RUDOLF VOLSONOK

RUDOLF VOLSONOK (1889-December 31, 1945)

            He was born in Bialystok.  He studied at Kovno University.  During WWII he was confined in the Kovno ghetto, and he was the leader of the airport division in the Jewish labor office and the statistics office which assigned people for labor camps.  A past officer in the Polish army, he assisted the partisan organization in military matters.  He was later sent to the Dachau Concentration Camp in Germany.  He was also a Yiddish journalist in prewar Kovno, and aside from Yiddish he also wrote in Polish and Russian for the most part on political and social topics.  In 1920 he was a contributor to Nayes (News), a daily newspaper in Kovno: “He could write about everything with great speed….  He could, like any German academic, pick up information on any question someone might need,” noted Dr. A. Mukdoni, editor of the newspaper.  In the early 1920s, Volsonok also published in Memel (Klaipėda) a pro-Lithuanian newspaper in German.  He was the political correspondent from Lithuania for foreign news agencies.  With the liberation in 1945, he found himself in the Landsberg Jewish camp.  He was the founder and editor of Landsberger lager-tsaytung (Landsberg camp newspaper), the first publication of Holocaust survivors, published initially in Roman script, later in the Jewish alphabet.  In that same year he became ill and following an operation died in Munich.

Sources: Yoysef Gar, Umkum fun der yidisher kovne (Destruction of Jewish Kovno) (Munich, 1948), see index; Gar, in Fun noentn over (New York) 3 (1957), pp. 154-55; Dr. A. Mukdoni, in Lite (Lithuania), vol. 1 (New York, 1951), cols. 1093-94; Dr. Sh. Grinhoyz, in Lite (Lithuania), vol. 1, col. 1740.