Rachel Margolis (1921–2015)

Rachel Margolis was born in Vilnius (Vilna), Lithuania, to a prosperous Jewish family. In 1941, when the Nazis invaded her country in World War II, she was sent to live with a Christian family. She voluntarily entered the Jewish Ghetto in 1942 and joined the resistance movement FPO (United Partisan Organization) formed by poet Abba Kovner. She and her future husband were among the few hundreds of Jews who survived the liquidation of the Ghetto in 1943 by escaping into the surrounding forests, where they joined Soviet partisans. Rather than stay behind at their bunker like other female partisans, she demanded military assignments alongside the men. She burned down a bridge, blew up railroad tracks, committed other acts of sabotage, and helped bring in food supplies for her fellow partisans. After the war, she discovered that she was the only member of her family to survive the Holocaust. She returned to Vilnius and earned a Ph.D. in biology. She worked a teacher until the end of the 1980s. She helped establish and led tours at the Green House in Vilnius, Lithuania's only Holocaust museum. Her memoir A Partisan from Vilna was published in 2010. She also found and transcribed the long-lost diary of Kazimierz Sakowicz, a Polish Christian journalist, published as Ponary Diary, 1941-1943: A Bystander’s Account of a Mass Murder (2004). In 2009, a new wave of anti-Semitism swept Lithuania, including a campaign of harassment against Rachel Margolis and other Jewish anti-Nazi partisans, and she took up residence in Israel.