Sara Ginaite was a Jewish Lithuanian partisan who fought against Nazi occupation during the Second World War.
Ginaite was born in 1924 in Kovno (Kaunas), Lithuania. She was educated in a Lithuanian-speaking school, which she was about to graduate from when Nazi Germany invaded the country in 1941. Three of Ginaite's uncles were killed in the Kaunas Pogrom, a massacre of Jewish people that the Nazi's encouraged the Lithuanian population to perform. The pogrom resulted in the deaths of 9200 people, almost half of them children. The surviving members of Ginaite's family were incarcerated in the Kovno Ghetto, along with 40,000 Jewish people.
While living in the ghetto Ginaite joined the Anti-Fascist Fighting Organization (AFO) to take part in the resistance against the Nazis. She began a relationship with their charismatic youth leader, Misha Rubinson, and the two married in 1943. The pair broke out of the Kovno Ghetto that winter, escaping to the Rudninkai Forest where they established a partisan military unit named 'Death to the Occupiers'.
Ginaite returned to the Kovno Ghetto twice to help others to escape, once disguised as a nurse claiming she was there to escort four sick workers. In 1944 Ginaite and Rubinson took part in the liberation of the Vilna and Kovno ghettos, although by this time 90% of the Jewish populations inside had been killed. Ginaite's own family were all dead, save for her sister and a young niece.
After the war, Ginaite fought against rampant anti-semitism to become a professor of Political Economics at Vilnius University, where she published award-winning books on the Holocaust in Lithuania. Following her husband's death in 1983, she moved to Canada to live with her two daughters and continue her academic career.