Bela Yaari Hazan

Bela Yaari Hazan (December 1922 – 18 January 2004) was a member of the Jewish resistance in Poland during the Second World War. She took on a Christian Polish identity and worked as a courier, passing information, money and arms between various ghettos. She was eventually imprisoned, tortured and sent to concentration camps, all the while maintaining her false identity. She worked as a nurse in the various camps that she found herself in, assisting resistance groups in the camps and getting medicine to Jewish inmates. She survived disease, hard labour, starvation and finally attempts by an SS squad to kill all the remaining prisoners in her final camp by helping move them overnight to the safety of approaching American troops. After liberation she went to France and then Italy, resuming her Jewish identity, before migrating to Israel in late 1945. After writing her memoirs They Called Me Bronislawa, she married and spent the rest of her life in Israel with her family. Many years after her death she was awarded the "Jewish Rescuer Citation" by B'nai B'rith.