“Fania Brantsovsky was the last survivor of the Jewish resistance in the Vilnius ghetto, where she was taken along with tens of thousands of other Jews at the age of 19. She passed away on 22 September in the capital of Lithuania, aged 102.
In the ghetto, “our life was more of an existence,” she said in an interview given in 2005 to Centropa, a Holocaust oral history project. Tributes poured in from her homeland and abroad, especially from the Jewish community.
“The death of Fania Brantsovsky, one of the last Jewish partisans who fought against the Nazis, is a deeply sad moment in the memory of the Shoah [Holocaust],” highlighted Raya Kalenova, Executive Vice-President of the European Jewish Congress (EJC), in a message sent to Expresso.
The EJC Executive Vice-President also reflected on Brantsovsky. “Fania dedicated her life not only to ensuring we would never forget the Shoah of the Lithuanian Jews, but also the vibrant and rich Jewish life she directly experienced in one of the centres of Jewish culture before the war.”
