June 7, 1921 – Birth of Hela Rufeisen, Heroic Jewish Resistance Fighter

Hela Schüpper Rufeisen, the heroic courier who helped with the Warsaw Jewish Ghetto rebellion, was born in 1921 in Krakow, Poland.

In 1939, at age 18, Hela became active in the Akiva (Zionist) youth movement, with the intention of starting a new life in Palestine. But shortly thereafter, one of the movement’s leaders was arrested, causing Akiva activities to go underground. In 1940, the movement’s activities resumed with the purpose of training members to set up an Akiva underground cell in the Warsaw ghetto. [In the fall of 1940, German authorities established a ghetto in Warsaw, Poland’s largest city with the largest Jewish population. Almost 30 percent of Warsaw’s population was packed into 2.4 percent of the city’s area. For more information see this entry on the Holocaust Museum website.]

Hela Rufeisen Schüpper, the only member of her family to survive the Holocaust

Hela traveled to Warsaw in March 1941, where fellow Akiva members established the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB). Hela was the first to volunteer as a courier in the movement. Dying her hair a lighter shade, she had to evade not only the Germans but also Polish blackmailers, who extorted money from Jews who were passing as Aryans, threatening to hand them over to the Gestapo if they did not pay.

She prepared forged Polish identity cards for fighters in the forests, obtained weapons and documents, relayed messages, and coordinated between fighting factions. She brought weapons into the Warsaw ghetto hidden under her dress and explosives hidden in her travel bag.

On one trip between Krakow and Warsaw she was arrested by a Polish police officer who suspected she was Jewish. Keeping her nerve and ability to maneuver, Schüpper insisted she was Polish and that she had to use the toilet urgently. Once there she flushed all the forged identity documents down the toilet. After three days of detention, the police released her as a Polish Catholic woman and even apologized. She entered the ghetto once more in her usual way, by joining a Jewish labor detail returning from work.

On another occasion she was leaving the Warsaw ghetto with money to use as ransom for Jewish prisoners. She was caught by a German guard renowned for his cruelty. Once more she was detained at the police station, this time appearing before the Polish and German police. She managed to stuff the money quickly into the pocket of a Jewish boy who entered to sweep her cell. Again her courage and aplomb served her as she insisted she was Polish.

This time she decided to escape, taking advantage of the permission she received to relieve herself near the ghetto wall with only one German police officer to guard her. Seizing an opportune moment, she ran off. A hail of bullets followed her, one hitting her foot. Reaching a dark place, she hid in some ruins, emerging to enter the ghetto in the morning when movement resumed.

Hela continued to move between various hideouts, but eventually was deported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she spent 22 months. As an article in the Jewish Women’s Archive Encyclopedia reports:

On March 8, 1945, all the inmates were ordered to the railway station, supposedly to be sent to Theresienstadt. Exhausted by hunger and disease, most could barely walk. The train finally stopped near Magdeburg, where the German officer in charge fled together with his men, leaving the prisoners inside the train to be liberated by American soldiers.”

After the war, she eventually moved to the new state of Israel and married.

Hela Schüpper-Rufeisen testifies at the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem.
(photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)

One of the last survivors of the ZOB, she died on April 23, 2017 at the age of 96, just hours before the annual Holocaust remembrance ceremony in Yad Vashem’s Warsaw Ghetto plaza.