Chajka Klinger

Chajka Klinger was born in 1917 in Będzin

Chajka Klinger was born in 1917 in Będzin, in southwestern Poland, to a poor Hasidic family. Her mother Perla ran a grocery store, and her father Leibel spent his life studying Torah. She studied at the bilingual Furstenberg Gymnasium and learned several languages, including Hebrew and German.

In the 1930s she joined Hashomer Hatzair and soon became a group leader. In 1938 she went to Kalisz to train for immigration. When the war began in 1939, she and her partner Dawid Kozlowski failed to leave Poland, and the movement told her to stay and rebuild its branch in Będzin.

She became a central figure in the Będzin underground, which acted as a branch of the Jewish Fighting Organization. On August 1, 1943, her bunker was found with a handgun in her purse, and the Gestapo interrogated her under torture. Listed for Auschwitz, she escaped with friends' help and hid in a village.

In December 1943 she crossed into Slovakia, and in January 1944 she reached Budapest, where her comrades rejected her call for a Jewish revolt. In March 1944 she left legally for Mandatory Palestine and arrived in Haifa. She married Yaakov Rosenberg, settled in Kibbutz Haogen and had children.

She prepared her wartime diaries for publication but never finished. She was unhappy with how her writings were edited and censored. She took her own life in 1958, on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.