[Thursday, 8 April, was Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Yom HaShoah. Officially known in Israel, where it’s a national holiday, as Yom Hazikaron laShoah ve-laG’vurah (Hebrew: יום הזיכרון לשואה ולגבורה, literally ’Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day’), it’s traditionally observed on the 27th day of Nisan in the Hebrew calendar, usually corresponding to the Gregorian calendar date of sundown on 7 April to sundown on 8 April.
[Elsewhere, especially in Jewish communities, Yom HaShoah is recognized as a day of commemoration for the Jews who perished in the Nazi Holocaust and for the Jewish resistance who fought against Nazi oppression during World War II. Both religious and civil ceremonies are conducted in observance of Yom HaShoah, both to honor and mourn those lost in the holocaust and to celebrate those who struggled against Nazi tyranny. (Shoah, pronounced show-uh, is the Hebrew word for ‘catastrophe’ and haShoah is the word used for ‘the [Nazi] Holocaust.’)
[Coincidentally, March
is recognized as Women’s History Month in the United States. 8 March is celebrated as International Women’s Day.
[Over the last month-and-a-half, several news outlets have published articles on Jewish women who took up the fight for freedom from the Nazi occupation of Europe, risking their own lives and even eschewing escape for themselves, to help save others. NY1, the proprietary news channel of Charter Spectrum cable system in New York City, reported on a New York University film professor, Enid Zentelis, who researched her grandmother. The grandmother, Isabelle Vital-Tihanyi (1916-88), known as Bella, was a Hungarian Jew who spied for the British against the Nazi occupiers of Hungary.
[The New York Times and then PBS NewsHour ran stories on Judy Batalion’s book, The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos, the result of a research project that developed somewhat by happenstance. Looking for material on strong Jewish women, the multi-hyphenate whose writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Vogue, the Forward, Salon, the Jerusalem Post, came across a record in Yiddish (she speaks English, French, Yiddish, and Hebrew) of women who fought with the resistance in German-occupied Europe.
[The following report was aired on Spectrum News NY1 on Thursday morning, 25 March 2021. In re: the reference to Spyscape, the espionage museum, reporter Stephanie Simon makes just below, see my republication of “A Place to Come In From the Cold” by William L. Hamilton in my post “Spy vs. Spy” on Rick On Theatre on 9 August 2019.]
Walking through Spyscape, the museum of espionage in Midtown, filmmaker Enid Zentelis is intrigued by the collection of spy artifacts, but she’s on her own mission to learn the truth about her late grandmother, a Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivor – and a spy.
“I was going through her things and found myself staring at a letter that I had seen in childhood and I didn’t really understand. It had to do with some sort of covert work she had done for the British,” said Zentelis.
And so Zentelis spent four years unraveling the secret life of her grandmother Isabelle, which unfolds like a classic spy thriller in a new six-part podcast called “How My Grandmother Won World War II” [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-my-grandmother-won-wwii/id1550511220].
Zentelis determined that her grandmother was in fact a covert operative working in Hungary for the British, during World War II.
“It was her brother Zoltan that got her involved in covert work,” said Zentelis.
Zoltan was a telegraph operator at the post office – a position that gave him access to crucial information like Nazi troop movements, which he then passed on to his sister. Exploring the artifacts at Spyscape, the famous enigma code breaking machines hold special significance to Zentelis.
“When my great uncle started working at the post office, they decided to use their childhood code and maybe further develop it to encrypt the information that they intercepted at the post office so that when my grandmother carried it to the British legation in Budapest -- if she were to be discovered, it would be in code,” said Zentelis.
Isabelle was arrested later, not for espionage, but for being Jewish. Using her guile once again, she escaped. After the war she was a refugee with young children who lost her husband.
She eventually settled in Corsica. She died in 1988. Her daughter – Enid’s Mom, came to America and lived in Queens.
Zentelis, an NYU film professor, pieced together her grandmother’s story by tracking down distant relatives and sifting through declassified records in Britain’s national archives.
“And I did find proof that she absolutely contributed to helping the Red [i.e., Soviet] Army prevail in Hungary [March 1945], which was a critical, critical point to winning World War II. It’s one of the proudest moments of my life finding this,” said Zentelis.
Enid is passionate about sharing her grandmother’s story but also raising awareness that so many women like her have been lost to history.
She also hopes that sharing her grandmother’s story will change the stereotype of female spies using their sexuality, rather than like her grandmother – their bravery, guile and intelligence.
“My grandmother like her brother, and like many other women, you will never hear about was willing to risk their lives to do what was right, to make this a better world,” said Zentelis.
It’s a story that’s now being told thanks to an intriguing old letter, and a very determined granddaughter.
[Stephanie Simon, Spectrum News arts reporter, covers art and culture in all its many forms across the five boroughs of New York City, including the visual arts, jazz, the New York Philharmonic, New York history, and everything in between. Beginning as a television and radio reporter in Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut, Simon began at NY1 as a features producer in 1998.]
[The following opinion article appeared in the New York Times of 21 March 2021 in section SR (“Sunday Review”). The title above was used on the front page of the section, which was a full-page promotional preview of Judy Batalion’s essay; the inside headline read: “The Women of the Jewish Resistance.”
[Dr. Batalion is the granddaughter of Polish Holocaust survivors; her mother was born on the way back to Poland in 1945 in the aftermath of wartime displacement. Batalion was born and grew up in Montreal and earned her bachelor’s degree in the history of science at Harvard and a Ph.D. in contemporary art from the University of London’s Courtauld Institute of Art. Suffering from what she calls “career promiscuity,” she’s worked as a museum curator, researcher, editor, university lecturer, MC, script-reader, dramaturg, performer, actor, producer, translator, muffin-server, and office temp. Dr. Batalion also does stand-up comedy.]
They flung Molotov cocktails, bombed train lines and flirted with Nazis, then killed them. Why hadn’t I heard their stories?
In 1943, Niuta Teitelbaum strolled into a Gestapo apartment on Chmielna Street in central Warsaw and faced three Nazis. A 24-year-old Jewish woman who had studied history at Warsaw University, Niuta was likely now dressed in her characteristic guise as a Polish farm girl with a kerchief tied around her braided blond hair.
She blushed, smiled meekly and then pulled out a gun and shot each one. Two were killed, one wounded. Niuta, however, wasn’t satisfied. She found a physician’s coat, entered the hospital where the injured man was being treated, and killed both the Nazi and the police officer who had been guarding him.
“Little Wanda With the Braids,” as she was nicknamed on every Gestapo most-wanted list, was one of many young Jewish women who, with supreme cunning and daring, fought the Nazis in Poland. And yet, as I discovered over several years of research on these resisters, their stories have largely been overlooked in the broader history of Jewish resistance in World War II.
In 2007, when I was living in London and grappling with my Jewish identity, I decided to write about strong Jewish women. Hannah Senesh [anglicized from Szenes; 1921-44] jumped immediately to mind. As I’d learned in fifth grade, Hannah was a young World War II resistance paratrooper. She left her native Hungary for Palestine in 1939, but later returned to Europe to fight for the Allied cause; she was caught and was said to have looked her killers directly in their eyes as they shot her.
That tale of audacity was exhilarating to me. I was the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors who had escaped from Poland; in my family, flight meant life. I had grown up to be a runner in relationships, careers and countries. But Hannah had returned to fight. I wanted to grasp what had motivated her boldness.
I went to the British Library, looked her up in the catalog and ordered the few books listed under her name. One, I noticed, was unusual, bound in worn blue fabric with gold lettering and yellowing edges — “Freuen in di Ghettos” [Pioneer Women’s Organization, 1946], Yiddish for “Women in the Ghettos.” I opened it and found 180 sheets of tiny script, all in Yiddish, a language I was fluent in. To my surprise, only a few pages mentioned Hannah Senesh; the rest relayed tales of dozens of other young Jewish women who defied the Nazis, many of whom had the chance to leave Nazi-occupied Poland but didn’t; some even voluntarily returned.
All this was a revelation to me. Where I had expected mourning and gloom, I found guns, grenades and espionage. This was a Yiddish thriller, telling the stories of Polish-Jewish “ghetto girls” who paid off Gestapo guards, hid revolvers in teddy bears, flirted with Nazis and then killed them. They distributed underground bulletins, flung Molotov cocktails, bombed train lines, organized soup kitchens, and bore the truth about what was happening to the Jews.
I was stunned. I was raised in a community of Holocaust survivors and had earned a doctorate in women’s history. Why had I never heard these stories?
“Freuen” was compiled for Yiddish-speaking American Jews in 1946 in an attempt to share this stunning history as widely as possible. But in the years that followed, these resistance narratives, like many historical contributions made by women, were sidelined or ignored for a variety of political and personal reasons.
Many women who told their stories in their own communities after the war were met with disbelief; others were accused by relatives of abandoning their families to fight; still others were charged with sleeping their way to safety. Sometimes, family members feared that opening old wounds would tear them apart. And many fighters suffered from survivors’ guilt — they’d “had it easy,” they felt, compared with others — and so in later years they remained mostly silent about their experiences.
Several other factors in postwar decades may have contributed to the relative obscurity of this history. In the 1950s, some say, many Jews had trauma fatigue; in the 1960s, the emerging horrors of Auschwitz and other camps became the predominant subject; in the “hippyish” 1970s, stories of violent rebellion were out of fashion; and in the 1980s, a flood of Holocaust books in the United States overshadowed many earlier tales.
My quest to learn more about these women turned into a dozen years of research across Poland, Israel and North America; in archives and living rooms, memorial monuments and the streets of former ghettos. I learned of the scope of Jewish rebellion: More than 90 European ghettos had armed Jewish resistance units. Approximately 30,000 European Jews joined the partisans. Rescue networks supported about 12,000 Jews in hiding in Warsaw alone. All this alongside daily acts of resilience — smuggling food, writing diaries, telling jokes to relieve fear, hugging a barrack mate to keep her warm. Women, aged 16 to 25, were at the helm of many of these efforts. I learned their names: Tosia Altman, Gusta Davidson, Frumka Plotnicka. Hundreds of others[.]
At the center of “Freuen” was a striking testimonial by a woman identified only as Renia K.; it was composed at the end of the war, when she was just 20 years old. Her writing was descriptive, even witty. “For them,” she wrote of the Nazi officers, “killing a person was easier than smoking a cigarette.” I found her file at the Israel State Archives and used the book she published in 1945 and additional testimonies to fill out her story.
Her full name was Renia Kukielka, and she was brought up in Poland in the 1930s in a world of sophisticated Yiddish theater and literature, and some 180 Jewish newspapers. After Hitler invaded Renia’s town, Jedrzejow, and locked her family in a ghetto, Renia escaped and fled through fields. She leapt off a moving train when she was recognized, bargained with the police and pretended to be Catholic. She got a job as a housemaid, nervously genuflecting at weekly church services. “I hadn’t even known that I was such a good actor,” Renia reflected in her memoir, “able to impersonate and imitate.”
Helped by a paid Polish smuggler, she joined her older sister in the town of Bedzin. Before the war, Bedzin had been a largely middle-class Jewish community and a hub for Jewish political parties, which had proliferated in response to the question of modern Jewish identity. A vast network of Jewish youth groups was affiliated with these parties. These groups had trained young Jewish men — and women — to feel pride, live collectively, be physically active and question, critique and plan. They trained them in the skills necessary for “staying.”
After Hitler’s conquest of Poland, the youth groups formed militias. When Renia arrived, Bedzin hosted a burgeoning cell of rebellion organized by secular, socialist-leaning Jewish teenagers and young adults. Those who were forced to labor in Nazi uniform factories slipped notes into the boots urging soldiers at the front to drop their weapons. They constructed workshops where they experimented with homemade explosives and designed elaborate underground bunkers. “Haganah!” was their rallying cry: Defense!
Women who were selected for undercover missions were required to look “good,” or passably “Aryan” or Catholic, with light hair, blue or green eyes, good posture and an assured gait. Renia was one of those chosen. Fueled by rage and a deep sense of justice, 18-year-old Renia became an underground operative, “a courier girl.”
I learned that “courier girls” connected the locked ghettos where Jews were imprisoned. Being caught on the Aryan side meant certain death; despite that, these young women dyed their hair blond, took off their Jewish-identifying armbands, put on fake smiles and secretly slipped in and out of ghettos, bringing Jews information and hope, bulletins and false identification papers, and linking youth resistance groups across the country. They smuggled pistols, bullets and grenades, hiding them in marmalade jars, sacks of potatoes and designer handbags.
As women, they were well positioned to do this work: Their brothers were circumcised and risked being found out in a “pants drop” test. Before the war, Jewish girls were more likely than Jewish boys to have studied at Polish public schools (many boys attended Jewish schools and yeshivas). They were, over all, more assimilated than Jewish boys and spoke Polish without the Yiddish accent, making them excellent spies.
They also took enormous risks. Bela Hazan got a job working as a translator and receptionist for the Gestapo; she stole their documents and delivered them to Jewish forgers. Vladka Meed smuggled dynamite into the Warsaw ghetto by passing bits of gunpowder through a hole in the wall of a basement that lined the ghetto border. She later supported Jews in hiding, secretly bringing them money, medical help and trusted photographers to take their pictures for fake IDs.
Hela Schupper, a beauty who’d studied commerce, dressed up as an affluent Polish woman attending an afternoon of theater, wearing clothes she’d borrowed from a non-Jewish friend’s mother. In 1942 she met a “Mr. X” from the Polish underground on a Warsaw street corner, followed him onto a train and into a safe house, stuffed her fashionable jute handbag, and brought five guns and clips of cartridges to Krakow’s “Fighting Pioneers,” who then bombed a Christmas week gathering at an upscale cafe frequented by Nazi officers, killing at least seven Germans and wounding more.
These women were so unlike me — they were the fight to my flight — and I was becoming increasingly obsessed with them.
Renia ran missions between Bedzin and Warsaw. She moved grenades, false passports and cash strapped to her body and hidden in her undergarments and shoes. She transported Jews from ghettos to hiding spots. She wore a red flower in her hair to identify her to underground contacts, met up with a black-market arms dealer in a cemetery, and slept in a cellar, wandering the city by day to gather information. She smiled coyly during searches on the train, and befriended one border guard to whom she “confessed” about smuggling food to distract him from the real contraband that was fastened to her torso with belts. “You had to be strong in your comportment, firm,” she wrote in her memoir. “You had to have an iron will.”
In Vilna, Ruzka Korczak found a Finnish pamphlet in a library on how to make bombs — it became the underground’s recipe book. Her comrade Vitka Kempner put a rudimentary explosive under her coat, slipped out of the ghetto, and blew up a German supply train in 1942. The Vilna resistance fled the ghetto to fight in the forests, where both women commanded units. Their comrade Zelda Treger completed 17 trips transporting hundreds of Jews out of ghettos and slave labor camps to the woods. In a different forest, a 19-year-old photographer named Faye Schulman joined the partisans, participated in combat missions and performed surgery — she was once forced to amputate a soldier’s wounded finger with her teeth. “When it was time to hug a boyfriend, I was hugging a rifle,” Faye said of her wartime adolescence in a documentary film.
Renia, through cunning and luck, managed to fend off prying Nazis and Poles who attempted to turn her in for a reward — until one border guard noticed her fabricated passport stamp. Imprisoned in Gestapo lockups that prided themselves on their medieval torture strategies, Renia was brutally beaten alongside Polish political prisoners. She masterminded an escape, helped by other courier girls who plied the guards with cigarettes and whiskey. Renia was able to slip away, change her clothes and run. Using an underground railroad set up by Jews, she crossed the Tatra Mountains by foot, then reached Hungary hidden in the locomotive of a freight train. The engineer expelled an extra puff of smoke to hide her departure from the engine.
Renia finally arrived in Palestine, where she was invited to lecture about her experience, and she published her memoir in Hebrew in 1945 — one of the first full-length accounts of the Holocaust. But in her life after the war, she remained mostly silent about it. For many female survivors, silence was a means of coping. They felt it was their duty to create a new generation of Jews. Women kept their pasts secret in a desperate desire to create a normal life for their children, and, for themselves. Renia’s family home after the war was not filled with stories of the resistance, but with music, art and tango nights; she was known for her fashionable tastes, and for her sharp sense of humor. Like so many refugees, the resisters wanted to start afresh, to blend into their new worlds.
Some 70 years after the war, I went to speak with Vitka Kempner’s son, Michael Kovner, on the outdoor terrace of a Jerusalem cafe. “She was someone who went toward danger,” he told me. “She didn’t care about the rules. She had true chutzpah.”
Researching these women, I’ve learned that my family’s narrative is not the sole option for confronting large and small dangers in the world. Running is sometimes necessary, but at other times I can stop and fight, or, at least, pause and discuss. Renia and her comrades were brave and powerful and paved the way for the generations that followed — not just the Ruth Bader Ginsburgs, but also women like me and my daughters. My children should know that their legacy includes not just fleeing, but also staying, and even running toward danger.
When I left the cafe, I found myself on a quiet side road. I looked up and saw the street sign with a name I would have never recognized a few years before: Haviva Reik Street. With Hannah Senesh, Haviva had joined the British Army as a paratrooper, helping thousands of Slovak Jews and rescuing Allied servicemen. Strong female legacies were all around us; if only we noticed, if only we knew their stories.
[Dr. Batalion is the author of The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos (William Morrow, 2020), from which this essay is adapted. The book is also available as an e-book, as an audiobook, in a large-print edition, and in a young readers’ edition.
[A New York Times review of The Light of Days, “The ‘Ghetto Girls’ Who Fought the Nazis With Weapons and Wiles” by Sonia Purnell, was posted on the Times’ website at https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/06/books/review/light-of-days-judy-batalion.html on 6 April.
[Deadline,
the online entertainment-industry news site, announced that Steven Spielberg’s
Amblin Entertainment is developing a film adaptation of The Light of Days,
and Batalion along with playwright and screenwriter Michael Mitnick are writing
the screenplay.]
[The interview below was broadcast on PBS NewsHour on Holocaust Remembrance Day, 8 April 2021. It covers the same new book the New York Times essay above discusses.]
Judy Batalion’s new book, “The Light of Days,” details acts of heroism by Jewish women in the ghettos of eastern Europe - and even within the death camps. She documents how female couriers hand-carried crucial messages, weapons, and ammunition as part of the resistance in besieged Jewish ghettos. Special correspondent Malcolm Brabant presents the report for Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Judy Woodruff: Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, now 76 years since the end of the Second World War in Europe.
A new book out this week, “The Light of Days” by Judy Batalion, details acts of heroism by Jewish women in the ghettos of Eastern Europe, and even within the death camps, who risked their lives to challenge the Nazis.
She concentrates on female couriers who hand-carried crucial messages, weapons, and ammunition as part of the resistance in besieged Jewish ghettos.
Here’s special correspondent Malcolm Brabant.
Malcolm Brabant: Seventy-six years since the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp was liberated and its railhead of industrial slaughter neutralized, ghosts of the Holocaust are coming to life in new uplifting stories.
One of the wartime heroines portrayed in this book is Bela Hazan, seen here with her son Yoel on the right. Yoel, a brain scientist in Jerusalem, wants the world to know what his mother did in the war to compensate for the torrid reception she received in Israel after surviving Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Yoel Yaari: They used to say, you are sheep who went to the slaughter. And she was treated as such.
Why didn’t you resist? I mean, this was a question. What did you do you were not killed? Did you collaborate with the Nazis? Were you bartering sex for food? Were you a prostitute? I mean, these were questions that were put to her.
Malcolm Brabant: How angry does that make you that your mother’s first period in Israel was so awful?
Yoel Yaari: I’m extremely angry. And this is, of course, one of the reasons why I’m trying to tell her story.
Malcolm Brabant: This picture testifies to Bela Hazan’s courage. She’s between two other Jewish underground couriers.
What makes the photograph extraordinary is that it was taken by a Nazi at a Gestapo Christmas party. Bela worked as an interpreter for the Gestapo. The job gave her a great cover story, which enabled her to travel to cities like Vilnius in Lithuania, where the Jewish resistance operated.
Aged just 19 and masquerading as a Polish Catholic, she became a brilliant spy. Her luck ran out at this railway station in Poland. Despite being arrested, tortured and sent to Auschwitz, she never confessed her true identity.
Yoel Yaari: She interacted with the Gestapo people. What she did was to steal official papers, to put stamps, official stamps on these papers, and she delivered these materials together with information that she gathered when she was in that place. She delivered it all to the headquarters of the underground.
Judy Batalion: They were walking around with cash in their garter belts and dynamite in their underwear.
Malcolm Brabant: The bravery of women in Hitler’s ghettos was buried in an old Yiddish book that author Judy Batalion stumbled upon in the British Library in London.
She has spent 14 years researching women whose exploits have been neglected by history and who she believes should be revered.
Judy Batalion: When I first began this project, I too had a kind of subconscious understanding what they call of the myth of passivity and which is why, when I first found this material by accident, I was blown away.
And now I cannot look at the story of the Holocaust without seeing it as one of a constant battle of resistance and resilience.
Malcolm Brabant: Batalion’s book concentrates on couriers like Chasia Bielicka, eulogized by her granddaughter Hadas in Israel.
Hadas Yahav: You could see it in the Holocaust, of course, the way she wanted to save people and help people and help children. And she didn’t just want to survive. That wasn’t her mission. She wanted to do much more than that.
Malcolm Brabant: Chasia Bielicka’s ability to evade Nazi patrols and checkpoints made her a key player in the Jewish insurgency in Bialystok, these days an ultra-conservative town in Northeast Poland renowned for its hostility to gays.
Eighty years ago under the Nazis, it had a ghetto where Jews were corralled before being dispatched to death camps.
Hadas Yahav: The courier missions was to bring ammunition to the partisans. The partisans were fighting in the forest. They needed ammunition.
The women that she was with tried to find always places where they could steal ammunition, bring it to the forest or to the ghetto sometimes.
Judy Batalion: These women showed bravery and courage and cleverness and bravado, against all odds.
Malcolm Brabant: As long as they appeared sufficiently Aryan, women could move more freely around occupied Poland than men, who were supposed to be working during daylight hours. The couriers exploited a naive German belief that women were incapable of sabotage and subterfuge.
Judy Batalion: The biggest militaries in the world couldn’t defeat the German army, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was the fight for justice and liberty.
Malcolm Brabant: Zivia Lubetkin left Poland when Germany invaded. She could have stayed outside the country, but came back
Judy Batalion: Zivia Lubetkin was ultimately a leader in the Warsaw ghetto. She helps get young Jews out of slave labor. She helps them find food. And she fought in two ghetto uprisings. She fought in the Warsaw uprising alongside the Polish resistance.
Malcolm Brabant: The 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising lasted almost a month, as heavily outnumbered Jewish fighters kept crack German forces at bay. Ultimately, they were overwhelmed, and some partisans died by suicide, rather than surrendering.
Today, only a small portion of the ghetto wall remains, but Zivia Lubetkin’s deeds live on.
Judy Batalion: She escaped through sewers, sewage water up to her neck. And even after the ghetto was razed and she was in hiding, she helped administer rescue organizations that helped thousands of Jews in hiding in Warsaw.
Malcolm Brabant: Although most of the characters in Batalion’s book are couriers, she couldn’t resist telling the story of Anna Heilman, a member of the Auschwitz resistance.
How on earth do you resist in Auschwitz?
Judy Batalion: This is such an incredible story, again, one of those: How did I not know about this?
Malcolm Brabant: Only one crematorium remains at Auschwitz-Birkenau. All but one were destroyed by the Nazis as they fled from the advancing Soviet Red Army.
The other one was blown up by Anna Heilman’s co-conspirators in October 1944. She helped to steal gunpowder from a munitions factory two miles from Birkenau and smuggle it back in the hems of her clothes.
Judy Batalion: It was this very elaborate system, where the people that worked in the room where they packed the powder would take little bits and put it in a waste — the wastebasket on the side. Another round of women would collect that waste, go to the bathroom, take out the gunpowder and hide it in fabric.
Malcolm Brabant: And here is Anna Heilman, in her own words, in Canada in 1996.
Anna Heilman: They used this gunpowder and manufactured little hand grenades made out of metal around boxes of shoe polish with a wick and filled with gunpowder. And when you lit it, it exploded.
Malcolm Brabant: The crematorium was destroyed during a brief rebellion by so-called Sonderkommandos [‘special units’], Jews forced by the Nazis to dispose of bodies from the gas chambers.
Anna Heilman: All the Sonderkommando people were killed. But the crematorium was destroyed as well.
Malcolm Brabant: In retribution, Anna Heilman’s sister was executed.
Anna Heilman: I heard this collective groan, and I knew what happened. I didn’t witness it with my eyes, but I was there.
Malcolm Brabant: In Jerusalem, Bela Hazan’s son Yoel Yaari, is grateful that light is now being shone on this aspect of the Holocaust.
Yoel Yaari: I think it is extremely important, because the story of the couriers is almost unknown worldwide and also in Israel.
Malcolm Brabant: The new book may help elevate these women to their rightful place in history, especially as the author is now working on a screenplay for Steven Spielberg, Oscar-winning director of that legendary Holocaust movie “Schindler’s List.”
For the “PBS NewsHour,” I’m Malcolm Brabant.
[Malcolm Brabant is a special correspondent for the PBS NewsHour.]
* *
* *
[I have a personal motivation for republishing the reports above: my mother.
[Mom died at 92 in 2015—just about six years ago now. She’s been on my mind prominently these days. Most significantly, I’ve been working on a very long project based on the letters she and my future father exchanged for almost a year in 1945, from just after they first met on 1 January to my father’s return from the army and the end of World War II and his release from the military in December.
[In addition, 7 April would have been Mother’s 98th birthday and next month, on the 8th, is Mother’s Day, and I always used to try to spend one of those dates—or some time in between—with her either here in New York City or at her home in Washington, D.C.
[These stories, though, have made the absence of my mother just now particularly notable. In particular, the account of Enid Zentelis’s grandmother, the Hungarian spy, because Mother’s family was a teensy bit Hungarian. Her father’s family had come from Austria-Hungary in the mid- or early 19th century, and Mom used to point to the tip of her little finger and say she was “that much Hungarian”!
[Further, Judy Batalion’s history is compiled in a book. Mom (whose name was also Judy, coincidentally) loved reading and would have delighted in stories of Jewish and female heroism, and I thought, what a wonderful birthday or Mother’s Day gift The Light of Days would’ve made for her.
