b'BC_5782_2021final_cmyk_Layout 18/8/219:47 AMPage 14Zivia Lubetkin, like so many others who were active in the resistance, came byher core beliefs early on. Born in 1914 in Byten in what is today Belarus, shewas active in Zionist and Socialist youth groups and became a leader. She movedto Warsaw, and after the German invasion of Poland worked in other cities aswell, eventually managing to return to Warsaw in 1940. Zivia Lubetkin. The she became a founder and one of the leaders on the central command of theJewish Fighting Organization (ZOB), taking dangerous trips outside Warsaw inorder to coordinate efforts among resistance organizations in different areas, and dispatching othersto do similar work. With Frumka Plotnicka (see November 2021), she ran a soup kitchen thatserved hundreds. Zivia fought in the January 1943 Warsaw ghetto mini-uprising, and then in April of that year she wasa leader of the main ghetto uprising. She and her fellow fighters had worked hard to organizethemselves and procure and manufacture weapons. Her unit was the first to engage the advancingGermans. In the initial hours of combat, they inflicted severe casualties on the Germans while enduringnone of their own. During the fighting, Zivia traveled between bunkers, maintaining contact amongthe fighters. But the Germans changed tactics and began burning the ghetto down, and the resistancefighters, running low on hideouts, food and ammunition, were in an increasingly desperate situation.Maintaining liaison with fighters until it was hopeless, Zivia helped organize their departure from theghetto to the Aryan side via sewage tunnels. Some forty fighters were rescued after escaping througha manhole cover. Zivia remained in Warsaw through the war, continuing to organize resistance. Afterthe war she married a fellow fighter and they emigrated to Palestine, where she died in 1976.'