Judy Batalion - The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitlers Ghettos

Contents

In memory of my Bubbe Zelda,

and for my daughters, Zelda and Billie.

Ldor vdor... Chazak VAmatz.

In honor of all the Jewish women of Poland who resisted the Nazi regime.

Warsaw with a weeping face,

With graves on street corners,

Will outlive her enemies,

Will still see the light of days.

From A Chapter of Prayer, a song dedicated to the Warsaw ghetto uprising that won first prize in a ghetto song contest. Written by a young Jewish girl before her death, published in Women in the Ghettos, 1946.

Contents

(In Order of Appearance)

Renia Kukieka: born in Jdrzejw, a courier for Freedom in Bdzin.

Sarah Kukieka: Renias older sister, a Freedom comrade who takes care of Jewish orphans in Bdzin.

Zivia Lubetkin: born in Byten, a Freedom leader in the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB) and the Warsaw ghetto uprising.

Frumka Potnicka: born in Pinsk, a Freedom comrade who leads the fighting organization in Bdzin.

Hantze Potnicka (pronounced in English as Han-che): Frumkas younger sister, also a Freedom leader and courier.

Tosia Altman: a leader of The Young Guard and one of its most active couriers, based in Warsaw.

Vladka Meed (nee Feigele Peltel): a Bundist courier in Warsaw.

Chajka Klinger (pronounced in English as Hay-ka): a leader of The Young Guard and the fighting organization in Bdzin.

Gusta Davidson: a courier and leader of Akiva, based in Krakw.

Hela Schpper: a courier for Akiva, based in Krakw.

Bela Hazan: a Freedom courier, based in Grodno, Vilna, Biaystok. Worked with Lonka Kozibrodska and Tema Schneiderman.

Chasia Bielicka (pronounced in English as Has-ia) and Chaika Grossman (pronounced Hay-ka): two Young Guard couriers who are part of a ring of anti-Fascist operatives in Biaystok.

Ruzka Korczak (pronounced in English as Rush-ka): a leader of The Young Guard in Vilnas fighting organization (FPO) and a partisan leader in the forests.

Vitka Kempner: a leader of The Young Guard in Vilnas fighting organization (FPO) and a partisan leader in the forests.

Zelda Treger: a Young Guard courier based in Vilna and the forests.

Faye Schulman: a photographer who becomes a partisan nurse and fighter.

Anna Heilman: an assimilated Warsaw Young Guard member who takes part in the resistance at Auschwitz.

The British Library reading room smelled like old pages. I stared at the stack of womens history books I had orderednot too many, I reassured myself, not too overwhelming. The one on the bottom was the most unusual: hard-backed and bound in a worn, blue fabric, with yellowing, deckled edges. I opened it first and found virtually two hundred sheets of tiny scriptin Yiddish. It was a language I knew but hadnt used in more than fifteen years.

I nearly returned it to the stacks unread. But some urge pushed me to read on, so, I glanced at a few pages. And then a few more. Id expected to find dull, hagiographic mourning and vague, Talmudic discussions of female strength and valor. But insteadwomen, sabotage, rifles, disguise, dynamite. Id discovered a thriller.

Could this be true?

I was stunned.

* * *

I had been searching for strong Jewish women.

In my twenties, in the early 2000s, I lived in London, working as an art historian by day and a comedian by night. In both spheres, my Jewish identity became an issue. Underhanded, jokey remarks about my semitic appearance and mannerisms were common from academics, gallerists, audiences, fellow performers, and producers alike. Gradually, I began to understand that it was jarring to the Brits that I wore my Jewishness so openly, so casually. I grew up in a tight-knit Jewish community in Canada and then attended college in the northeast United States. In neither place was my background unusual; I didnt have separate private and public personas. But in England, to be so out with my otherness, well, this seemed brash and caused discomfort. Shocked once I figured this out, I felt paralyzed by self-consciousness. I was not sure how to handle it: Ignore? Joke back? Be cautious? Overreact? Underreact? Go undercover and assume a dual identity? Flee?

I turned to art and research to help resolve this question and penned a performance piece about Jewish female identity and the emotional legacy of trauma as it passed over generations. My role model for Jewish female bravado was Hannah Senesh, one of the few female resisters in World War II not lost to history. As a child, I attended a secular Jewish schoolits philosophies rooted in Polish Jewish movementswhere we studied Hebrew poetry and Yiddish novels. In my fifth-grade Yiddish class, we read about Hannah and how, as a twenty-two-year-old in Palestine, she joined the British paratroopers fighting the Nazis and returned to Europe to help the resistance. She didnt succeed at her mission but did succeed in inspiring courage. At her execution, she refused a blindfold, insisting on staring at the bullet straight on. Hannah faced the truth, lived and died for her convictions, and took pride in openly being just who she was.

That spring of 2007, I was at Londons British Library, looking for information on Senesh, seeking nuanced discussions about her character. It turned out there werent many books about her, so I ordered any that mentioned her name. One of them happened to be in Yiddish. I almost put it back.

Instead, I picked up Freuen in di Ghettos (Women in the Ghettos), published in New York in 1946, and flipped through the pages. In this 185-page anthology, Hannah was mentioned only in the last chapter. Before that, 170 pages were filled with stories of other womendozens of unknown young Jews who fought in the resistance against the Nazis, mainly from inside the Polish ghettos. These ghetto girls paid off Gestapo guards, hid revolvers in loaves of bread, and helped build systems of underground bunkers. They flirted with Nazis, bought them off with wine, whiskey, and pastry, and, with stealth, shot and killed them. They carried out espionage missions for Moscow, distributed fake IDs and underground flyers, and were bearers of the truth about what was happening to the Jews. They helped the sick and taught the children; they bombed German train lines and blew up Vilnas electric supply. They dressed up as non-Jews, worked as maids on the Aryan side of town, and helped Jews escape the ghettos through canals and chimneys, by digging holes in walls and crawling across rooftops. They bribed executioners, wrote underground radio bulletins, upheld group morale, negotiated with Polish landowners, tricked the Gestapo into carrying their luggage filled with weapons, initiated a group of anti-Nazi Nazis, and, of course, took care of most of the undergrounds admin.

Despite years of Jewish education, Id never read accounts like these, astonishing in their details of the quotidian and extraordinary work of womans combat. I had no idea how many Jewish women were involved in the resistance effort, nor to what degree.

These writings didnt just amaze me, they touched me personally, upending my understanding of my own history. I come from a family of Polish Jewish Holocaust survivors. My bubbe Zelda (namesake to my eldest daughter) did not fight in the resistance; her successful but tragic escape story shaped my understanding of survival. Shewho did not look Jewish, with her high cheekbones and pinched nosefled occupied Warsaw, swam across rivers, hid in a convent, flirted with a Nazi who turned a blind eye, and was transported in a truck carrying oranges eastward, finally stealing across the Russian border, where her life was saved, ironically, by being forced into Siberian work camps. My