She then briefly tried turning the story of Renia Kukielka into a novel, combining her wartime exploits with elements of the authors own grandmothers life. Her own extensive research included revisiting numerous wartime sites across Poland, reading and watching whatever testimonies existed, and interviewing the families of the women who survived the war. The social and intellectual zeitgeist played a role in sidelining tales of the Jewish resistance in the narrative of the Holocaust. Our armed struggle will be an inspiration to future generations, one young fighter, a pre-war poet, called out to Zivia before attacking the Nazi soldiers storming the Warsaw ghetto. Furthermore, much of this resistance was enabled, organised and led by women. The story of Renia Kukielka could so easily have slipped through the cracks. In his 2017 book Saving Ones Own, Mordechai Paldiel, the former director of the Righteous Among the Nations department at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Remembrance center in Israel, claims that he was troubled by the fact that Jewish rescuers never received the same recognition as their Gentile counterparts. Judy Batalionthe granddaughter of Polish Holocaust survivorstakes us back to 1939 and introduces us to Renia Kukielka, a weapons smuggler and messenger who risked death traveling across occupied Poland on foot and by train. Or they told them right after the war, like Renia, and that was it. During this difficult COVID year, Batalion drew personal inspiration from her subjects life stories. Without sentimentalising their achievements and the price paid for the risks they took to save their families, friends and community, Batalions collective biography provides a significant contribution to Holocaust history. Their stories serve as a timeless call to action to women to empower themselves to resist all forms of oppression. Its just a matter of time.. I was working with personal stories: You can have a whole memoir that takes place in one week and the rest of the war takes up one page, so I had to figure out how these stories worked together.. Her research missions took her to Poland for two weeks and Israel for 10 days. Donald Trumps election as president, with the misogyny and anti-Semitism that she saw churned up in its wake, pushed Batalion to go all in and craft the ghetto girls stories into a work of narrative nonfiction. Batalion is no stranger to the Holocaust. Or Zivia Lubetkin, who was in her There is anotheryoung woman in the same room,Renia Kukielka. Women felt judged according to a lingering belief that while the pure souls perished, the conniving ones survived. Much Holocaust scholarship was based on objective Nazi records, which certainly didnt contain discussions of rebellious young girls. Im writing here in the U.S., where a huge percentage of the millennial population doesnt even know what Auschwitz is, she says, referring to the 2018 survey that found two-thirds of millennials had never heard of the death camp. The book and a companion edition targeting 10- to 14-year-olds are both due out on April 6 in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day. Along with other scholars I interviewed, he suggests that a myth of Jewish passivity was perpetrated by Israels early politicians. These women were literally jumping off trains, running between towns, getting dressed up, dyeing their hair. These were women who saw and acknowledged the truth, had the courage to act on their convictions and fought with their lives for what was fair and right, she said. Women are routinely dropped from stories in which they played key roles, their experiences blotted out of history, Batalion writes. Click to reveal Id discovered a thriller, she wrote. Performance & security by Cloudflare. That autumn, the Nazi occupying forces in the ancient town of Lubliniec, in southern Poland, had forced the Jewish community to assemble in the square. As a 15-year-old, Renia saw her parents deported from the Bdzin ghetto to Auschwitz. For three tumultuous years under the Nazi occupation of Poland, she and her parents and siblings fled their home in the small town of Jedrzejow, endured hunger, and witnessed atrocities and the brutal murders of other Jews. Many young women and men hid in self-made bunkers and in the forest to elude capture. Cabinet members. The Rev. I thought if they could get through the horrific challenges they faced, I can definitely get through this.. Later, a barrage of Holocaust literature drowned out earlier titles. To her amazement, Batalion, who knows Yiddish, discovered sabotage, rifles, disguise, dynamite. Together, these women will go on to become the face of female Jewish resistance to the Hitler regime in occupied Poland. When she talks to friends and colleagues,her impression is that "we are so excited to learn about these legacies, that we come from this. Add your comment! Immediately post-war many of these stories were shared and even published. Its very important to tell the true story, Batalion recounts. All the Frequent Troubles of our Days: The True Story of the Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler, by Rebecca Donner; Little, Brown & Co.; 2021; $32. These tales lurking under the surface are finally springing to the fore, jumping from the footnotes to the main text, making herstory. Julie Wheelwright is the author of Sisters in Arms: Female Warriors from Antiquity to the New Millennium (Osprey, 2020). Another awoke in a ditch of frozen cadavers, naked, staring into the eyes of her dead mother. Poignantly, Batalion adds,Reinhartz was reading the USnovel Gone with the Windwhile hiding to escape deportation. This brought home on such a personal level that I was writing about real people, she said. She looks away, and asilence ensues. Prices start at $65 per year. Constantly risking their lives, they used their "non-Jewish" appearance to transport people, money, information, munition and firearms in and out of the ghettos. These were educated young women who could think on their feet and pass as their Aryan compatriots. Batalion, who is the granddaughter of a Polish-Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, lives in New Yorkbut discovered the untold stories of these women at theBritish Library in London. An abiding misconception of the second world war is that the Jews of Europe went passively to their deaths. All eyes turn to Plotnicka. Batalion is the author of The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitlers Ghettos and the memoir White Walls. For many years, memoirs and personal accounts were considered unreliable source material. Fuelled by a well-founded sense of injustice and anger, determined young Polish Jewish women taped handguns to their bodies, hid grenades inside menstrual pads and baked pistols into loaves of bread. So, things were silenced for many reasons, and a lot of it had to do with these women feeling very determined to create families, to create a new generation of Jews and they didnt want to hurt them. In vivid and often heart-wrenching prose, Kukielka provided one of the first full-length accounts of the Holocaust, Batalion wrote. Judy Batalion: I was slow with this book because it was so challenging emotionally, intellectually and practically. (Beowulf Sheehan). And thats how we find ourselves in the rare position of having to praise an agent for their efforts on our behalf. But the biggest initial challenge was to work out the chronology of events and how lots of separate stories might mesh together. The longest piece in Women in the Ghettos was a personal tale by Renia Kukielka, an 18-year-old I tried to piece together stories, and a lot of times the details did conflict what happened in one account isnt exactly the same as in another account. She snapped photos of the documents to share with a Polish translator in New York. Choose from the CJN's informative e-newsletters. They said to me, just in passing, Renia wasnt someone who, when she crossed the street, would look left and right, left and right. And that stayed with me, because I am someone who looks left and right, left and right, left and right. That crucial but often overlooked story of defiance and resistance is told by Judy Batalion in her new book, The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitlers Ghettos (William Morrow). Within two months of narrowly escaping capture, working for a Polish family and risking her life to flee again, Renia, not yet 18, joined her sister Sarah in Bedzin, a town that had attracted many young Jewish freedom fighters. In fact, I have never met one that says Hey, Im not really that good. Most salespeople just think that their natural ability is what it takes to sell. 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. They forget that this is a profession, and like any profession, it has rules, strategy, . For Batalion, its both the big numbers and the smallness of the places that overwhelm. Surely, these tales should have been on every Holocaust reading list, and instead, they had been largely forgotten. Im writing history out of memoir, so I had to put together what happened, and when. Against terrifying, oppressive odds, Renia lived to tell her story in a memoir she began writing at 19. Judy Batalion The Jewish women who played a vital role in thePolish resistance against the Nazis. But Senesh was not the only female to fight. In 1943 when Kukielka and her comrades received news of the Warsaw ghettos armed uprising, they knew that deportation was imminent and their own resistance escalated. Jewish Resistance in Poland: Women Trample Nazi Soldiers, ran a New York headline in late 1942. It was so not what I expected, and so foreign to the Holocaust narrative I had grown up with. But that wasnt the only unusual thing: Batalion actually speaks Yiddish too, so was able to read the 1946 book, called Freuen in di Ghettos (Women in the Ghettos). When caught, they would often be killed on the spot. American Mildred Fish of Milwaukee goes to Germany to earn her Ph.D. in literature and marries Arvid Harnack, who becomes a special agent of the U.S. Embassy tasked with obtaining intelligence from key sources in Berlin for high-level U.S. One is to be reminded of the sheer scale of the Nazi killing machine, with the Germans establishing over 400 ghettos across Poland alone. One such example of cultural resistance is provided by Batalion through the biography ofHenia Reinhartz, a young woman in the ghetto of Lodz. What she found instead were"women, sabotage, firearms, camouflage, dynamite.". Ultimately however, The Light of Days is an intense and atmospheric tribute to the almost forgotten determination and courage of remarkable women such as Renia Kukielka and Zivia Lubetkin, whose Jewish youth groups fought the Nazis. They even used an 11-year-old American boy, Donald Heath, to be a carrier of secrets that could be smuggled out of the country alerting the rest of the world of the atrocities being committed by the Nazis. Then theres Renia Kukielka, who was just 14 at the start of the war but went on to become a crucial courier ferrying messages between ghettos. You know, Ive thought about this a lot, she says. Vladka (Peltel) Meed smuggled dynamite into the ghetto. Two female rabbis in Berlin, one queer, one a convert to Judaism, may represent the diversity in Jewish life in Germany today. The Light of Days , with its more than 450 pages of narrative, hundreds of detailed footnotes, and The girls with Aryan features who could pass as non-Jews flirted with Nazis plying them with wine, whiskey and pastry before shooting them dead. She made her way to the meeting being She stumbled across them only by chance on the dustier shelves of Londons British Library. These women, their beliefs, their friendships and their extraordinary sacrifice emerge from the shadows. Judy Batalionthe granddaughter of Polish Holocaust survivorstakes us back to 1939 and introduces us to Renia Kukielka, a weapons smuggler and messenger who risked death traveling across occupied Poland on foot and by train. Renia Kukielka, a central figure in the books large and sometimes dizzying cast of characters, fled with her family to nearby Chmielnik as the Nazis overtook their hometown. Many others operated as couriers, bringing news of Nazi atrocities to Polands 400-plus ghettos or smuggling in munitions, cash and even fighting spirit. I so wanted to talk to their children and find out who these women became, she said. Most were still young: rather than becoming professional survivors they wanted to lead normal lives. It takes something special to be even more astounding than a Matt Gaetz alibi, but Judy Batalions new book, The Light of Days, achieves that and much, much more. As I learned more about these Jewish female ghetto fighters, forest partisans, and courier girlswho dyed their hair blonde, took off their star-of-David armbands, and secretly slipped in and out of ghettos, smuggling information, false Aryan papers, and pistols, bullets, and grenades in marmalade jars, sacks of potatoes, and designer handbagsI marveled equally at these stories and their obscurity. Haaretz.com, the online English edition of Haaretz Newspaper in Israel, gives you breaking news, analyses and opinions about Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World. She survived a tortuous journey through hidden bunkers in Slovakia, then on to Hungary, Turkey and the ultimate destination Palestine. These were stories with so much action, and I think that also just changed the tone of the Holocaust narrative for me. Among them was Malka Zdrojewicz (right), who survived Majdanek extermination camp. Over the decades, however, stories like Renias dissipated among trauma fatigue, and then a fascination in Auschwitz and the death camps. Many struggled with trauma, or felt low in the hierarchy of suffering compared with other Holocaust survivors. A German photograph of sleeping quarters inside a bunker prepared by the Jewish resistance for the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 1943, Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park. Instead, they stayed and fought them. Miller and Ryan also own the Portland Pickles baseball team. Slowly they also built up support among the wider Jewish community, and connected with both the Polish communist party and the official Polish underground. These young people were outnumbered but many managed to escape. 2023 TIME USA, LLC. When later histories were written, all too often the women tended to be depicted as passive, swept up in events rather than directing them. Courtesy of Yad Vashem Photo Archive, Jerusalem. Virago 558pp 20. Batalion centers her book on one such group of exceptional women, some as young as 15, all part of the armed underground Jewish resistance that operated in more than 90 Eastern European ghettos, from Vilna to Krakow. Reading was a way to escape into "another world,"a "normal life in a normal world, not one like ours that is all about fear and hunger." I made fascinating connections in Poland, mainly with young people in their 20s and 30s. There is a clear sense of what she is thinking: That this isn't about her. The Light of Days conjures up many indelible images: women hiding razor blades in their hair; secret libraries and makeshift weapons labs being established in ghettos; female couriers donning layers of skirts to hide contraband in the folds; and young women determined not to go like sleep to the slaughter, to quote Jewish partisan leader Abba Kovners resistance mantra. Judy Batalionthe granddaughter of Polish Holocaust survivorstakes us back to 1939 and introduces us to Renia Kukielka, a weapons smuggler and messenger who risked death traveling across occupied Poland on foot and by train. A meeting of Zionist youth at the agricultural training farm in Bdzin, Poland, during the war. Renia Kukielka, an eighteen-year-old Jewish woman and an emerging warrior of the underground resistance movement, came up from the laundry room. Some of them were accused of leaving their families or sleeping their way to safety. It was then that Kukielka became a Freedom courier, carrying cash to buy food, medicine, weapons, transporting bullets in innocuous jars of jam, or bribing guards and the police. But 2007 wasnt the right time for her to emotionally commit to such a mentally exhausting project. Renia Kukieka in Budapest, 1944. Its the result of her 12-year odyssey digging through archives and interviewing descendants of the women. For them, Renia Kukielka wrote in her memoir, killing a person was easier than smoking a cigarette.. As men, women, the elderly and children were ordered to strip, a dozen women suddenly attacked their persecutors, scratching, biting and hurling stones. They were able to obtain documents that will permit them to smuggle some of them out of the occupied territories. Many of these women knew each other, sharing news and contacts as well as their aims to rescue fellow Jews, to fight and if necessary die with dignity, and to leave a record of resistance. Over a decade, I learned many reasons why the tale of Jewish female resistors fell to the footnotes. She, along with scores of other brave young women who passed as Aryans, were the vital connecting links between the ghettos, bringing news, smuggling false identification papers, and at times weapons, concealed on their bodies or in sacks of food and even jars of marmalade. While dozens of women carried out rebellious acts, which consisted of everything from espionage missions for Moscow to flirting with Nazis, or bribing them with whisky, wine and pastries, a handful form the books narrative arc. The second thing that strikes you is the joie de vivre exhibited by so many of these young Jews, despite or perhaps because of the horrors of everyday ghetto life. She almost set it aside, but the historian in her forced her to pick it up and examine it. Silence was a coping mechanism for many of these women. Renia Kukieka in Budapest, 1944. But soon into my sleuthing, I happened to come across a 1946 anthology about dozens of young Jewish women who took similar risks. If the Polish Jewish resistance achieved relatively modest victories, Batalion argues that it was much larger and more organised than historians have previously recognised. Batalion was overjoyed to meet Renias adult children, who described their mothers zest for family, fashion and world travel. Use census records and voter lists to see where families with the Kukielka surname lived. Low around 35F. The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler's Ghettos. Batalion didnt set out to write this book, a dozen years in the making and already optioned for film rights by Steven Spielberg. This is a visible source of pleasure to Batalion, but she remains humble in her conversation with DW. It was a turning point in her young life, as Renia drew on a deep well of courage and determination, working tirelessly to help other Jews and carry out defiant acts against the Nazis. And some of them are very personal. You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked. Was the closure of the grammar schools really such a tragedy? Courtesy of Yad Vashem Photo Archive, Jerusalem. The authors research uncovered more incredible resistance stories than she ever could have imagined, but I wonder if she found any common traits among these young women to help explain their apparent fearlessness. The womens names and the place names had so many confusing iterations Yiddish, Polish, Hebrew, English.. Selected to serve as a courier because of her plausibly Aryan looks, Renia hid cash, maps of Treblinka and fake passes inside her shoes, sewed intelligence into her skirts and smuggled grenades across wartime borders. The Light of Days highlights the incredible tenacity of Renia Kukielka, one of the youngest ghetto girls. Batalion has her own theories. It is also impossible not to read The Light of Days and see it as the current Polish governments worst nightmare in light of its controversial, some would say revisionist, stance regarding the role its citizens played in World War II: a book that presents the Holocaust in all its complexities, depicting some non-Jewish Poles as heroes but many others as aiding and abetting the Nazis or committing their own atrocities. Polish Jewish resistance women, captured after the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943. On Yom Hashoah, we light memorial candles and mourn the dead. The people who had survived, or had survived long enough to write about their experiences, were characters that I could focus on, because they had left more detailed, robust stories, she explains. Her story provides a through point in The Light of Days. Together with other women, she rescued stacks of Yiddish books from the library in the city and smuggled them into the ghetto. So often, when their vulnerable outpourings were not received with empathy, women turned inward and repressed their experiences. Low around 35F. Rainfall near a half an inch.. Cloudy with periods of rain. My only reactions have been from people who helped me do research in Poland translators, research assistants, drivers, fixers and I honestly felt that they were as interested in this story as I was, she says. You have permission to edit this article. At the heart of the project is an obscure Yiddish book published in 1946 titled Freuen in di Ghettos (Women in the Ghettos) chronicling these young womens tales of resistance and derring-do. Batalion comes from a family of Polish-born Holocaust survivors and grew up in a tight-knit Jewish community in Montreal, but says much of her early life was an attempt to run away from that. Hence, she found herself in London, performing stand-up comedy and working in the art world, but with questions gnawing away about her Jewish heritage. Renia Kukielka was, typically, neither an idealist nor a revolutionary but a savvy, middle-class girl who happened to find herself in a sudden and unrelenting nightmare. I think their bold and savvy behavior was shaped by their training, by their youth movements and how they were educated but I also think many of these women had a very strong sense of instinct, and followed it. The Cleveland Guardians High-A affiliates new ownership group, COLLiDE NEO, will be led by owners Alan Miller and former NFL punter Jon Ryan. More recently, in the U.S., where so many millennials dont know what Auschwitz is, and the memory of the genocide is fast fading, some people are hesitant to talk about armed Jewish resistance. COLLiDE NEO plans to m, Almost all salespeople think that they are great. This wasnt a story of just two or three women this was a movement of organized resistance across the country that involved hundreds, if not thousands, and it was important that that came across, she explains. Yet it also provokes anger that it has taken some 75 years for these stories to themselves see the light of day and for these acts of heroism finally to be acknowledged. When the Nazis occupied their native Poland, Jewish women, some barely into their teens, joined the resistance and risked their young lives to sabotage the regime. The Nazis decapitated a pregnant mother of seven for illegally slaughtering a pig, she writes. If you purchase a product or register for an account through one of the links on our site, we may receive compensation. They wanted their children to be healthy and happy and normal., As her own toddler starts screaming in the background, demanding her attention, Batalion just has time to express her hopes for a book 14 years, or perhaps several lifetimes, in the making: I just want people to know these stories. Israel has been an LGBTQ haven in the Middle East. Im always obsessed with people that I feel have what I lack., She recounts a meeting with Renia Kukielkas family in Israel a few years ago. The teenaged Renia Kukielka, who wrote a detailed memoir right after the war, is one of the books central figures. On this day, women and men have come together in this building to make a momentous decision. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our, Digital Renias youthful charm, fluent Polish and soft features made her an ideal courier. I wanted to know how they reconstructed their lives after going through everything they did. Renia Kukieka in Budapest, 1944. Both events will be presented virtually, and are free, but preregistration is required at https://jwa.org and https://vilnashul.org. Contact your KUKIELKA family in Argentina We locate and contact with you the branches of your family that has emigrated to Argentina. Winter has a cold grip on the Jewish ghetto in Bedzin, a city in Poland occupied by Nazi Germany. Visit judybatalion.com/events for details of online talks connected to the book. I was slow with this book because it was so challenging emotionally, intellectually and practically. In 2007, while living in London, Batalion, then in her 20s, was researching Hannah Senesh, the young Jewish heroine of World War II who was executed by the Nazis. During the war, she became known as Little Wanda with the Braids. (Courtesy of Ghetto Fighters House Museum Photo Archive). This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. Credit: Yad Vashem Photo Archive, Jerusalem, Get email notification for articles from Adrian Hennigan. As a 15 Author to speak on women of the underground during Holocaust They upheld the idea that European Jews were weak and that the new Israeli Jew was strong, which helped build morale for a developing country. Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. View a list of stores and vendors. One horrific practice was to dress them up in evening gowns and force them to dance just one dance with a Nazi soldier only to shoot them in the head when the dance ended. Knowing that there would be no mercy in capture, only torture and a brutal death, the women bribed executioners; smuggled pistols, grenades and cash inside teddy bears, handbags and loaves of bread; helped hundreds of comrades to escape; and seduced Nazis with wine and whiskey before killing them with efficient stealth. Renia Kukieka and her eldest granddaughter, Merav Waldman, at Meravs sisters wedding, Israel, 2008. I want people to know their legacy. Obviously, there was no way for the Nazis to physically prove a woman was Jewish. Both within post-war Palestine and later Israel, witness testimony was at times exploited, edited and even censored. Others were silenced by modesty, the disbelief they encountered, or the concern that focusing attention on active resisters implied criticism of others. Her welcome research and fluid storytelling fit a larger, still emerging historiography, which reveals the breadth of womens agency during armed conflicts and, as she writes: A different version of the women-in war story., The Light of Days: Women Fighters of the Jewish Resistance And then, on the other hand, theres the smallness. When Bonhoeffer was just a 26-year-old pastor in Berlin, he gave a radio address about Hitler stating, It is critical to distinguish a leader and a nonleader. His microphone was cut off and listeners then heard just static. 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