Liza Czapnik
No one believed Liza Czapnik when she first reported on the massacre of Jews by Nazis in 1941, driving her to take a more active role as a partisan. Czapnik finished her studies at School No. 9 the day before the Nazi invasion in June of 1941. When her brother was captured and detained with the men, Czapnik organized food and water to keep the prisoners from starving. After her brother was released, Czapnik was traveling alone when she witnessed the mass murder of Jews in Slonim. On her return home, she was interned in the Grodno ghetto with her family, where no one believed the Nazis were as bad as Czapnik claimed. She became determined to leave the ghetto and join the partisans, and after her parents were transported to Treblinka, she escaped to Bialystok and joined the underground, posing as an Aryan and working as a courier to smuggle messages, supplies, and weapons. In 1944 she became chair of the anti-fascist underground in Bialystok. After the war, she earned a PhD from the Moscow Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages in 1952 and taught English in Ryazan, Russia until 1991, when she made Aliyah and settled in Beersheva.
How to cite this page
Jewish Women's Archive. "Liza Czapnik." (Viewed on February 19, 2019) <https://jwa.org/people/czapnik-liza>.