Haia Lifșiț

Haia Lifșiț or Lifschitz (Russian: Хая На́хмановна Ли́вшиц, romanized: Khaya Nakhmanovna Livshits; December 14, 1903 – August 17, 1929) was a Romanian communist who died as a result of a hunger strike while in detention for her political opinions.

[1] After finishing high school, Haia worked a schoolteacher, however she was soon arrested for her political options by the Romanian authorities, as Bessarabia had joined Greater Romania in 1918.

Lifșiț decided to flee Romania, and emigrated to Belgium, then Germany (where she used the pseudonym Maria Pavel), before finally settling in Vienna, Austria.

The case involved several other important communist activists (Eugen Rozvan, Dan Avramescu) and was brought before a military tribunal, the War Council of the 6th Army Corps – Cluj.

In June 1929, while in jail, Haia started a hunger strike along other comrades convicted in the same trial, demanding to be set free according to a recently announced amnesty decree.