Hesya Helfman

Hesya Mirovna (Meerovna) Helfman (העסיע העלפֿמאַן, Геся Мировна (Мееровна) Гельфман) 1855, Mazyr — 1 (N.S. 13) February 1882, Saint Petersburg), was a Belarusian-Jewish revolutionary member of Narodnaya Volya, who was implicated in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. Escaping execution as she was pregnant at the time, she died in the aftermath of childbirth in prison. Helfman was born into a religious Jewish family, in Mozyr, Belarus, then part of the Russian Empire. She received no schooling, and had a husband picked for her by her father while she was a teenager. She ran away from home in 1868, before the wedding could take place. She lived with a local Christian friend, then moved to Kyiv, where she worked as a seamstress and began training to be a midwife. In the early 1870s, Helfman was an active member of several revolutionary clubs in Kiev where she met, among others, Leo Deutsch and her future husband ru. Helfman was sentenced to two years' imprisonment at the Litovsky Castle during the 1877 Trial of the Fifty, and on 14 March 1879 was sent into exile to the province Novgorod. She escaped a few months later and joined Narodnaya Volya in Saint Petersburg, probably following her husband who was a member of the organization's executive committee. In 1881 Helfman was part of the Narodnaya Volya group that assassinated Alexander II, albeit not in a front-line position; she was assigned to run a conspiratorial flat, where she lived with another member of the group, Nikolai Sablin, as an unsuspicious apparent married couple. When the police raided their apartment, two days after the deadly attack on the tsar, Sablin shot himself while she was captured. During the Pervomartovtsy trial in March 1881, Helfman refused to admit her guilt, but was nonetheless sentenced to death by hanging for her alleged part in the assassination of the tsar. A few hours after being convicted, she made a statement that "in view of the ... sentence I have received, I consider it my moral duty to declare that I am in the fourth month of pregnancy".