They built rescue networks to help other Jews to hide or flee and engaged in"moral, spiritual and cultural resistance. Against terrifying, oppressive odds, Renia lived to tell her story in a memoir she began writing at 19. The book will be published in Hebrew by Yediot. I was slow with this book because it was so challenging emotionally, intellectually and practically. The last place I wanted to be at that time in my life was spending my afternoons in 1943 in Warsaw emotionally, socially, intellectually, she recalls. Batalion hit the research jackpot at Warsaws new Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews, where an archivist directed her to thousands of pages of information about Jewish resistance fighters. Political forces have also shaped how Holocaust narratives are constructed, and this differs among countries and communities. Batalion stressed the importance of uncovering the stories that had been repressed. 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. I didnt want to make it sound like there was a massive Jewish army who was fighting the Nazis. Inflation fell in the 12 months leading up to December 2022 to 10.5 []. Automatic approval of subscriber comments. 139.99.62.131 For many years, memoirs and personal accounts were considered unreliable source material. Of course, Jewish men in the resistance performed heroic feats as well, but because of the womens ability to blend into the background they were often assigned more daring roles. Id discovered a thriller, she wrote. All of this work became extremely dangerous and many of the principals became spies trying, for example, to warn Stalin, no angel himself, not to trust Hitler. Young resisters were constantly reassessing whether to stay or to go, whether to fight from inside the ghettos or from the forests, and whether to attempt to escape and serve as witnesses of the atrocities to the world or to stay behind, Judy Batalion writes in her riveting book The Light of Days.. Sarah and her underground comrades bribed a guard with whiskey and cigarettes to rescue her from prison. 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. Others in Bedzin included Frumka Plotnicka and her younger sister, Hantze. Cloudy with periods of rain. 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. 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. It was also a more Germanic Yiddish, and I grew up with a more Polish Yiddish). Renias older brother, Aaron, had been taken away as part of a roundup of young Jewish men and sent to a Nazi labor camp. What she uncovers, in excoriating and poignant detail, are the stories of the ghetto girls who paid off Gestapo guards, hid revolvers in loaves of bread and messages in their pigtails and fought in armed struggles. On June 22, 1941, Germany invaded Russia and killed and wounded over 600,000 Red Army members. Renia Kukieka in Budapest, 1944. 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. They smuggled weapons, sabotaged German railways and died in combat: Historian Judy Batalion recovers the important stories of Jewish female resistance. Kaili out, Angel in: Is the EU Parliament starting afresh? In fact there was fierce and sustained armed resistance operating from many of the ghettos, culminating in uprisings, as well as revolts in concentration and forced labour camps and a significant, if sometimes covert, Jewish presence in partisan armies. 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 cover of "The Light of Days," by Judy Batalion. Judy Batalion The Harnacks and their circle of friends, including the famous Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Arvids cousin, believed Hitler would be rejected by the German people. These women were literally jumping off trains, running between towns, getting dressed up, dyeing their hair. Im writing history out of memoir, so I had to put together what happened, and when. I worked on it in dribs and drabs when I could, Batalion said of her years of off-again, on-again research and writing. Thinking back to their stories of courage and bravery really helped me, she said. Winds ESE at 10 to 20 mph. Find a copy of the Cleveland Jewish News. With great acumenand a firm narrative instinct, she recovers an important part of history that has, for too long, been ignored. Women subjected to medical experiments often died, but some survivors were called Rabbits because they were deliberately disabled or a leg had been amputated without their consent to help a Nazi soldier who had lost his. Its just a matter of time.. 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 Light of Days reveals not only that womens history is often surprising, but also that it is essential to understanding the past, Rosenbaum said in an email. The action you just performed triggered the security solution. In the bohemian 1970s, reports of violent rebellion were erased in favor of a focus on resilience and spiritual resistance. "No,"she says. Why, Batalion wonders, had she not heard these womens stories before? Much Holocaust scholarship was based on objective Nazi records, which certainly didnt contain discussions of rebellious young girls. Id had no idea. Thus, my research became double-layered: on the one hand, what is the story of Jewish women in the resistance; on the other hand, what happened to this story? I had to work in multiple languages, she said. Renia Kukielka sewed fake IDs into her skirts to save Jewish lives in German-occupied Poland. Why were women chosen for these tasks? In the British Library, Batalion cracked open a worn, yellowed copy of a Yiddish anthology, Freuen in di Ghettos (Women in the Ghetto),she wrote in the introduction to her book. Batalion hopes the stories of female heroism she resurrected serve to inspire future generations of all faiths, especially her own two daughters, both in elementary school. It is so deeply exciting for women to know that that's what our foremothers did. And some of them are very personal. 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. Amid overcrowded houses stands a special building:the heart of the Jewish youth organization Freiheit(English: freedom)and the headquarters of Jewish resistance against the Nazis. Rainfall near a half an inch. It often took until my generation, the 3Gs, to feel pride in this legacy, to ask our grandmothers about their lives. 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. It really startled me.. But let us strive for a heroic death.". 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. 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. Left to right: Vitka Kempner, Ruzka Korczak, and Zelda Treger. Members of The Young Guard in Wocawek, Poland, during Lag BaOmer, 1937. Shining a light on women resisters in Nazi Germany. These were educated young women who could think on their feet and pass as their Aryan compatriots. 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. Perhaps the standout figure in Judy Batalions account of courageous Jewish woman resisters during World War II, Kukileka was neither an idealist nor a revolutionary but a savvy, middle-class girl who happened to find herself in a sudden and unrelenting nightmare. Credit Email: padrealex@yahoo.com; Twitter: @padrehoboken. She looks away, and asilence ensues. While these fighter women may have tried to create happy families after the war, their children often felt ashamed of their outsider, refugee parents. This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. "It just felt like something I had to do,"she finally says. 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. Twenty-five years ago, I dont know how many women historians would be pitching to women agents and women editors who would have been supportive.". I thought if they could get through the horrific challenges they faced, I can definitely get through this.. Discovering that Renia Kukielka, a truly courageous standout heroine of WWII, was also my cousin has awakened a new kind of resilience in me. Or flirted with them, then shot and killed them. Together, these women will go on to become the face of female Jewish resistance to the Hitler regime in After The Jewish Womens Archive, headquartered in Brookline, is taking pride knowing that Batalion used the archives encyclopedia as an early source of information for her book, Rosenbaum told the Journal. And then, on the other hand, theres the smallness. Now, with the publication of The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitlers Ghettos, author Judy Batalion is revealing their remarkable lives. 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. Slowly, however, their voices disappeared. The Light of Days , with its more than 450 pages of narrative, hundreds of detailed footnotes, and 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. The social and intellectual zeitgeist played a role in sidelining tales of the Jewish resistance in the narrative of the Holocaust. For them, Renia Kukielka wrote in her memoir, killing a person was easier than smoking a cigarette.. In 1920 there were 4 Kukielka families living in Michigan. You have permission to edit this article. These women, their beliefs, their friendships and their extraordinary sacrifice emerge from the shadows. When you go to these towns and walk through the streets of former ghettos, theyre just small-town streets. 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. A few weeks on: hows that going? Defying Expectations: Women Resistance Fighters during the Virago 558pp 20. 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). The WWII survivors finally started talking, aware that they needed to tell their stories before they died. She feels a deep sense of connection to the ghetto girls who died fighting and believes they sacrificed themselves for the future dignity of the Jewish people. Alexander Santora/For the Jersey Journal. Get the award-winning Cleveland Jewish News and our popular magazines delivered directly to you. She found it in the forgotten stories of Polish ghetto girls dozens of Jewish women who did not ask for pity or flee the Nazis. Woman who allegedly gave birth in N.H. woods, left newborn in freezing tent, due in court Man whose body found in White Mountains on Christmas latest in troubling trend of lone 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. If the Polish Jewish resistance achieved relatively modest victories, Batalion argues that it was much larger and more organised than historians have previously recognised. The research skills she honed while earning a doctorate in the history of art from the University of London helped her navigate the daunting challenges of crafting a cohesive, factually accurate narrative out of history shrouded in myth and neglect. They were able to obtain documents that will permit them to smuggle some of them out of the occupied territories. The Gestapo headquarters [in Warsaw] is a four-story building, its so regular which is equally troubling, in a way.. View a list of stores and vendors. What she found instead were"women, sabotage, firearms, camouflage, dynamite.". Why, despite her years of education at a Montreal Jewish day school, where she learned Yiddish and Hebrew, and as the granddaughter of Polish Holocaust survivors, had she never heard of these ghetto girls? Freuen was just the starting point for The Light of Days, though. Support NJ.com, Rev. 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. These tales lurking under the surface are finally springing to the fore, jumping from the footnotes to the main text, making herstory. Their families were exterminated, but they survived. https://jwa.org and https://vilnashul.org, Weapons have been heading from Israel to Ukraine out of an American stockpile, Over 90 countries, including allies, express deep concern over Israels retaliation against Palestinians, After religious freedom objection, US Merchant Marine Academy obscures massive painting of Jesus at sea, A new film brings to life the largest single work of art created by a Jew during the Holocaust. When caught, they would often be killed on the spot. Even the books subtitle The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitlers Ghettos doesnt do justice to the amazing tales recounted in this labor of love from the Canadian-born New Yorker. The family eventually escaped to Montreal. I simply did what I felt I had to do.". 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. Batalions favorite research and writing involved the surviving ghetto girls postwar lives. They were so passionate about it, this was so important to them. Women are achieving so muchright now. 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. ", To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video. As a 15-year-old, Renia saw her parents deported from the Bdzin ghetto to Auschwitz. Germany boasts 1,700 years of Jewish history, but that history is often overshadowed by the Holocaust. 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. Her grandparents escaped from Warsaw to Siberian work camps, and her mothers was born in then Soviet-ruled Kyrgyzstan as the war raged. 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. Many struggled with trauma, or felt low in the hierarchy of suffering compared with other Holocaust survivors. Together, these women will go on to become the face of female Jewish resistance to the Hitler regime in occupied Poland. Copyright 2023 History Today Ltd. Company no. Low around 35F. The teenaged Renia Kukielka, who wrote a detailed memoir right after the war, is one of the books central figures. (Courtesy of Merav Waldman) The Light of Days highlights the incredible tenacity of Renia Kukielka, one of the youngest ghetto girls. Renia herself did not promote her book; if anything, writing down her tale was therapeutic. Perhaps the standout figure in Judy Batalions account of courageous Jewish woman resisters during World War II, Kukileka was neither an But Senesh was not the only female to fight. 1556332. Speaking with DW, translator Maria Zettner underlinedhow important it is that this history is told,particularly in Germany. Was the closure of the grammar schools really such a tragedy? "It was an underground library,"she remembered many years later. Or Zivia Lubetkin, who was in her 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.. Tosia Altman is at the bottom. Director Steven Spielberg has optioned the book for a motion picture and signed Batalion to co-write the screenplay. The reasoning: feminists should not politicize the story. There were uprisings in at least nine cities, including Warsaw and Vilna sustained by the labyrinth of underground bunkers hand-dug by women, together with their attacks on the electrical grid. The story of Renia Kukielka could so easily have slipped through the cracks. Bela Hazan, a courier based in Grodno, was assigned by an employment office to work as a translator for the Gestapo. There are jewish families in Argentina with surname KUKIELKA In the Jewish cemetery of La Tablada, Buenos Aires, is buried some people with this surname. During the war, she became known as Little Wanda with the Braids. (Courtesy of Ghetto Fighters House Museum Photo Archive). Poignantly, Batalion adds,Reinhartz was reading the USnovel Gone with the Windwhile hiding to escape deportation. 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. The longest piece in Women in the Ghettos was a personal tale by Renia Kukielka, an 18-year-old 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. Another awoke in a ditch of frozen cadavers, naked, staring into the eyes of her dead mother. Theyre convinced that Germans will revolt against this lunatic politician, Donner writes. Photograph taken at a Gestapo Christmas party, 1941. A powerful new book, 'The Light of Days,' reveals the tragic and audacious stories of fearless Polish women in Jewish resistance movements. The book has 65 pages of endnotes and a lot of them say, I took this from this section and this from this, and this memoir said this and in this testimony it said something a little different, Batalion says. All Rights Reserved. Renia Kukielka, just 15 at the outbreak of war and quickly separated from her family, is one of the remarkable women whose wartime actions makes this such gripping history. It's a short day in February 1943. Why have certain stories predominated our understanding while others have seemingly vanished? 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. 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. As men, women, the elderly and children were ordered to strip, a dozen women suddenly attacked their persecutors, scratching, biting and hurling stones. As I mentioned in the book, some of these women werent believed. 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. It took me about six months to do a rough first draft, she says. 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 scholar who wrote a book about humor in the Holocaust wrote, If you want to write about humor in the Holocaust, the danger is that it seems like the Holocaust wasnt that bad. This resonated with me. 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. "She ran missions between Bedzin and Warsaw," Batalion said of Kukielka. Mildred Harnack and 75 Germans were charged with treason and forced to undergo a mass trial. 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. She eventually escaped to Slovakia and then to Palestine, where she lived to be almost 90. Writing my book on these women, The Light of Days, required working with a multitude of languages and monikers. 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. Batalion is no stranger to the Holocaust. They fear that highlighting fighters makes the Holocaust look not that bad. They also fear that glorifying resisters places too much focus on agency, implying that survival was more than luck, judging those who did not take up arms and ultimately blaming the victim. The brutal barbarism of the Nazis has been well documented: Six million Jews were systematically murdered along with millions more they deemed undesirable. 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. Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement updated 7/1/2022). When the Nazis invaded their hometown of Bdzin in 1939, the Kukielka family had fled to relatives in nearby Jdrzejw where they were later forced into a ghetto, one of the 400 established throughout the country. Many others operated as couriers, bringing news of Nazi atrocities to Polands 400-plus ghettos or smuggling in munitions, cash and even fighting spirit. 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. Renia Kukieka in Budapest, 1944. ", That she is a woman figured greatly in the genesis of the book. The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler's Ghettos. 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. Even some of the camps that I visited, theyre very human in size in my head they loomed so large. 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? I so wanted to talk to their children and find out who these women became, she said. 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. "If we must die, then let us die together. Credit: Yad Vashem Photo Archive, Jerusalem, Get email notification for articles from Adrian Hennigan. Vladka Meed, passing as a Christian, smuggled correspondence and weapons to support the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. There are many reasons why this tale disappeared some of them have to do with the Zeitgeist and the interests of the times; some of them have to do with politics. In Poland, where in the past years, the government has tried to shape the Holocaust narrative by law, stories from the war and resistance, in particular, have been emphasized or downplayed based on political allegiances with communists, Soviets, and Polish nationalists. What does it meanto her to have written the book? In the 1980s and 1990s, however, scholars argued that the female experience differed from mens and was a valid area of study. It A meeting of Zionist youth at the agricultural training farm in Bdzin, Poland, during the war. Renia Kukielka Herscovitch (or possibly Irena Kukelko Herskovitch or Renata Kukilka Neumann Herzcovitz) has endless English permutations. And thats how we find ourselves in the rare position of having to praise an agent for their efforts on our behalf. The womens names and the place names had so many confusing iterations Yiddish, Polish, Hebrew, English.. She went on to lose her family, her home, her friends and her money, but never her iron will. The Light of Days highlights the incredible tenacity of Renia Kukielka, one of the youngest ghetto girls. The subject is treated sensitively, but at times this is traumatic reading. A decade of subsequent research and writing produced remarkable results: A great number of Jewish women were actively resisting the Nazis in occupied Poland, in all senses of the word, from the ghettos in Bedzinto Warsaw. She has talked to survivors and their children and grandchildren all over the world. With her fair complexion and mastery of Polish, Renia was able to disguise herself as a Christian and sent off separately. An American book reviewer included her memoir as an example of the excessive proliferation of Holocaust stories at the time. The Light of Days begins with the wars most celebrated Jewish resistance fighter, Hannah Szenes. But 2007 wasnt the right time for her to emotionally commit to such a mentally exhausting project. From that moment, I was on my own, she later wrote. We were actors in a play that had no intermission.. Choose from the CJN's informative e-newsletters. Miller and Ryan also own the Portland Pickles baseball team. The Light of Days the books title comes from a line written by a young Jewish girl for a ghetto song contest is both a profoundly moving and breathtaking read, full of tragic and audacious stories. "The first is the story of Jewish resistance in general, in particular in Poland,that is talked about so little," she explainsfrom her apartmentin New York. I wanted to know how they reconstructed their lives after going through everything they did. For me too, this is a Polish history book. Instead, they stayed and fought them. Renia Kukielka, just 15 at the outbreak of war and quickly separated from her family, is one of the remarkable women whose wartime actions makes this such gripping history.