Bela Yaari Hazan

She took on a Christian Polish identity and worked as a courier, passing information, money and arms between various ghettos.

After writing her memoirs They Called Me Bronislawa, she married and spent the rest of her life in Israel with her family.

[1] By the age of 16 Hazan had joined the HeHalutz Jewish youth movement, which gave young people agricultural training to prepare them for settling in the Land of Israel.

After unsuccessfully trying to escape the advancing German forces, Hazan and her HeHalutz colleagues heard that Vilna (then part of Poland, now capital of Lithuania) remained free.

She adopted the name of a Polish woman that she knew, obtaining her passport, changing the photograph to become Bronislawa Limanowska, an identity she maintained throughout the war.

She obtained a job with the Gestapo as an interpreter, allowing her to steal documents and stationery that she passed on to the resistance.

While at the party, one of the Gestapo officers took a picture of the three of them, Hazan, Tema Sznajderman and Lonka Korzybrodska, all three of them young Jewish women part of the Kashariyot, living with assumed Polish identities.

Although finding it hard to believe, they gave her money to allow her to help Jews to escape from the Vilna ghetto.

Soon Hazan started working as a nurse in the women's camp's hospital, where she was able to smuggle medicine to the Jewish patients, who were otherwise deprived of them.

Hazan persuaded the SS doctor to allow her to take her friend's body to the morgue herself, where she removed the icon and recited the Jewish prayer for the dead, the Kaddish.

[1] Auschwitz was evacuated on 18 January 1945, with the inmates forced on a "death march" until they reached the German border after four days.

She moved on to southern Italy, reaching a Jewish displaced persons camp at Santa Maria al Bagno in Apulia.

HeHalutz sent Hazan to another kibbutz, Givat Brenner, where she wrote her memoirs that were finally published in 1991 as a book entitled They Called Me Bronislawa.

More than 14 years after her death she was recognised for her "devotion, courage and heroism exhibited in rescuing fellow Jews in the holocaust" when B'nai B'rith awarded her its "Jewish Rescuer Citation".