Tema Schneiderman
36″ x 36″ oil on cradled panel
Tema Schneiderman, courier of the Dror youth movement and a member of the Jewish underground in the Bialystok ghetto.
Tema Schneiderman was born in Warsaw (Warszawa) in 1917. Upon the outbreak of WWII, she began her activities in the Jewish underground and became a courier for the Dror movement in Lithuania and Poland. Schneiderman carried out some twenty courier missions between Bialystok and Warsaw. On January 17, 1943, she entered the Warsaw ghetto where, the next day — during the second Aktion (mass roundup for deportation) — she and other young women were arrested and deported to the Treblinka extermination camp. She perished there.