Tosia Altman

She was portrayed by American actress Leelee Sobieski in the 2001 television film Uprising.

Altman was posthumously awarded the Silver Cross of the Military Order of Virtuti Militari by the decision of the President of the Polish People's Republic on April 1, 1948, for her merits in the underground struggle during the occupation.

In January 1943, during the next wave of deportations, the Warsaw Jews put up scattered armed resistance. The ŻOB infiltrated the Jews rounded up for deportation and launched a surprise attack on the Germans. Most were killed, but the leader, Mordechai Anielewicz, managed to escape. During the action, Altman returned to the ghetto with another female smuggler, Tema Schneiderman [he], to fight with the ŻOB. Both were apprehended and taken to the Umschlagplatz for deportation to Treblinka, but Altman was released by a Jewish ghetto policeman acting for Hashomer Hatzair. The resistance was partly successful: the Germans only deported 5,000 Jews, rather than the 8,000 that they had wanted to. After the January skirmish, the Home Army began to support the ŻOB in earnest, and the remaining Jews trained and built bunkers in preparation for the final liquidation. Altman and Wilner were also able to buy a few weapons on the black market. Wilner was arrested in March, but he did not betray the resistance even under torture. Afraid that the Germans had tracked her down, Altman returned to the ghetto, replaced by Yitzhak Zuckerman as liaison to the Polish resistance.

Upon her return to Warsaw, Altman found that the Jews were unwilling to accept that they were about to be exterminated, even after reports arrived of a death camp at Chełmno. In early 1942, she collaborated with other leftist groups to establish a self-defense organization, but their efforts came to nothing because they were unable to secure any arms. In July, during the Grossaktion Warsaw and after the establishment of the Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB), Altman, due to her Aryan appearance and Polish language skills, was appointed a liaison with the Home Army and Armia Ludowa. Although these Polish resistance organizations refused to offer any substantial help, Altman helped smuggle some grenades and explosives. Living on the Aryan side of the city, she also helped Jews escape from the ghetto and find places to hide. In a letter to Adam Rand, then in Vienna, in April 1942, she wrote, "Jews are dying before my eyes and I am powerless to help. Did you ever try to shatter a wall with your head?"

On 24 December 1941, Altman and Haika Grossman managed to return to the Vilna Ghetto, where they met with Abba Kovner and the leadership of the United Partisan Organization. Altman described the horrible conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto, but still urged the Zionist leaders to evacuate there since the Vilna Ghetto was being systematically depopulated in a series of massacres at Ponary. Kovner disagreed, as he believed that there was a systematic plan to exterminate all Jews under Nazi control. The youth movements decided to promulgate the word about mass killings and encourage the ghettoized Polish Jews to resist with force. On her trip back to Warsaw, Altman visited several eastern Polish ghettos, including Grodno, to pass along this message.

Upon the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany in September 1939, the Zionist youth movements urged their members to flee eastward to avoid the Germans. With Adam Rand, a friend from Hashomer Hatzair, Altman walked to Rovno. When the Soviet Union invaded, Altman and the youth movement leadership evacuated to Vilna, under Polish and then Lithuanian control until June 1940. Altman joined the headquarters of Hashomer Hatzair in Vilna, and helped to organize several unsuccessful attempts to send members of the youth movements illegally to Palestine.

After two failed attempts to cross the Soviet and German borders, in December 1939 she visited her family in Włocławek and returned to Warsaw, the first youth movement leader to do so. Altman traveled frequently to Galicia and Częstochowa despite restrictions on Jews traveling by train, where she attempted to organize clandestine education and even training kibbutzim. She sent postcards to youth movement leaders in Vienna, Vilna, and Switzerland, describing the suffering of the Jews under the Nazi regime. After the walling-off of the Warsaw Ghetto, her own family trapped inside, Altman continued to travel under false papers despite the fact that to be caught outside the ghetto was a capital offense. She sent food packages into the Warsaw Ghetto for her family and friends.

Tosia Altman (Hebrew: טוסיה אלטמן) (24 August 1919 – 26 May 1943) was a courier and smuggler for Hashomer Hatzair and the Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB) during the German occupation of Poland and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Altman was born on 24 August 1919 to Anka and Gustaw Altman in Lipno, Poland, near the city of Włocławek. Her father, a watchmaker, owned a jewelry shop in Włocławek and the family was relatively well-off. Although her father had been raised in a Hasidic household, Altman's parents had a liberal interpretation of the Jewish faith and encouraged Altman to study Polish and Hebrew. Influenced by her father's General Zionist convictions, Altman studied at a Hebrew-language gymnasium and joined the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement at the age of eleven. Elected as a representative of the local branch of Hashomer Hatzair, she attended the Fourth World Convention in 1935. Inspired to immigrate to Israel, she joined a training kibbutz in Częstochowa in 1938, but Hashomer Hatzair soon appointed her to the central leadership of youth education in Warsaw.