Tal (Thal) Zitta (Sitta) Izrailevna Tal (21 November 1902, Talsi) — proofreader.
Zitta Tal graduated from the Riga Municipal Jewish Secondary School in 1921 and began studies at педагогical courses. Her parents — her father Israel Tal (1860–1940), a small shopkeeper, and her mother Elena Tal (1870–1935), a home-based worker — lived in great poverty, denying themselves much in order to provide a good education for Zitta, her brother Yakov Tal (1898–1940), and her sister Khinda Tal (1904).
In 1923, as an escort for a seriously ill acquaintance, she moved to Leipzig and enrolled as an auditor at the Faculty of Philology of the local university, combining study with work. Due to financial difficulties, she was forced to leave her studies after one year. She worked as a correspondent and typist-stenographer — until 1930 in private firms, and from 1930 to 1935 in the Trade Representation of the USSR in Germany (Fur Department, Leipzig).
In 1925, she joined the German Communist Party. Her daughter Liya (born 1925) was given for upbringing to a childless German couple.
In January 1936, she was arrested together with three fellow party members and sentenced by the Supreme Court of Saxony (Dresden) to three years of imprisonment in the Zuchthaus prison in Waldheim. After completing her sentence in April 1939, she was transferred under escort to the German–Latvian border point Tilsit and from there, as a Latvian citizen, expelled to Latvia together with her daughter.
In Riga, she was unable to find work in her profession and worked as a nanny for a family with two children. After Latvia’s incorporation into the Soviet Union, she took a job as a typist in the Latvian office of the foreign trade organization “Eksportles.”
In July 1941, she was evacuated with her daughter to the village of Uni in the Kirov region. In 1944, she decided to return to Riga. Falling ill on the way, she was hospitalized in Velikiye Luki and only in early 1945 managed to reach Riga and reunite with her daughter. After recovering from typhus, in spring 1945 she began working as a proofreader at the newspaper “Sovetskaya Latviya.” From 1948, she worked at the Museum of the Revolution. She later worked as a proofreader at the 2nd Riga printing house, and from 1953 as a typist-secretary at the Latvian State Conservatory.
From 1972, she was a pensioner. In 1970, in connection with the 25th anniversary of the liberation of Ravensbrück, she requested permission for a visit to Germany to meet her comrades in the anti-fascist struggle.
Her parents died before the war. Her brother Yakov was killed by German occupiers in the 1940s.
Family:
Khinda Tal (1904) — sister
Liya Zlotina (née Tal) (1925) — daughter
Israel Tal (1860–1940) — father
Elena Tal (1870–1935) — mother
Yakov Tal (1898–1940) — brother