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Polish Nun Who Helped Hide Vilna Ghetto Rebels during Holocaust Dies
(Times of Israel) Stuart Winer - Cecylia Roszak, a Polish Catholic Dominican nun who was honored by Israel for helping to hide Jewish resistance fighters in her convent during World War II, died last week aged 110. In 1938 Roszak traveled with a group of nine nuns to Vilnius in Lithuania to set up a new convent. According the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial page dedicated to Anna Borkowska, the mother superior of the convent, the sisters took in 17 members of a Jewish underground movement that formed to fight back against the extermination of the Vilna ghetto's residents. Borkowska smuggled the first hand grenades into the community. Borkowska was arrested in 1943 and the convent closed down. She and Roszak both survived the war. In 1984 Yad Vashem gave the members of the convent, including Borkowska and Roszak, its Righteous Among Nations award, which honors non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.