Chasia Bornstein-Bielicka

Chasia Bornstein-Bielicka was born in 1921 in Hrodna

She was born in Grodno, Poland, in 1921, the second daughter in a family of 4 children. Her father Yehuda owned a soft drink factory and did accounting, and her mother Deborah worked in a factory and ran a small grocery from their window. Because money was short, she studied at an ORT vocational school, where she learned sewing.

In 1933 she joined Hashomer Hatzair, which taught Zionist and socialist values. Under Soviet rule from 1939 the movement was banned, and she and her friends kept meeting in secret.

After the Germans took Grodno again in 1941, she worked sewing jobs and later in a brick factory and beet fields to get food for her family. In the ghetto she and her movement friends formed an underground leadership that ran education for children, a mutual aid network, weapon making and document forgery.

After the war she joined the Bricha movement and ran a home for surviving Jewish children. She immigrated with them to the Land of Israel and helped found Kibbutz Lehavot HaBashan. She described her life in the book One of the Few, and died in 2012.