Born: 11 November 1914, Belarus
Died: 3 August 1943
Country most active: Poland
Also known as: Fruma (Frumke) Plotnitzki (Anglicized)
Frumka Płotnicka was a Polish resistance fighter during World War II and Zionist activist. She was one of the resistance organizers in the Warsaw Ghetto, and participated in the military preparations for the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
Płotnicka moved to Warsaw in 1938 to take a position at the Dror Zionist Youth Movement headquarters. After the 1939 invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, she participated in underground activities as leader of the HeHalutz youth movement. In disguise and using false identities, she travelled across General Government territory between Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland. She witnessed Holocaust trains leaving for undisclosed death camps. As a kashariyot (courier), she delivered weapons procured by the Warsaw Ghetto underground and blueprints, drafted by the headquarters, for making Molotov cocktails and hand grenades. Płotnicka was the first Jewish courier in the Warsaw Ghetto to smuggle weapons from the Aryan part of the city inside sacks of potatoes. Among the Jewish communities she visited, Płotnicka was known as “Die Mameh” (“Mom” in Yiddish), and residents would come to her for information and supplies She conveyed the reports of murderous liquidations of so many ghettos that she began to call herself a gravedigger.
After the Großaktion Warschau – the deportation and mass murder of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto, 22 July to 21 Sept 1942 – Płotnicka was sent to Będzin in occupied south-western Poland by the Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB) in order to help the resistance there. She organized a local chapter of the ŻOB in Będzin but soon after witnessed the murderous liquidation of both Sosnowiec and Będzin Ghettos by the Germans.
In March 1941 there were 25,171 Jews in Będzin, which increased to 27,000 after the forced removal of the Jewish community of Oświęcim, the location of the Auschwitz II Birkenau redevelopment. In May 1942 deportations to Auschwitz began with the first transport of 3,200 Będzin Jews loaded onto Holocaust trains at the Umschlagplatz. On 3 August 1943, during the final deportation, the resistance launched an uprising that lasted for several days. Płotnicka was killed in a bunker at Podsiadły Street that same day, fighting the Germans. She was awarded the Order of the Cross of Grunwald by the Polish Committee of National Liberation on 19 April 1945.
There is an engraved Syenite commemorative plaque at the intersection of Niska and Dubois streets in Warsaw dedicated to her memory. It is part of Warsaw’s Memorial Route of Jewish Martyrdom and Struggle, inaugurated in 1988, from the intersection of Zamenhof and Anielewicz streets to the intersection of Dzika and Stawki streets.