Bornstein-Bielicka Chasia - (16.01.1921, Grodno - 15.07.2012, Israel) - a participant in the resistance movement in the Ghettos in Grodno and Białystok, liaison officer and courier on the so-called Aryan side, co-founder of a home for Jewish orphans in Łódź, author of the memoir One of the few. A Resistance Fighter and Educator 1939–1947
Chasia Bornstein-Bielicka was born on 16 January 1921 in Grodno into the family of Jehuda Bielicki and Dewora Bielicka, née Jablońska. She had an older brother, Awremele, and two younger sisters, Rochela and Cypora. She came from a traditional Jewish family with Zionist attitudes. Apart from her youngest sister, all her siblings belonged to Ha-Shomer ha-Cair. Jehuda Bielicki dreamt of going to Palestine, but the family could not afford to obtain an immigration certificate.
In 1928, Chasia began attending Tarbut Hebrew primary school, which her brother already attended. Due to financial difficulties, the Bielicki family was unable to pay for their daughter's school fees and transferred her to a municipal Jewish school with Polish as the language of instruction. She then completed the ORT vocational school (tailoring courses) for girls in Grodno. Thanks to her studies at both of these schools, Chasia became fluent in Polish, which was of great importance in her underground work and in staying on the "Aryan side" during the Holocaust. Her sewing skills and the sewing machine she received as a gift from her father enabled her to earn a living in the ghetto and on the "Aryan side".
Jehuda Bielicki was the owner of a soft drinks factory. In 1928, he went to Argentina for a year to improve the family's financial situation. During that time, her mother was working at that drinks factory. On his return from Argentina, Yehuda took a job as an accountant, which significantly improved the family's finances, enabling his younger daughters to attend Tarbut School. In 1938, Chasia's mother opened a small grocery shop in their home.
In 1933, Chasia joined the Zionist youth organisation Ha-Shomer ha-Cair. Her sense of alienation and isolation from the Poles led her to identify closely with the movement with which she remained associated throughout her life.
Soviet occupation
After the dissolution of political parties and youth movements by the Soviet authorities, members of Ha-Szomer ha-Cair in Grodno continued their activities underground and met secretly in the garden of the Bielicki family. In her memoirs, Bornstein-Bielicka paints a critical picture of the Soviet occupation, but admits that it enabled her to complete her last two years of secondary school. Together with Liza Czapnik and Bronia Winicka (later Klibańska), she attended School No. 9, which was renamed the Jewish Real Gymnasium. After finishing the school, she planned to study interior design in Leningrad. She graduated from school on the eve of Germany's attack on the Soviet Union.
German occupation
Just as during the first German occupation of Grodno in September 1939, taking advantage of her "good looks", in 1941 Chasia began to go out to another part of the city to buy bread and to meet up with friends. She also obtained food in exchange for sewing work for her Polish neighbours. After establishing the ghetto in November 1941, together with her parents and sisters, she moved into Ghetto No. 1 in the flat of her friend Sarka Shewachowicz, with her grandmother and grandfather, where they were joined by the Epsztejn family of three. Chasia had a pass to move between ghettos, which she initially used to visit relatives in Ghetto 2 and then to look after a group of children.
At the beginning of the ghetto, Bornstein-Bielicka, together with other members of Ha-Szomer ha-Cair, formed an underground leadership of the organisation in the Grodno ghetto. They were involved in taking care of and educating the children and young people they took off the streets. They created a mutual aid operation in the ghetto - visiting the wards in their homes, bringing them bread, clothes, and shoes.
Chasia registered for work outside the ghetto to receive food from the Poles in exchange for tailoring work. During the winter and spring of 1942, she worked in a linen factory in Cegielnia, where most of the workers were Poles. She performed physical work involving loading linen into wheelbarrows and taking them to the warehouse. She then applied to work in the sugar beet fields which allowed her to received bread rations so that she could support her family. She gave it up to work with children in the two ghettos.
Resistance movement
Information about the mass murders in Ponary had reached Grodno by the summer of 1942. Members of the youth movements in Grodno realised that the fate of the Jews of Grodno would be the same and that the deportation actions that took place in the Grodno ghettos in November and December 1942 were part of a larger extermination plan. During a visit to Grodno, Edek Boraks, a member of Ha-Szomer ha-Cair and commander of the resistance movement in the Białystok ghetto, called for the formation of an armed underground. Secret passages and escape routes were created, while weapons were manufactured and purchased.
Bornstein-Bielicka was appointed as courier to the liaison officer Eliahu Skowronski, who delivered letters to them from Warsaw. In January 1943, the organisation of an armed resistance intensified with the arrival in Grodno of Zerach Zilberberg, a member of Ha-Szomer ha-Cair and the leadership of the resistance movement in the Białystok ghetto. The leaders of the Białystok underground sent him not only to organise the resistance movement, but also to try to transfer survivors of the uprising to Białystok. The chairman of the Judenrat, doctor David Brawer, promised Zilberberg that members of the underground would not be placed on lists for deportation - in return, the underground was not to undertake armed action until it was clear that the Germans intended to liquidate the ghetto. When rumours of the upcoming operation spread on 15 January 1943, the underground decided not to leave the ghetto until the very end to stay with its inhabitants. Only then the surviving fighters were supposed to make their way to Białystok and join the resistance there. Plans for resistance in the Grodno ghetto failed.
In January 1943, on Zilberberg's instructions, Chasia, together with Cyla Szachnes, transported the equipment of the laboratory for forging documents from Grodno to Białystok. At that time, she was working in Grodno in a Wehrmacht shop that produced handbags for the wives of Wehrmacht and Gestapo officers. There, Chasia designed handbag models that were sewn from leather scraps from the shoe factory. She transported the laboratory equipment in a bag taken from the shop. Cyla and Chasia entered the ghetto by joining a group of Jewish female workers. When they told them that the Grodno ghetto was being liquidated the women did not believe them, accusing them of lying and spreading panic. The underground in the Białystok ghetto decided that Chasia would not return to Grodno, but become a liaison officer on the "Aryan side". She agreed on the condition that when the liquidation operation in the ghetto begins, she will be able to take part in the resistance.
Białystok
She settled on the "Aryan side: as Halina Stasiuk, a Polish woman from the village of Koszewo near Druskiennik, who had fled the village in fear of being deported to Germany for labour. Thanks to her education at a Polish school and the ORT school, Chasia spoke Polish with a Grodno accent. She found a position as a housekeeper with an SS man Luchterhand of the SS Werkzentrale and in a kitchen for the Germans, where her friend from the underground Liza Czapnik also worked. Chasia stole ammunition from Luchterhand's house and smuggled it into the ghetto. She worked at Luchterhand's until the ghetto was liquidated.
Bornstein-Bielicka recalled that when she entered the Białystok ghetto, she felt that it was her place of rest and refuge, a place where she could be herself. She also visited it on urgent matters - delivering letters from Warsaw that came to the post box she rented, delivering medicine or ammunition. She also maintained contact with the non-Jewish underground - Belarusian, Polish, and Communist.
Couriers, participants of the resistance movement in Grodno and Białystok: Anna Rud (right), Liza Chapnik (center) and Chasia Bielicka (left). Post-war photo. GFH Archive.
On the eve of liquidating the Białystok ghetto in August 1943, Chasia noticed increased traffic in the city as well as the presence of Ukrainian and Lithuanian soldiers. She entered the ghetto to warn her comrades of the upcoming operation and to take part in the fighting. She was not believed because the chairperson of the Judenrat - Efraim Barash - did not warn the underground. When the ghetto was surrounded, Chasia was ordered to leave it, as it was believed that she was more needed on the "Aryan side". After the fall of the resistance in the Białystok ghetto, Chajka Grossman moved in with her. Bornstein-Bielicka obtained food in exchange for tailoring work and sewing clothes for her neighbours. She was one of the liaison officers (along with Chajka Grossman, Bronia Klibańska, Marylka Różycka, Liza Czapnik, Ania Rod, and Rywka Madajska) who operated on the Aryan side and helped Jewish survivors of the ghetto to join the partisans.
In September 1943, in Białystok, Chasia took a job with Otto Busse, initially as a domestic helper and then as his secretary. Busse was a German civilian working for the Wehrmacht who helped hiding Jews. He helped her acquire weapons, including arranging a pass for her to enter the former ghetto. She also made contact with a German communist named Arthur Schade, who also helped Jews. Chasia and the other liaison officers established cooperation with the partisans through contact with the communist and partisan Marylka Różycka. Their tasks included acquiring weapons and ammunition, medicines, batteries, and food for partisan units as well as intelligence work. They also put Busse and Schade in contact with the partisans.
When the Soviets set up the Białystok Anti-Fascist Committee, Liza Czapnik became its chairperson; members of the committee included. Ania Rod, Bronia Winicka, Marylka Różycka, Chajka Grossman, and Chasia Bornstein-Bielicka. Together with the other liaison officers, Chasia collected information on the positions of the German forces and, in the summer of 1944, developed a detailed map of the German positions using, among other things, information from Busse and Schade. This map was used by the Soviets when liberating Białystok, allowing the Red Army and partisans to take over Białystok without major losses. Chasia participated in partisan operations during the liberation of Białystok in August 1944. Together with the Red Army, the liaison officers entered Białystok. Bronia Winicka, Chasia, and Ania Rod were awarded the highest civilian medal for services to the Red Army.
Post-war
Chasia was the only one of her family to survive the Holocaust. In 1944, she returned to Grodno together with Ania Rod and Liza Czapnik. They lived together at 7 Klasztorna Street. They received a scholarship and started studying at a teachers' college. In the summer of 1945, they worked with peasants from the surrounding villages to get food. Chasia sewed clothes for them, and Ania Rod and Liza Czapnik worked in the fields.
In 1945. Chasia illegally travelled from Grodno to Białystok and from there to Warsaw. In Warsaw, she met, among others, with Cywia Lubetkin and Icchak Cukierman. In June 1945, she arrived in Łódź. In January 1946, she attended the first post-war congress of Ha-Szomer ha-Cair in Fontainebleau, France, as a member of a three-member delegation from Poland. For two months, she travelled around Europe visiting Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Germany. She talked about the Warsaw Ghetto and the Ghetto Uprising, Grodno, and the resistance movement in Białystok, the Holocaust and underground activities, as well as about her story of survival. Together with Israel Szklar, she travelled in Switzerland, raising funds for the functioning of existing centres for Jewish youth in Poland. At that time she met her future husband, Heini (Henri) Bornstein, whose parents came from Łódź.
Chasia Bielicka (sitting in the middle) among war orphans in an orphanage under the care of the Zionist Coordination organization, around 1946 before emigrating to Palestine.
In January 1946, the Zionist Coordination was established, an organisation dedicated to finding surviving Jewish children in Poland to place them in orphanages (children's kibbutzim run by Ha-Shomer ha-Cair and Dror) and then take them to Palestine. Chasia co-founded a home for Jewish orphans in Łódź, rescued by Polish families, in monasteries or the USSR and found by the organisation on the streets and at railway stations.
In 1946 Bornstein-Bielicka left Poland with 70 Jewish children as part of an illegal emigration to Palestine. Against the Coordination's decision ordering her to stay in Łódź and open a new orphanage, Chasia left Poland with the children. They spent five months in the DP camp in Salzheim before being transferred to Dornstadt in October 1946. More than 200 children left Germany with her and made their way to France. On 1 April 1947, they left France on board the ship "Theodor Herzl". After travelling for two-weeks, they were interned in Cyprus. In August 1947, the children were allowed aliyah, but without guardians who could only accompany the children to the Atlit Camp. In September, under the pretext of medical research in Haifa, she was secretly taken to the Gan Shmuel kibbutz, where she spent two months with the children.
In the winter of 1947, together with her husband Heini, she settled in the Lehavot Habashan kibbutz near the Syrian border. During the First Israeli-Arab War, she was involved in first aid. She gave birth to three daughters, Yehudit, Raheli, and Dorit. She worked with immigrant youth, cultivated a vegetable garden, and founded the first kindergarten for immigrant children. Ha-Szomer ha-Cair sent her and her husband on two missions: to South Africa and then to France. In 1967, Bielicka started working at Tel Hai Regional College, where she taught ceramic making for the next 20 years. After her retirement, she returned to the Lehavot Habashan kibbutz and took up sewing and selling clothing for children and women. She died on 15 July 2012 in Israel.
Memoirs
The first edition of Chasia's memoirs was published in Hebrew under the title Ahat mi-meatim in 2003; an English translation was published in 2009 as One of the few. A Resistance Fighter and Educator 1939–1947. The memoirs are based on transcripts of conversations with Noemi Yitzhar from the Gan Shmuel kibbutz. While the book was being written, Chasia and her family travelled to Poland and Grodno with her husband and daughters as well as Noemi Yitzhar.
Sylwia Szymańska-Smolkin
The biography was created as part of the project "Polskie Żydówki dla Niepodległej" (Polish Jewish Women for the Independent), implemented with a grant from the Totalizator Sportowy Foundation.
References:
- Cohen B., Survivor Caregivers and Child Survivors: Rebuilding Lives and the Home in the Postwar Period, "Holocaust and Genocide Studies" 32.1 (2018), pp. 49-65.
- Dawidowicz, Grażyna. Jedna z wielu. Krótki szkic o Chasi Bornstein-Bielickiej, [in:] Żydzi wschodniej Polski. Seria III: Kobieta żydowska. Białystok 2015, pp. 27-40.
- Izhar N., Chasia Bornstein-Bielicka. One of the Few. A Resistance Fighter and Educator 1939–1947, Jerusalem 2009.
- Ławski J., Kobieta żydowska: w kręgu inspiracji Chasi Bornstein-Bielickiej, [in:] Żydzi wschodniej Polski. Seria III: Kobieta żydowska. Białystok 2015, pp. 15-25.
