Marija Rolnikaitė (Macha Rolnikas)

Macha Rolnikas (21 July, 1927, in Vilnius – 7 April 2016, in Saint Petersburg) was a Lithuanian writer and Holocaust survivor. Rolnikas’ family were Jewish and prominent in the local community, and when the Wehrmacht took control of Lithuania in 1941, her father joined the underground resistance. Rolnikas and the remainder of her family were sent to the Vilna Ghetto, and subsequently moved to Stutthof concentration campfor employment as an undertaker. As a result of her “employment”, she survived in the camp until the Red Army liberated Stutthof in 1944. She was reunited in Vilnius with her older sister and father; her younger siblings and mother had perished. Following the end of the war, Rolnikas moved to the Soviet Union, first to study at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute, and later to Leningrad after she was married. Her concentration camp diary was later adapted into a book, I Must Tell, that was published in the USSR in 1964 in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Lithuanian, and subsequently published from Paris in French in 1966

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