Vitka Kempner

Vitka Kempner (; 14 March 1920 – 14 February 2012) was a Polish Jewish partisan leader during World War II. She served in the Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye (FPO) and, alongside Rozka Korczak and founder Abba Kovner, assumed a leadership role in its successor group, the Nakam.

Early life Kempner was born on 14 March 1920 in Kalisz, Poland, to a liberal Jewish-Polish family proud of both their Jewish and Polish ancestry. Her parents, Hayah and Zevi, ran a retail business in Kalisz. She had a younger brother, Baruch, born 1923, and spoke Polish at home. Vitka completed her schooling at a progressive Jewish school before receiving tertiary education in Warsaw. During her youth, Vitka was active in Jewish groups. She became the first woman to join Betar, a revisionist Zionist paramilitary organisation, but later transferred to Hashomer Hatzair, a secular Labour Zionist youth movement, and the affiliated Avukah student organisation.

World War II

Flight to Vilna Whist Kempner was 19-years old and in Kalisz, Nazi Germany began its invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939. The city fell quickly on September 3 due to its proximity to the German border. Witnessing the abuse inflicted by Germans onto Jews, she became determined that she would "not be humiliated". Together with Baruch, she left her parents and fled to Vilna (Vilnius). Vilna had been under Polish control up until October 10 when it was absorbed into Lithuania. By being in neutral Lithuania, Vilna served as a gathering place for the members of Zionist youth movements who were planning out routes to immigrate to Mandatory Palestine. In June 1940, Lithuania came under Soviet occupation. Because of her ability to move in and out of the ghetto, Kempner became an active part of the ghetto's underground Jewish movement. Using the city's sewage canals, she helped move people and ammunition. Alongside fellow partisan Rozka Korczak, Kempner had to hide herself as she lacked the proper documents to remain in the ghetto. Inspired by the 1942 manifesto "Let us not go like lambs to the slaughter!" by Jewish partisan Abba Kovner, who was also active in the Vilna ghetto, she entered the ghetto with occasional participation in partisan activity. With Korczak, Kempner became one of Kovner's lieutenants. This was also around the same time the personal relationship between Kempner and Kovner began.

In July 1944, Kempner led a patrol mission to reach Soviet-liberated Vilna, where she met Jewish Soviet soldiers. Kovner ended up being arrested and imprisoned by British authorities in December 1945 and the groups plans of poisoning the water supply of important German cities never came to fruition

Kempner initially avoided writing down her recollections of World War II until much later, when other Jewish partisans and fighters had published their own. In the 1990s she became involved with Yad Vashem and handed over Kovner's personal pistol to them in 2004 following his death from cancer in 1987. Kempner died in Israel on 15 February 2012.

Kempner is remembered in the song Shtil, di nakht iz oysgeshternt by Hirsh Glick, which celebrates her heroic attack on a German convoy in the Vilnius sector in 1942.