Bella Yaari Hazan

Bella Yaari Hazan was born in 1922 in Rozhyshche

Hazan was born in December 1922 in Rozhyshche, Poland, one of 8 children of David and Esther Hazan. Her father died when she was 6, and her mother supported the family from her grocery shop. She studied at a Tarbut school in Hebrew and later at an ORT vocational school in Kowel.

She was active in the HeHalutz Dror youth movement. In 1939 she took a defense course in Zielonka and then served as a defense instructor at the movement's training kibbutz in Bedzin. In late 1940 she traveled with a group of 10 pioneers to Vilna.

After the Germans took Vilna in 1941, she became a courier for the underground under the false name Bronislawa Limanowska. She carried messages, money and arms between ghettos and worked as an interpreter for the Gestapo in Grodno, taking documents for the resistance. She also helped Jews move from the Vilna ghetto to safer places.

In 1942 she was arrested, tortured and held in Pawiak prison, then sent to Birkenau, all while keeping her false identity. In the camps she worked as a nurse and helped resistance groups. After liberation she went to France and Italy and moved to Israel in late 1945, where she wrote her memoirs, married and lived until her death in 2004.