Rozka Korczak

Origins and early life

Rozka Korczak was born on 24 April 1921 at Bielsko, a village on the Vistula with forty Jewish families in it, the daughter of Gedaliah, a cattle dealer and a Zionist, and of Hinda; there was no Jewish school, so she went to the Polish one, and in the eighth grade she organised a strike of the Jewish pupils against the headmaster's antisemitic remarks.

Work and career

Her mother and her two younger sisters, Teibel and Rachel, were murdered around 1942. She had joined Ha-Shomer ha-Tzair, and in the Vilna ghetto, on 21 January 1942, she was among the founders of the Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye, the United Partisan Organisation, with Abba Kovner and Vitka Kempner; she smuggled weapons in and got people out. She was among the last fighters to leave the ghetto in September 1943, and she carried the movement's archives out on her back.

She fought in the forests of Rudninkai and Naroch, reached Palestine on 12 December 1944, and in October 1947 joined Kibbutz Ein HaHoresh with Kovner and Kempner, where she and Avi Marla raised three children and where she served two terms as secretary of the kibbutz. She wrote Flames in the Ashes, one of the first accounts of Jewish armed resistance by someone who had been inside it, and she ran Moreshet, the institute for Holocaust research and publication.

Later years

She refused the easy version of her own story to the end: you may by no means say, she insisted in 1945 and again in 1988, that whoever supported the uprising became a hero and whoever objected to it was a coward, it was not divided like that; she died that same year.