Sophie Schwartz

Sophie Schwartz (or Schwarc) was born in Lodz, Poland, on December 28, 1905. She was deeply affected by a wave of pogroms she experienced. At age 14, she joined the Bund, a Jewish socialist movement, and then the underground Communist Youth in 1922.

Arrested in 1924, she fled Łódź for the Netherlands and then for Belgium; she worked as a factory worker to earn a living. She joined the Kultur Ligue (Kultur Liga), a democratic Jewish cultural organization. There she met Leizer Micnik, her future husband. An active communist activist, he was expelled from Belgium and went into exile in France with Sophie.

In Paris in 1930, they continued their activist work with the Communist Party and the Kultur Ligue.

In 1935, Sophie Schwartz, along with other activists from the Kultur Ligue, founded a mutual-aid organization called the “Jews’ Movement Against Fascism and War.”

In September 1940, she co-founded, along with former activists from the Jewish section of the M.O.I., the underground organization “Solidarité,” which would play a major role in the Resistance in France. The “Movement of Jewish Women Against Fascism and War” then became the “Union of Jewish Women” (UFJ), a key component of “Solidarité.”

In addition, Sophie Schwartz headed the “Solidarity” technical group, which was responsible for printing leaflets and the clandestine Jewish communist newspaper *Unzer Wort*. The following year, she joined the leadership of the Jewish section of the M.O.I. in the occupied zone. She founded a Children’s Commission and was deeply committed to rescuing Jewish children, both in the north and the south, particularly through the Mouvement National contre le Racisme (MNCR).

In the spring of 1943, the Jewish Communist Resistance movements in the northern and southern zones merged into a single organization, the Union of Jews for Resistance and Mutual Aid (UJRE), founded by several resistance fighters, including Sophie Schwartz.

Hunted by the Special Brigades, she evaded arrest and made her way to the Southern Zone. She assumed political leadership of an UJRE combat unit and was promoted to the rank of lieutenant in the FTP-M.O.I.

In the immediate postwar period, she was one of the co-founders of the Commission Centrale de l’Enfance (CCE) within the UJRE, which cared for Jewish children orphaned by the Shoah.

She served as its secretary-general until the end of 1950, when she decided to return to Poland. Facing anti-Semitism from Polish leaders, she moved to France in 1969. She died there on January 17, 1999, in Boulogne-Billancourt, in the Paris region.