Fania (Fanny) Dunetz Brodsky, the heroic Holocaust survivor who participated in the Novogrudok Tunnel Escape in 1943 and was featured on the cover of The Jerusalem Report on December 7, died in Jerusalem on June 27 at the age of 100.
Her daughter, Batya (Betty) Brodsky Cohen, is completing a book on her mother’s escape during the Holocaust, which was first told in a 2015 film made by Dror H. Shwartz called Tunnel of Hope. Cohen’s research revealed that the escape in Novogrudok by Jewish inmates was one of the most successful escapes during the Holocaust, if not the most successful. She identified 226 escapees and 129 survivors, most of whom had large families.
After her escape, Fania joined the famous Bielski Jewish Partisans. Her brother, Motl, who she helped to escape earlier, spent only a few days with the Bielskis before joining the Partisans of his hometown, Zhetl, in the Lupiczanski Forest.
Following the Holocaust, Fania moved to a D.P. camp to get out of Europe and it was there that she met her husband, George (Getzel), also a Holocaust survivor, who was the camp administrator. In 1949, they moved to New York, and had two children, Steven and Betty. After being widowed for 12 years, she made aliyah at the age of 88 in 2008 and moved to the Nofei Gilo retirement home in Jerusalem. It was there that she celebrated her 100th birthday on November 15, 2020 with her extended family, including her daughter, two grandchildren and a great-granddaughter. This was her daughter’s moving eulogy at her funeral on Jerusalem’s Har Hamenuchot:
Dear Mom,
I don’t believe in coincidences. It cannot be a coincidence that both you and your beloved brother, Motl, the only survivors of your family, died on the same day, on the fast of Yud Zayin Be’Tamuz, exactly two years apart. This fast signifies the beginning of the three-week period of mourning leading up to Tisha Be’Av, the period during which many calamities befell the Jewish people. It also happens to be the period during which almost all your family members were so cruelly murdered during the Holocaust.
It also cannot be a coincidence that you, the oldest living Bielski Partisan, now lie only several meters away from your esteemed commander, the man who gave you shelter and saved your life, the great Partisan leader, Tuvia Bielski.
Although you used to say that you don’t believe in God after the Holocaust, God believed in you. He allowed you a long life, to see children, grandchildren and great grandchildren.
Why? I was once told that only one moment of a truly great deed guarantees a place in Gan Eden (Paradise). Your moment was when you were offered the chance to escape together with your brother from the Novogrudok Labor Camp and you made the decision, at the risk of your own life, to remain in the camp after finding another inmate who knew the way to the partisans to escape with Motl in your stead.
Because God loved you, you remained alive, escaping with approximately 240-250 others through a handmade 200-meter tunnel in what is perhaps the most successful prisoner escape of the Holocaust.
You remained a fighter to the very end. Even in hospice, the nurses, without knowing anything about you, referred to you as such. You taught me how to fight for life, which came in handy when I needed a liver transplant six years ago. I truly believe that it is because of you that I am still alive today.
Thank you for twice giving me life. Thank you for being my mother.