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The Night Witches and Other Warrior Women of World War II

Khalid Elhassan December 8, 2019 31 min

Lyudmila Pavlichenko - World War II — WWII Red Army snipers. Pintrest

28. Hiding From the Nazis

Charlotte Noshpitz’s fake wartime ID. The Forward

By 1942, Charlotte Noshpitz’s father was in hiding. Later that year, her mother was arrested in a roundup and deported to Auschwitz. Charlotte’s father and brother fled to Nice in southern France. She followed them soon thereafter, and joined the local Resistance at age seventeen.

When her father stumbled upon her stash of weapons, Charlotte arranged false identity papers to get him out of the country and out of her hair. She told him that she would go with him to Switzerland, but at the border, she bid him adieu as she handed him to a guide who escorted him the rest of the way. She then turned around and returned to the fight.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.