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WWII’s French Serial Killer Doctor and Other Forgotten Monsters From History

Khalid Elhassan January 27, 2020 32 min

15. The Born Revolutionary

She was born Rosalia Samilovna Zalkind into a Jewish family in 1876, in today’s Belarus. Given the Tsarist government’s antisemitism, it was unsurprising that her parents had radical tendencies. Years later, the future killer recalled that one of her earliest childhood memories was of her parents approving the assassination of Tsar Alexander II by revolutionaries in 1881.

Rosalia was introduced to peasant populism by an older brother and left school in 1891, when she was just fifteen, to dedicate her life to the revolution. She was arrested by the Okhrana, the Tsarist political police, soon thereafter. By 1896, hardened by stints in Tsarist prisons, Rosalia had moved from populism to Marxism. By 1902, she had adopted the revolutionary name Rosalia Zemlyachka, and that year, she joined Lenin’s faction of the Communist Party, the Bolsheviks.

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.