Still, Batalion applied for and received a grant to translate Freuen into English, which took about five years (It was a very complicated translation because, first of all, my Yiddish was rusty I dont use Yiddish that much in my daily life. 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. Others in Bedzin included Frumka Plotnicka and her younger sister, Hantze. Together, these women will go on to become the face of female Jewish resistance to the Hitler regime in occupied Poland. Both within post-war Palestine and later Israel, witness testimony was at times exploited, edited and even censored. With great acumenand a firm narrative instinct, she recovers an important part of history that has, for too long, been ignored. Vladka (Peltel) Meed smuggled dynamite into the ghetto. This is how the historical events of that night are portrayed by historian Judy Batalion in her book The Light of Days. After Reich was a brunette divorcee in her 30s with a checked romantic history. She was shrewd, Magazines, Digital "It just felt like something I had to do,"she finally says. The hard work of so many women has paid off: The Light of Days is already a New York Times and international bestseller, director Steven Spielberg has optioned the film rights and there has beeninterest from documentary filmmakers and playwrights. 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. 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. Renia Kukieka in Budapest, 1944. Contact your KUKIELKA family in Argentina We locate and contact with you the branches of your family that has emigrated to Argentina. During the war, she became known as Little Wanda with the Braids. (Courtesy of Ghetto Fighters House Museum Photo Archive). Women are routinely dropped from stories in which they played key roles, their experiences blotted out of history, Batalion writes. 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. the second world war. Including womens experiences helps us write a different story, one which has the potential to teach us new things about women, the Jewish people, and humanity.. This was the perfect cover for her to act as a courier for a rebel group from the Dror youth movement, smuggling news bulletins, money and weaponry across Nazi-occupied Poland. Alexander Santora/For the Jersey Journal. And in part thanks to such acts of female heroism, armed Jewish resistance broke out in Auschwitz and other death camps. 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. "If we must die, then let us die together. Their families were exterminated, but they survived. There is anotheryoung woman in the same room,Renia Kukielka. When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. She eventually escaped to Slovakia and then to Palestine, where she lived to be almost 90. Much Holocaust scholarship was based on objective Nazi records, which certainly didnt contain discussions of rebellious young girls. The problem she then confronted in writing this book, which pulses with both rage and pride, was choosing which women to include and which to leave out. Why have certain stories predominated our understanding while others have seemingly vanished? The German translation of the book is set to published this monthand comes at a time of ongoing debateabout how to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive as eyewitnesses grow increasingly older and pass away. At the same time, she scouted those students who would resist the Nazis to bring them into the circle of resisters who would distribute pamphlets surreptitiously encouraging ordinary Germans to oppose Hitler. I am able to do this work because of other women who paid me and supported me professionally to carry out this type of work. She reminds me that in moments of deep despair, Others suffered debilitating survivors guilt. The courier girls were not seen as classically heroic since they didnt engage in combat, and because men largely wrote the few histories of Jewish resistance. Shed published a book-length memoir in Hebrew in 1945, which had been popular among the Jewish community in Palestine; it was excerpted into Yiddish in Women in the Ghettos then fully translated to English in 1947 with a foreword by a founder of Brandeis University. As a 15-year-old, Renia saw her parents deported from the Bdzin ghetto to Auschwitz. But living under an assumed identity required them to participate in antisemitic conversations and maintain a light-hearted tone as they did so: We couldnt cry for real, ache for real, or connect with our feelings for real, wrote another courier, Chasia Bielicka. In a riveting, exhaustively researched book, Batalion is saying their names, recognizing their heroism, and restoring their place in history. "While I was translating the book and reading about what the Germans had done to these Jewish women, I felt a great sense of shame. When you go to these towns and walk through the streets of former ghettos, theyre just small-town streets. Why, Batalion wonders, had she not heard these womens stories before? Batalions favorite research and writing involved the surviving ghetto girls postwar lives. 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. Many of these female rebels were not believed, accused of sleeping their way to safety, or blamed for abandoning their families to fight. Even some of the camps that I visited, theyre very human in size in my head they loomed so large. Together, these women will go on to become the face of female Jewish resistance to the Hitler regime in Ghetto girls, such as the shy and serious pre-war socialist Zivia Lubetkin, rescued Jews from forced labour parties, helped build secret underground bunkers and in May 1943 fought with gun in hand as the Warsaw ghetto was liquidated, before leading her fellow fighters to relative safety through the sewer system. If the Polish Jewish resistance achieved relatively modest victories, Batalion argues that it was much larger and more organised than historians have previously recognised. She almost set it aside, but the historian in her forced her to pick it up and examine it. Fueled by outrage, she and her older sister, Sarah, joined the ghettos resistance movement. Tosia Altman is at the bottom. The Jewish women who played a vital role in thePolish resistance against the Nazis. To her amazement, Batalion, who knows Yiddish, discovered sabotage, rifles, disguise, dynamite. Batalion sees a great hunger for these stories at the current moment. Why has it taken so long for these stories to finally be told and for these women to get their three lines in history, as one young ghetto activist puts it? In the bohemian 1970s, reports of violent rebellion were erased in favor of a focus on resilience and spiritual resistance. The womens names and the place names had so many confusing iterations Yiddish, Polish, Hebrew, English.. THE LIGHT OF DAYSThe Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitlers GhettosBy Judy Batalion, Judy Batalion was raised in Montreal surrounded by Holocaust survivor families with stories of loss and suffering. 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. Niuta Teitelbaum as a schoolgirl in od, 1936. They forget that this is a profession, and like any profession, it has rules, strategy, . Many of these women suffered terrible survivors guilt. Jewish Resistance in Poland: Women Trample Nazi Soldiers, ran a New York headline in late 1942. The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitlers Ghettos, by Judy Batalion; William Morrow; 2021; $28.99. But which narratives of the Holocaust do we recall? Now, interested in hidden womens histories, we publish books based on these late-in-life conversations and ruminations. When later histories were written, all too often the women tended to be depicted as passive, swept up in events rather than directing them. Michigan had the highest population of Kukielka families in 1920. Perhaps the standout figure in Judy Batalions account of courageous Jewish woman resisters during World War II, Kukileka was neither an Credit: Yad Vashem Photo Archive, Jerusalem, Get email notification for articles from Adrian Hennigan. Why is Jeremy Hunt pretending he can control inflation? Batalion has her own theories. It's a short day in February 1943. Among them was Malka Zdrojewicz (right), who survived Majdanek extermination camp. Through this painstaking work, she has managed to reconstruct a history that had been lost for decades in fact, one that has never been properly told: how Jewish women resisted the Nazi occupation in Poland. Use census records and voter lists to see where families with the Kukielka surname lived. Your IP: These rebel women had Polish, Hebrew, and Yiddish names, as well as nicknames. That source material was like a scrapbook, Batalion says, comprising clippings from different newspapers, obituaries, speeches and memoirs about female fighters from Jewish youth movements. I wanted to understand what the ride from Krakow to Warsaw looked like from the train window and experience a taste of what they did, she said. What she found instead were"women, sabotage, firearms, camouflage, dynamite.". You have permission to edit this article. Their stories seeped into my system. In 1920 there were 4 Kukielka families living in Michigan. Courtesy of Yad Vashem Photo Archive, Jerusalem. Renia Kukielka, whose photo on the book's cover shows her undercover in Budapest, coiffed and styled to assume the identity of a fashionable Christian Pole, documented her experiences. I worked on it in dribs and drabs when I could, Batalion said of her years of off-again, on-again research and writing. The Light of Days highlights the incredible tenacity of Renia Kukielka, one of the youngest ghetto girls. Many young women and men hid in self-made bunkers and in the forest to elude capture. 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. Yet, womens stories became mired in the politics and dismissed. 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. These women were literally jumping off trains, running between towns, getting dressed up, dyeing their hair. But 2007 wasnt the right time for her to emotionally commit to such a mentally exhausting project. In all, 30,000 Jews joined partisan units in European forests, a significant number of them women, despite the rough treatment (including rape) they often received at the hands of male comrades. Batalion was overjoyed to meet Renias adult children, who described their mothers zest for family, fashion and world travel. They smuggled weapons, sabotaged the German railway and exploded major TNT charges. Julie Wheelwright is the author of Sisters in Arms: Female Warriors from Antiquity to the New Millennium (Osprey, 2020). 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. Judy Batalions powerful book refutes one of the abiding misconceptions about the second world war that the Jews of Europe went passively to their deaths. Or Zivia Lubetkin, who was in her mid-20s when she played a key yet long overlooked role in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1943 as part of the Jewish Fighting Organization (also known by its Polish acronym, the ZOB). There are also more political reasons as to why this story was lost. Galvanised by largely left-wing youth activists and connected by mainly female couriers, Jewish defence groups were soon staging armed attacks and operations across occupied Poland. Is Putin about to gamble on a second mobilisation wave? COLLiDE NEO plans to m, Almost all salespeople think that they are great. Neither do we. Renia Kukielka, an eighteen-year-old Jewish woman and an emerging warrior of the underground resistance movement, came up from the laundry room. He uses his large-format portraits to combat racism and antisemitism. There were a lot of balances to get right, Batalion notes. The family eventually escaped to Montreal. Such cruelty is the constant theme of Batalions book, describing how after Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, the Nazis began to round up Jews for the concentration camps by emptying the ghettos. She would help others get phony identifications and help ferry people to safety. Batalion stressed the importance of uncovering the stories that had been repressed. Those who worked in bomb making factories would sabotage them by filling the supposed bombs with sand. One such example of cultural resistance is provided by Batalion through the biography ofHenia Reinhartz, a young woman in the ghetto of Lodz. Chance of rain 100%. With her Polish looks and an education that had given her fluent Polish, Renia Kukielka was able to acquire fake documents and return to Bdzin, where she joined the resistance, networks of young Jews who created a novel kind of family life to help heal from the ones that had been destroyed. Inflation fell in the 12 months leading up to December 2022 to 10.5 []. With her sister Sarah, the Kukielka sisters were couriers for Freedom, one of the prewar youth movements that provided a network for the resisters. Renias memoir, published in 1945, is a rare first-person account bearing witness to the womens motivations, their ingenuity in surviving, their loyalty to their comrades and the losses they suffered. Or they told them right after the war, like Renia, and that was it. Your email address will not be published. Immediately post-war many of these stories were shared and even published. Renia Kukielka sewed fake IDs into her skirts to save Jewish lives in German-occupied Poland. Political forces have also shaped how Holocaust narratives are constructed, and this differs among countries and communities. 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. We have a responsibility to do all we can so that something like this will never happen again," she says. Renia Kukieka in Budapest, 1944. Winter has a cold grip on the Jewish ghetto in Bedzin, a city in Poland occupied by Nazi Germany. (Courtesy of Merav Waldman) The Light of Days highlights the incredible tenacity of Renia Kukielka, one of the youngest ghetto girls. In vivid and often heart-wrenching prose, Kukielka provided one of the first full-length accounts of the Holocaust, Batalion wrote. Speaking with DW, translator Maria Zettner underlinedhow important it is that this history is told,particularly in Germany. Should their leader, the Jewish-Polish woman Frumka Plotnicka, use these papers to travel to The Hague and represent the Jewish people before the International Criminal Court? Batalion paints an intimate portrait of a dozen such young Jewish women, conveying not only their extraordinary courage but also making their unimaginable suffering seem almost within grasp. Many of those who survived, like Renia, honoured their commitment to bear witness, writing the memoirs and giving the talks that Batalion has used to good effect. Her book is an achievement,as rigorous as it is gripping. 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. Thinking back to their stories of courage and bravery really helped me, she said. Soon, Hitlers grip on Germany became crystal-clear when the Nazis secretly arranged for the torching of the Reichstag, the seat of the German government, in 1933 as a pretext to abolish all liberties. Poignantly, Batalion adds,Reinhartz was reading the USnovel Gone with the Windwhile hiding to escape deportation. They also led groups of Jewish fighters into combat against the Wehrmacht. The Light of Days , with its more than 450 pages of narrative, hundreds of detailed footnotes, and Batalion, who spent her mid-20s in London working as an art historian by day and stand-up comedian at night, is not a Holocaust scholar accustomed to reading graphic primary sources. Prices start at $65 per year. Then, there, they got real married, altering their names yet again. My research was very complex and strangely time consuming. (Courtesy of Merav Waldman). 2023 Advance Local Media LLC. The Lake County Captains announced a new ownership group Jan. 17. As men, women, the elderly and children were ordered to strip, a dozen women suddenly attacked their persecutors, scratching, biting and hurling stones. In 1943, Niuta Teitelbaum, dressed as a Polish farm girl, walked into a Gestapo apartment and shot and killed two Nazis. These were stories of constant activity, and they drew me in. "It was an underground library,"she remembered many years later. The book will be published in Hebrew by Yediot. I simply did what I felt I had to do.". 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. They were so passionate about it, this was so important to them. It was so not what I expected, and so foreign to the Holocaust narrative I had grown up with. It was an unusual book for the British Library to hold, since it was in Yiddish. For more than seven decades, the little-known and surprising stories of the sisters and many others have remained in the shadows. Along with other scholars I interviewed, he suggests that a myth of Jewish passivity was perpetrated by Israels early politicians. Subscribe to leave a comment. 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. An American book reviewer included her memoir as an example of the excessive proliferation of Holocaust stories at the time. Support NJ.com, Rev. Two female rabbis in Berlin, one queer, one a convert to Judaism, may represent the diversity in Jewish life in Germany today. 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