Biography
Sonia Baltruin, also known as Sonia Baltrun and Sonia Kaross, was a Lithuanian-born labor organizer. She immigrated to the United States as a child and organized women textile workers in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania before moving to Oakland in 1929. Police clubbed and arrested her during an Oakland City Hall demonstration in 1930 protesting an attack on a Trade Union Unity League meeting at the USL Battery Company. She was sentenced to sixty days. Baltruin later organized textile and agricultural workers on the West Coast and served as a vice president of the California CIO council.
Page 3's individually labeled group photograph places this person among seven arrested at the Oakland City Hall unemployment demonstration on December 27, 1929. The enlarged original caption gives $150 fine or forty days in jail, differing from the $100 stated in some existing accounts. This nominal alternative is not a completed forty-day interval. Separate later USL Battery Company protest sentences remain distinct. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1930/v06-n334-NY-apr-02-1930-DW-LOC.pdf
Daily Worker, April 2, 1930; relevant page stated in the accompanying profile note.
PatriciaHickerson’s page6 biography identifies SoniaKaross as a Lithuanian-born organizer,with a1982 funeral photograph of her in Lithuania. It says she and husbandJoeKaross were pulled from bed and jailed in Philadelphia by July1918,in what it calls a Palmer raid,while she was nearly seven months pregnant; it attributes a stillbirth to harsh jail treatment. The July1918 wording conflicts with the usual chronology implied by the Palmer-raids label,so no exact arrest date is encoded. It also reports an Oakland SocialSecurity demonstration arrest with AnitaWhitney and GertrudeWarwick,two actual months in jail and $15,000 bail. The undated retrospective does not securely distinguish that episode from the existing1929/1930 cases,so it is retained without creating another Oakland case or converting months into exact days.
