[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.
[It
occurred to me that now is a perfect moment to republish these remarkable
stories—not least because we are besieged with efforts by forces, across the globe
and right here at home, taking malicious aim at people because of their skin color,
national heritage, gender, religious belief, or choice of romantic partner. One wonders what the women whose stories are
recounted here might have elected to do in the face of this current enemy. I think they’d shout out “Never
again!” and take up arms once more.]
“NYU FILM PROFESSOR LEARNS HER GRANDMOTHER
WAS A SPY FIGHTING THE NAZIS DURING WWII”
by Stephanie Simon
[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 NAZI-FIGHTING WOMEN OF THE JEWISH
RESISTANCE”
by Judy Batalion
[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.]
* * * *
“NEW BOOK EXPLORES THE HEROIC
WOMEN-RUN
RESISTANCE INSIDE NAZI DEATH CAMPS”
by Malcolm Brabant
[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.
