Rachel Margolis

Background

Margolis was born in Vilnius, Lithuania in 1921. In 1941, when the Nazis occupied Lithuania, Margolis was sent to live with a Christian family. Of Jewish birth, she instead decided to voluntarily enter the Jewish Vilna ghetto in September 1942. She entered the resistance movement there and became active in the underground. She joined the Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye (the United Partisan Organisation), formed that same year by poet Abba Kovner. Margolis wrote Everyone was anxious to fight... Our mission was to acquire weapons, complete militarily preparations, all with the aim of provoking an uprising in the ghetto. If we perished it would be with honour, having proved to humanity that we are not sheep going meekly to the slaughter.

In June 1943 Heinrich Himmler commanded the extermination of the ghetto. 4000 Jewish residents were sent to death camps and killed; 4000 more were sent to labour camps. Margolis and her future husband were one of the few hundreds that survived the ghetto, by escaping to the surrounding forests. They contracted typhus but lived to continue their work with the resistance movement, joining a new unit and blowing up German infrastructure. Margolis was the only member of her family to survive the Holocaust .

Post war

After the war, Margolis gained a Ph.D. in biology and was a teacher until the end of the 1980s. She helped establish Lithuania's only Holocaust museum, the Green House in Vilnius. Her work in the resistance has been honoured by US congress and the British House of Lords.

Margolis's 2010 memoir A Partisan of Vilna recounts the author's escape from the Vilna Ghetto with the FPO (United Partisan Organization) resistance movement and the time spent in the forests of Lithuania with the partisans, active on sabotaging missions.

Margolis found and published the long-lost diary of Kazimierz Sakowicz, a Polish Christian journalist who witnessed the Ponary massacre outside Vilnius, where tens of thousands of Jews were murdered. Margolis reconstructed Sakowicz's diary from fragments of paper found in lemonade bottles, text written on a 1941 calendar and other papers held in archives that were not accessible under Soviet rule.

Since 2008 Holocaust denial groups within Lithuania targeted Margolis and police have sought her arrest for war crimes against Lithuanian citizens in her role with the anti-Nazi resistance. Lithuanian newspapers have referred to her as a terrorist and a murderer.

Margolis has also lived in Rechovot, Israel.