The importance of telling honest stories about women in the Holocaust and womens empowerment felt urgent, she said. Batalion, who has so far been a quick conversationalist, having said morethan could possibly fit into a 30-minute interview,pauses. Julie Wheelwright is the author of Sisters in Arms: Female Warriors from Antiquity to the New Millennium (Osprey, 2020). Watching the ghetto burn from the Aryan side of the perimeter wall, she noted not only the horror but also the heroism of the six-week battle that marked the first urban uprising against the Nazis of any underground movement during the war. Courtesy of Yad Vashem Photo Archive, Jerusalem. 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. 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. The WWII survivors finally started talking, aware that they needed to tell their stories before they died. Subscribe to leave a comment. Low around 35F. 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? The social and intellectual zeitgeist played a role in sidelining tales of the Jewish resistance in the narrative of the Holocaust. Email: padrealex@yahoo.com; Twitter: @padrehoboken. Senesh, whod joined the Allied forces, became a poster child showing that they did. There is another young woman in the same room, Renia Kukielka. As if indiscriminate murder isnt the height of abuse, Batalion writes about the routine rape and sexual abuse of young Jewish women with Aryan features. COLLiDE NEO plans to m, Almost all salespeople think that they are great. 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. The resisters used homemade weapons and stole guns to ambush Nazis. 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. Weak and feverish from starvation and physical abuse, Renia mustered the strength to run through forests and over snow-capped mountains. The reasoning: feminists should not politicize the story. She was the only person Id ever heard of who volunteered to return and fight Hitler. When you go to these towns and walk through the streets of former ghettos, theyre just small-town streets. Haaretz Daily Newspaper Ltd. All Rights Reserved, in light of its controversial, some would say revisionist, stance. In the larger context of the war, their victories were small and their sacrifices great. 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. Renia Kukieka in Budapest, 1944. All eyes turn to Plotnicka. Most prominent was Renia Kukielka, whose Aryan features enabled her to present herself as a Catholic with all the fake IDs to allow her to escape capture. My children should know that their legacy includes not just fleeing, but also staying, and even running towards danger., Your email address will not be published. These women, their beliefs, their friendships and their extraordinary sacrifice emerge from the shadows. You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked. With great acumenand a firm narrative instinct, she recovers an important part of history that has, for too long, been ignored. Her book is an achievement,as rigorous as it is gripping. 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. It was also a more Germanic Yiddish, and I grew up with a more Polish Yiddish). Renia Kukieka and her eldest granddaughter, Merav Waldman, at Meravs sisters wedding, Israel, 2008. The subject is treated sensitively, but at times this is traumatic reading. My genes were stamped even altered, as neuroscientists now suggest by trauma, she writes in The Light of Days. I grew up in an aura of victimization and fear.. What she found instead were"women, sabotage, firearms, camouflage, dynamite.". 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. Many struggled with trauma, or felt low in the hierarchy of suffering compared with other Holocaust survivors. Its very tricky to tell a story about the Holocaust, because I want to explain the deeply horrific nature of this genocide, but I also want to tell a story of the people that fought it. 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. "I feel grateful to Reniafor leaving such detailed accounts that enabled me to tell the story. These women didnt tell their story. She looks away, and asilence ensues. The Jews on the run, like Renia, did not know whom to trust. She survived a tortuous journey through hidden bunkers in Slovakia, then on to Hungary, Turkey and the ultimate destination Palestine. Their stories serve as a timeless call to action to women to empower themselves to resist all forms of oppression. When Batalion read Renias memoir she felt as if shed discovered a kindred spirit a thoughtful writer processing her experiences. The womens names and the place names had so many confusing iterations Yiddish, Polish, Hebrew, English.. As a 15 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. In a New York Times opinion piece, Batalion wrote that these womens stories offer a broader and less familiar perspective that is inspiring for new generations, including for her own daughters. After As I mentioned in the book, some of these women werent believed. Vladka (Peltel) Meed smuggled dynamite into the ghetto. Michigan had the highest population of Kukielka families in 1920. She also unearthed the writings of Renia Kukielka, who penned her memoir in 1945, after escaping to Palestine. We have a responsibility to do all we can so that something like this will never happen again," she says. 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. But let us strive for a heroic death.". Then, there, they got real married, altering their names yet again. With the threat of deportation looming, Renias parents decided that splitting up was their only hope to survive. 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. Although not physically strong, she spied on the Nazis, smuggled weapons into the ghettos and crossed heavily patrolled borders. She would help others get phony identifications and help ferry people to safety. Both events will be presented virtually, and are free, but preregistration is required at https://jwa.org and https://vilnashul.org. On the pragmatic side, researching historical women can be particularly tricky. In a riveting, exhaustively researched book, Batalion is saying their names, recognizing their heroism, and restoring their place in history. They built rescue networks to help other Jews to hide or flee and engaged in"moral, spiritual and cultural resistance. 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. Miller and Ryan also own the Portland Pickles baseball team. The Light of Days begins with the wars most celebrated Jewish resistance fighter, Hannah Szenes. The family was ultimately confined to the Jewish ghetto in their hometown. Some of the young women Batalion showcases were partisans, literally fighting the Nazis deep within the forests of Eastern Europe. Automatic approval of subscriber comments. When tortured by the Gestapo to the brink of death, she remained defiant. Batalion didnt set out to write this book, a dozen years in the making and already optioned for film rights by Steven Spielberg. Despite repeated beatings that left her bloodied and unconscious, she clung to her cover story and never revealed her Jewish identity. She almost set it aside, but the historian in her forced her to pick it up and examine it. 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. She made her way to the meeting being 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. 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. 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. 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. Find a copy of the Cleveland Jewish News. 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. Photograph taken at a Gestapo Christmas party, 1941. 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. These women were literally jumping off trains, running between towns, getting dressed up, dyeing their hair. I simply did what I felt I had to do.". Perhaps the standout woman here, though, is the hugely appealing Renia Kukielka, whom Batalion describes as neither an idealist nor a revolutionary but a savvy, middle-class girl who happened to find herself in a sudden and unrelenting nightmare.. The Light of Days highlights the incredible tenacity of Renia Kukielka, one of the youngest ghetto girls. 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? Obviously, there was no way for the Nazis to physically prove a woman was Jewish. "It is the place where we arein our feminist trajectory, in the history of feminism," she tells DW. You have reached your limit of 4 free articles. Zivia Lubetkin speaking at Kibbutz Yagur, 1946. 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.. It's a short day in February 1943. I thought if they could get through the horrific challenges they faced, I can definitely get through this.. From that moment, I was on my own, she later wrote. 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 Nazis decapitated a pregnant mother of seven for illegally slaughtering a pig, she writes. Batalion: Every testimony I read, every memoir I read, was just so full of action they were so alive. What does it meanto her to have written the book? Her desire to pay tribute to as many as possible is understandable, but a simpler narrative with fewer subjects might have been even more powerful. Its better to begin understanding Hitlers gradual rise to power as a dictator by reading the true story in All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, by Rebecca Donner, first. Jewish resistance fighters Vitka Kempner, left, Ruzka Korczak, and Zelda Treger. It really startled me.. And finally, in 2017, it was my literary agent who asked me, Wait, what? The teenaged Renia Kukielka, who wrote a detailed memoir right after the war, is one of the books central figures. 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. After the war, they got faux married for emigration papers, thus changing their names, and then, they changed them again to suit the languages of the countries where they ended up. Renia Kukieka in Budapest, 1944. She eventually escaped to Slovakia and then to Palestine, where she lived to be almost 90. The Light of Days highlights the incredible tenacity of Renia Kukielka, one of the youngest ghetto girls. 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). I didnt want to make it sound like there was a massive Jewish army who was fighting the Nazis. 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). 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. On this day, women and men have come together in this building to make a momentous decision. Then there was the small matter of trying to verify stories that havent been told in nearly 80 years, if at all, and were sometimes written when typewriters, pens and paper werent exactly easy to access. They were able to obtain documents that will permit them to smuggle some of them out of the occupied territories. Against terrifying, oppressive odds, Renia lived to tell her story in a memoir she began writing at 19. ", That she is a woman figured greatly in the genesis of the book. When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. 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. As a 15-year-old, Renia saw her parents deported from the Bdzin ghetto 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. Along with other scholars I interviewed, he suggests that a myth of Jewish passivity was perpetrated by Israels early politicians. Batalion sees a great hunger for these stories at the current moment. Low around 35F. Winter has a cold grip on the Jewish ghetto in Bedzin, a city in Poland occupied by Nazi Germany. 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? But equally importantly, many were more familiar with Polish culture than their male peers and could blend in more easily. 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 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.. 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. 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 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. Why were women chosen for these tasks? There are also more political reasons as to why this story was lost. Stunned by this unexpected defiance, the Nazi soldiers fled. the second world war. 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. 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. Batalion has her own theories. The Jewish community in Palestine was accused of not having provided enough help to European Jews. 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. On Thursday, April 8, Batalion, the author of White Walls: A Memoir About Motherhood, Daughterhood, and the Mess in Between, will discuss her book with historian Judith Rosenbaum, chief executive officer of the Jewish Womens Archive at 8 p.m. On Thursday, April 15, Batalion will speak in a 7 p.m. program with the Vilna Shul. Israel has been an LGBTQ haven in the Middle East. Germany boasts 1,700 years of Jewish history, but that history is often overshadowed by the Holocaust. 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. 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. The cover of "The Light of Days," by Judy Batalion. Niuta Teitelbaum as a schoolgirl in od, 1936. Her grandparents escaped from Warsaw to Siberian work camps, and her mothers was born in then Soviet-ruled Kyrgyzstan as the war raged. Kukielkas story supplies the books narrative spine. Described by Batalion as a savvy, middle-class girl who happened to find herself in a sudden and unrelenting nightmare, she was just 15 when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. 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. She 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 good news is that The Light of Days will be published in Poland next year, so locals will be able to make up their own minds, while Batalion has only good things to say about the Poles who assisted her in the writing process. Some 14 years ago, I decided to research the life story of Hannah Senesh, a young Hungarian Jew who lived in Palestine but joined the allied forces to return to Europe and fight the Nazis. 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. 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. I dashed off a book proposal and committed to diving into two years of intensive, focused research.. Women, in general, had long been left out of Holocaust narratives. 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. She was expecting another "boring" elegy on female strength and courage. As men, women, the elderly and children were ordered to strip, a dozen women suddenly attacked their persecutors, scratching, biting and hurling stones. 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. The Lake County Captains announced a new ownership group Jan. 17. Many of these women suffered terrible survivors guilt. Silence was a coping mechanism for many of these women. Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page. These were stories with so much action, and I think that also just changed the tone of the Holocaust narrative for me. 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. 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. There were a lot of balances to get right, Batalion notes. Magazines, Digital She snapped photos of the documents to share with a Polish translator in New York. Over 400,000 Jews were forced to live in the Warsaw ghetto alone. Much Holocaust scholarship was based on objective Nazi records, which certainly didnt contain discussions of rebellious young girls. Choose from the CJN's informative e-newsletters. But which narratives of the Holocaust do we recall? The story of Renia Kukielka could so easily have slipped through the cracks. 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. Their stories seeped into my system: How Judy Batalion found the stories of overlooked female Polish WWII resistance fighters, The Samuel H. 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