The Night Witches and Other Warrior Women of World War II

The Night Witches and Other Warrior Women of World War II

Khalid Elhassan - December 8, 2019

The Night Witches and Other Warrior Women of World War II
Eta Wrobel. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

12. The Resistance Leader of Lokov

Polish Resistance heroine Eta Wrobel was born in 1918 in Lokov, into a large Jewish family of ten children. Her father taught his offspring to help others, no matter the circumstances, and Eta took that to heart. When the Nazis conquered Poland, things got horrifically bad for Poland’s Jews, but Eta, who described herself as a “born a fighter“, was determined to do what she could to resist.

What she could do, at first, was to forge false identity papers for Jews. She did that until 1942, when her ghetto was liquidated, and Etta and her family were packed off to concentration camps. Fortunately, she and her father managed to escape en route, and fled into the woods near Lokov. Unfortunately, she was the only one of ten siblings to survive the Holocaust. She would do her best to avenge them by founding a resistance group.

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