The Lithuanian Jewish Community mourns the passing of Rachel Margolis, born in Vilnius, a partisan, biologist and author of the book Partisan from Vilna.

She was born on December 28, 1928. As a young Jewish girl she was sent to the Vilna ghetto, were she joined the FPO, the united partisan  underground, and carried out various military missions. She was blonde and blue-eyed, and able to pass “on the Aryan side” as she put it. She also worked at Herman Kruk’s ghetto library on Strashun Street (now Zemaitijos street) where the FPO sometimes held target practice in the cellar.

She was friends with Hirsh Glik, the young poet who penned the words which would become the Partisan Hymn, Sog Niet Keynmol, still sung when Holocaust survivors gather in Israel and throughout the world. Margolis was the first to hear the poem and put it to musical accompaniment.

Her entire family was murdered during the Holocaust, but she married a fellow partisan and started her own family. She is survived by several daughters in Israel. In the post-war period she worked for many years teaching biology at Vilnius University and was the main force in the decyphering and publishing of the Sakowicz diary, an eye-witness testimony of the mass
murder operations at Ponar outside Vilnius. After making aliyah to Israel she used to return to Vilnius during the summers and volunteered her time constructing exhibits at the Green House Holocaust exhibit of the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum and leading tours through the Vilna ghetto.