Chaika Grossman lived with her parents and two siblings in Białystok (Poland). She joined the socialist Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair at the age of ten. In the fall of 1939 she began studying economics in the then Polish town of Wilna (now Vilnius, Lithuania) and was part of the local Hashomer Hatzair leadership.
Wilna was occupied by the Germans in 1941. Chaika Grossman was able to evade the mass executions of Jews and go into hiding. Operating underground, Hashomer Hatzair deployed her as a courier, since her blonde hair meant people did not think she was Jewish. Furnished with a false identity, Chaika Grossman traveled around German-occupied Poland, Lithuania, and Belorussia, organizing resistance in various ghettos, passing on messages, and distributing underground publications. Later, she obtained money for different local resistance groups, bought explosives, weapons, and ammunition, and smuggled them into the ghettos.
After the uprising in the Białystok ghetto was put down in 1943, Grossman supported the Jewish partisan brigades. She went on living in the city under a false identity until its liberation in August 1944.
Chaika Grossman’s forged identity card, issued in the name of Halina Woranowicz, Białystok, 1943. Source: Bejt Lochamej haGeta’ot, Kibbuz Lochamej haGeta’ot
Chaika Grossman (5th from left) with a group of Jewish survivors at the memorial to the Jewish resistance fighters in the Białystok ghetto, Białystok, around 1946. Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington D.C., courtesy of Meir Orkin
