translator for English, Yiddish and Russian. She accompanied and interpreted American Soviet and JAFK sympathizers on their trips to the Soviet Union.

Although she had no political authority in the JAFC and was therefore not responsible for its activities, she was arrested like many other JAFC members in the late 1940s. Her contacts and her long stay in the USA were ideal for constructing the theory of the American- Zionist conspiracy and espionage against the Soviet Union.

After three years of imprisonment and torture, she was shot together with many prominent members of the JAFC in Moscow on August 12, 1952, on the night of the murdered poets . You and Emilia Teumin are the most arbitrary victims of the murder of the JAFK members.

literature

• Arno Lustiger : Rotbuch: Stalin and the Jews. The tragic story of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and the Soviet Jews. Structure, Berlin 1998, 2nd edition 2002, page 413, ISBN 3-7466-8049-2 .