Partisan from Vilna

After the Holocaust, Rachel Margolis received a Ph.D. in biology in and taught until the late 1980's. She then co-founded Lithuania's only real Holocaust museum, the Green House in Vilnius. She is also responsible for the discovery and transcription of the Kazimierz Sakowicz diary, published here in the US under the title, Ponary Diary: A Bystander's Account of Mass Murder (Yale University Press, 2004).

"Arguably the most extraordinary Holocaust survivor of our time, Rachel Margolis left a safe hiding place to join her (doomed) family in the Vilna Ghetto, then left the ghetto to join the anti-Nazi partisans in the forests. After the collapse of the USSR, she helped build a small Holocaust museum, then rediscovered, transcribed and published the lost diary of a Christian Pole who witnessed tens of thousands of murders of Jews by enthusiastic Lithuanian nationalists. In her mid eighties, she published the Russian original of this memoir. The local anti-Semitic press focused on one paragraph, took it out of context, and then – in May 2008, armed police came looking for Rachel and a fellow woman partisan survivor. Currently living in Israel and prevented from returning to her native Vilna (now Vilnius, Lithuania) by the prosecutors’ campaign, she is a survivor who can’t return home. This book is the reason why. In publishing it in English, Academic Studies Press does a great service to both the dwindling community of Holocaust survivors, and the growing community of readers who just want to know."

• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS. INTRODUCTION BY ANTONY POLONSKY. LALECZKA (YEARS 1927-1931): Summer in Lanwarów. The dacha in Popieszki. Winter in the city. Irka. A little brother. Anna Pawlowna Wygodzka’s School. A Year Without Mama. Kazik. The Flood. The Eliza Orzeszkowa School. Anniversary of the Pogrom. Posing for a Picture. Michalovo. The New School. Zakopane. My Studies. The New Dacha. A New Girlfriend. My New Music Teacher – Anna Feigus. The Riywinscy’s Family. Major Nuisances. Excursion to Narocz. Arrests. Boria Glezer. A Marvelous Summer. THE GATEWAY TO HELL: The Trip to Zakopane. “Matura” – Final Exams. Grown Up At Last. 1939: War. A Change of Regime. At the University. Germany Attacks the USSR. Peregrinations. Mrs. Narkiewicz. GHETTO: March 1942. The Library. Chaim. The Underground. The New Year. The Train to the Kovno Ghetto. Three More Months. September First. PARTISANS: The “Revenge” Detachment. Surrounded. Maszerow. Typhoid. The Jewish Detachment. The Bag from the Sky. Epilogue. AFTERWORD BY MARJORIE MARGOLIS.