Hella Schuepper Rufeisen, a 96-year-old Holocaust heroine, died a day before Holocaust Remembrance Day. She was one of the last survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto Jewish combat organization headed by Mordechai Anielewicz.
Hella Scheupper was the second of five children born to a Hassidic family in Krakow, Poland. When she was ten years old, her mother died, and Hella went to live with her grandparents. Despite being very religious, her grandmother sent her to a Polish public school, where in addition to secular subjects she learned Catholic prayers and traditions. That, and her fluent Polish, spoken without a trace of a Yiddish accent, stood her in good stead after the Nazi invasion of Poland.
When Hella was fourteen, her Jewish friends persuaded her to join Akiva, a Zionist youth movement. Her grandparents objected, concerned that Hella would become lax in religious observance and she might want to go to what was then called Palestine.
The Germans invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and the Krakow Ghetto was established in March 1941, with the population limited to 15,000 as dictated by the Nazis. As they could not enter the ghetto, the family left Krakow for Warsaw.
In Warsaw Hella joined fellow Akiva members who established the Jewish Combat Organization – which was committed to an armed struggle against the Nazis.
The group assigned Hella the task of ghetto courier, which meant smuggling information in and out of the ghetto. She also began going back and forth between Warsaw and Krakow – always a dangerous trip. Fortunately, on those trips she was able to convince the Germans she was purely Polish, and the Poles she met apparently believed whatever story she spun.
Over time, Hella smuggled money, fake documents, weapons, explosives and more between the two cities. Her walk and appearance exuded so much confidence that hardly anyone suspected she was anything other than what she pretended.
Liberated by the Americans in March of 1945, Hella thought the only reason she was alive was to tell her story. And over the years she told it many times.
In 1945, she finally arrived in Palestine, six years later than she had first intended.
At first she lived at Kibbutz Beit Yehoshua, where she met Aryeh Rufeisen, whom she married in 1947. Two years later they were among the founders of Moshav Bustan Ha-Galil in the Western Galilee, where they raised three children and where she continued to live after her husband died until her own death this year, 24 hours before Holocaust Remembrance Day.