A poor girl from the Slovak mountains
Haviva Reik, born Marta Reik, and also written Reick or Reich, was born on 22 June 1914 into a Jewish family in Slovakia, then part of the Kingdom of Hungary. Sources differ on the exact village of her birth, but she grew up in Banská Bystrica, a town in the forested Carpathian hills of central Slovakia. She was one of several children in a very poor family.
As a teenager she joined Hashomer Hatzair, the Zionist-socialist youth movement that trained young Jews for a collective life of farming in the Land of Israel. She dreamed of emigrating, but family poverty came first: instead of starting agricultural training she went to work as a saleswoman for a firm selling agricultural machinery, helping to support her parents and siblings.
Kibbutz pioneer
In 1938 Reik finally began her pioneering training (hakhsharah) in Bratislava. There she married a young Zionist, Avraham Martinovitch; some later accounts suggest the marriage may have been one of convenience, a common device at the time to let two people share a single scarce immigration certificate to British-ruled Palestine. In 1939, months before the outbreak of the Second World War, the couple emigrated and joined Kibbutz Ma’anit, near Karkur in the Samaria plain.
Reik threw herself into kibbutz life just as she had into her youth movement, coordinating the citrus harvest and taking on other responsibilities. Her husband later left the kibbutz, though the two remained on good terms. After disagreements with her community, she moved to Kibbutz Shamir, another Hashomer Hatzair settlement. There she met Sara (Surika) Braverman, who persuaded her to join the Palmach, the elite strike force of the Haganah, the Jewish underground defence organisation.
The parachutists’ mission
As news of the destruction of European Jewry reached Palestine, the Jewish Agency and the British military developed a joint plan. The British needed agents who spoke the languages of occupied Europe and knew its landscape and culture; the Jewish leadership wanted emissaries who could reach Jewish communities and help them resist and survive. Between 32 and 33 volunteers were eventually sent into occupied Europe. Women were accepted alongside men, and Reik and Braverman both volunteered.
To give her a military identity, Reik was enlisted in the British Women’s Auxiliary Air Force under the cover name ‘Ada Robinson’; her British documents also listed her married name, Martha Martinovich. She trained in wireless operation and parachuting, and reached the rank of sergeant. Before leaving, she told friends she was not sure she would ever return.
Her trainers had one moment of doubt. On the day of her first jump she had an injured hand from earlier exercises, and they worried it might not be strong enough to control the parachute. She jumped anyway, with little sign of concern. The British organisation that ran such operations, the Special Operations Executive, had first asked the Palmach for volunteers with knowledge of Central Europe; for Reik, a Slovak speaker who knew the Carpathian countryside from childhood, the mission was a return home.
Refusing to be left behind
By the late summer of 1944 her native Slovakia was in turmoil. The pro-Nazi Slovak state had already handed tens of thousands of its Jews to the Germans for deportation, but at the end of August 1944 the Slovak National Uprising broke out, centred on Banská Bystrica, Reik’s home town. As German troops moved in to crush it, Jews from across Slovakia fled into the rebel-held enclave.
Reik was sent to Bari, in southern Italy, to wait with three male comrades, Rafael Reiss, Zvi Ben-Yaakov and Haim Hermesh, for a drop into Slovakia. Then the British refused to let her go: their rules barred women from ‘blind’ parachute drops behind enemy lines, and they feared that a captured woman would be shot as a spy rather than treated as a prisoner of war. Hermesh later remembered her bursting into tears and protesting that the four of them had promised to go together. She refused to give up. When the three men parachuted in on the night of 14 September 1944, Reik found another way, joining an Allied flight carrying American and British personnel to the rebel airfield near Banská Bystrica. When her comrades arrived in the town a few days later, they were astonished to find her already there, at work among the local Jews.
Soup kitchen in a besieged town
For about six weeks, Reik and her comrades, later joined by a fifth parachutist, Abba Berdiczew, who brought a radio, carried out a double task. They helped Allied airmen who had been shot down to get back to their lines, and they organised the thousands of Jewish refugees crowded into the enclave. Working with the local Hashomer Hatzair leader, Egon Rot, Reik helped bring rival Jewish groups together into a resistance, settled disputes between them and supplied money and other help.
She ran a large public kitchen that fed hungry, homeless Jews who had fled to Banská Bystrica from all over Slovakia. The group also set up a community centre for refugees, helped Jewish children escape to Hungary and on towards Palestine, and established a camp for escaped Soviet prisoners of war. It was, in miniature, exactly what the parachutists’ mission had been meant to be: a bridge between the Jews of Palestine and the trapped Jews of Europe.
The choice in the mountains
In late October 1944 German forces, including SS units with Ukrainian auxiliaries, closed in, and Banská Bystrica fell. The parachutists faced a terrible choice. They could take only the young and fit to the mountains to fight on, leaving the mass of refugees behind, or try to lead everyone to safety. According to Judith Tydor Baumel’s account, many of the Zionist activists favoured the first course, but Reik argued for the second and persuaded her comrades to take the risk.
The group, including about 40 local Jews of all ages, retreated to the hills near the village of Pohronský Bukovec and built a camp. Within days it was overrun by German forces. Hermesh escaped and went on to fight with the partisans and the Red Army; Reik, Reiss and Ben-Yaakov were captured.
Kremnička
In the early hours of 20 November 1944, Haviva Reik and Rafael Reiss were shot, together with a group of captured Jews, at Kremnička near Banská Bystrica, one of the mass killings carried out there by the Germans and their collaborators in the weeks after the uprising was crushed. Their bodies were thrown into a mass grave. Reik was 30 years old. Of the five Palestinian Jewish parachutists in Slovakia, only Haim Hermesh survived the war.
Of all the volunteers sent from Palestine, seven did not come back, among them Hannah Szenes, executed in Budapest earlier that month, and Enzo Sereni, who died in Dachau. She and Szenes were the two women among them.
Brought home to Jerusalem
After the war, Jews searching for the victims located the grave. Reik’s and Reiss’s bodies, identified by their military uniforms, were exhumed and reburied in the British military cemetery in Prague, at first under crosses, which were replaced with Stars of David in 1949 after Zionist protests. In September 1952, in an exceptional step, the British War Office allowed Israel to bring them home. On 10 September 1952 Haviva Reik was reburied in the parachutists’ plot of the military cemetery on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, alongside Hannah Szenes and Rafael Reiss.
Legacy
Reik’s Jewishness was not a matter of religious observance but of a whole life shaped by Zionist socialism, the kibbutz, and a fierce sense of responsibility for her people. She chose to return to the country she had left, at the moment it became most dangerous for a Jew to be there, and chose again, at the end, to stay with the weakest refugees rather than save herself.
In Israel her name is everywhere. Kibbutz Lahavot Haviva and Givat Haviva, the Hashomer Hatzair education centre that has become known for its work on Jewish–Arab shared society, are named after her, as are an Aliyah Bet ship that carried Jewish immigrants to Palestine, a stream, a variety of gerbera flower, a reservoir and many streets. Together with Hannah Szenes, she became one of the defining images of Jewish courage in the Holocaust: not only a fighter, but a rescuer who ran a soup kitchen under siege.
Sources & further reading
Havivah Reik, Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women (Jewish Women’s Archive) · Haviva Reik, Jewish Virtual Library · Haviva Reik, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.