Rachel Margolis

Rachel Margolis (28 October 1921 – 6 July 2015) was a Lithuanian Holocaust survivor, partisan, biologist and Holocaust historian.

Background Margolis was born in Vilnius, Lithuania in 1921. In June 1943 Heinrich Himmler commanded the extermination of the ghetto. 4000 Jewish residents were sent to death camps and killed; 4000 more were sent to labour camps. Margolis and her future husband were one of the few hundreds that survived the ghetto, by escaping to the surrounding forests. They contracted typhus but lived to continue their work with the resistance movement, joining a new unit and blowing up German infrastructure. Her mother and brother perished in the Ponary massacre. Her work in the resistance has been honoured by US congress and the British House of Lords.

Margolis found and published the long-lost diary of Kazimierz Sakowicz, a Polish Christian journalist who witnessed the Ponary massacre outside Vilnius, where tens of thousands of Jews were murdered. Margolis reconstructed Sakowicz's diary from fragments of paper found in lemonade bottles, text written on a 1941 calendar and other papers held in archives that were not accessible under Soviet rule.

Beginning in 2008, the Lithuanian prosecutor general wanted to question Margolis as part of the investigation of the Koniuchy massacre when Soviet and Jewish partisans killed at least 38 civilians. Lithuanian newspapers referred to her as a terrorist and a murderer.

Margolis also lived in Rehovot, Israel.