Sara Ginaite

Sara Ginaite
Born 1924
Kaunas Edit this on Wikidata
Occupation

Sara Ginaite-Rubinson (born 1924) is a Lithuanian-born Canadian academic. During the Second World War she was a resistance fighter during the Nazi occupation of Lithuania.[1][2]

Biography

Born in Kaunas on 17 March 1924, Ginaite was brought up in an affluent family. Her father, Yosef Ginas, was an engineer who had graduated in France while her mother, Rebecca Virovitch, had matriculated from a Polish high-school.[3][4] She was about to complete her secondary school education when Germany invaded Lithuania in 1941. After three of her uncles had been killed in the Kaunas pogrom, she was imprisoned with the surviving members of her family in the Kovno Ghetto. While there, she joined the Anti-Fascist Fighting Organization, a resistance group.[5] Together with Misha Rubinson, whom she married, she escaped in the winter of 1943–44, establishing a partisan military unit "Death to the Occupiers". She twice returned to the ghetto helping others to escape. In 1944, she and her husband participated in the liberation of the ghettos in Vilnius and Kaunas although most of the Jews had been killed. From her own family, the only survivors were her sister and a niece.[1]

She became a professor of political economics at Vilnius University until her husband's death in 1983 when she moved to Canada with her two daughters.[1]

Ginaite's book Resistance and Survival: The Jewish Community in Kaunas, 1941–1944 was translated into English and published in Toronto. In 2008, it won the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Holocaust History.[2]

Publications

¨*Ginaite-Rubinson, Sara (2008). Resistance and Survival: The Jewish Community in Kaunas 1941–1944. Mosaic Press. ISBN 978-0889628168.

Several books by Ginaite have also been published in Lithuanian.[6]

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Sara Ginaite". The Female Soldier. 29 April 2015. Retrieved 19 December 2016.
  2. 1 2 "Sara Ginaite-Rubinson". Canadian Society for Yad Vashem. Archived from the original on 20 December 2016. Retrieved 19 December 2016.
  3. ↑ Bergen, Doris L. (2016). War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. pp. 23–. ISBN 978-1-4422-4229-6.
  4. ↑ "Portrait of female partisan, Sara Ginaite at the liberation of Vilna. The photograph was taken by a Jewish, Soviet major who was surprised to see a female, Jewish partisan standing guard". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 19 December 2016.
  5. ↑ "Sara Ginaite Lithuanian Jewish Partisan, Witness - BBC World Service". BBC. Retrieved 2017-09-19.
  6. ↑ "Sara Ginaite". The European Library. Retrieved 19 December 2016.
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