Sunday, November 20, 2016

Pnina Grynszpan-Frymer (1922-2016)

From today's Ha'aretz: the obituary of Pnina Grynszpan-Frymer, among the last survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto struggle against the Nazis. When the war ended, and she discovered that her entire family had been murdered in the Holocaust, she came to Israel and lived on a kibbutz and in Tel Aviv, where she married and raised a family. 

Pnina Grynszpan-Frymer
from Ha'aretz
From the obituary:
"Grynszpan-Frymer was born in 1922 in the town of Nowy Dwór Mazowiecki near Warsaw. When World War II broke out in 1939 with Germany's invasion of Poland, she joined Eyal, the Jewish Fighting Organization, also widely known by its Polish initials, ŻOB. 
"She fought the Germans in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, fled the burning ruins through the sewage tunnels and joined the partisans in the forests. A year later she returned to Warsaw, where she was hidden by Poles and took part in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising." (link)
When I read about freedom fighters and resistants, I'm always struck by their subsequent lives -- if they survived, of course. They almost always returned to a much less exciting, much more "normal" and usually middle-class life, and when I think about it, I realize that this was what these heros were fighting for.

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