VILNIUS – Fania Brancovskaja, a Vilnius Ghetto survivor and a Holocaust remembrance activist, died on Sunday at the age of 102, the Jewish Community of Lithuania said on Monday.
Born in Vilnius in 1922, Brancovskaja was sent to the Vilnius Ghetto at the age of 19 and stayed there until its liquidation. Her entire family was killed by the Nazis.
"Fania was a Jewish partisan who originally served as a courier. Several films have been made about her life. She was one of only a handful of Jewish partisans who remained in Lithuania after the Holocaust. In her later years she continued to speak out publicly and teach younger generations about what happened in Lithuania," the community said.
In 2017, Brancovskaja received a state decoration for her merits to Lithuania.
The Vilnius Ghetto established in September 1941 in the Old Town of Vilnius and it was liquidated on September 23-24, 1943.
Before the war, Jews made up about a third of the city's population, and the Lithuanian capital was an important center of Jewish culture. Only about 2,000 of the approximately 57,000 Jews of Vilnius survived the war.
During WWII, the Nazis killed 90 percent of the approximately 208,000 Jews in Lithuania, often with the help of local collaborators.
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