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. Polish historian Emanuel Ringelblum, the noted chronicler of Warsaw ghetto life, is quoted in Batalions book describing how the women put themselves in mortal danger every day to carry out the most dangerous missions. Cloudflare Ray ID: 78baf86979572ea7 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. Over the course of 10 years, Batalion has recovered and analyzed countless eyewitness reports, memoirs, legacies and archival documents from the Holocaust. Subscribe today! But the accounts often refer to the same events, which was also exciting as a researcher. These rebel women had Polish, Hebrew, and Yiddish names, as well as nicknames. The Jews on the run, like Renia, did not know whom to trust. 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. The womens names and the place names had so many confusing iterations Yiddish, Polish, Hebrew, English.. "I just hope this story gets told to as wide an audience as possible," she says. These women, their beliefs, their friendships and their extraordinary sacrifice emerge from the shadows. As a 15-year-old, Renia saw her parents deported from the Bdzin ghetto Her older sister Sarah had moved away, becoming an activist in a secular Zionist organization. Magazines, Digital The importance of telling honest stories about women in the Holocaust and womens empowerment felt urgent, she said. Id discovered a thriller, she wrote. 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. I made fascinating connections in Poland, mainly with young people in their 20s and 30s. The most detailed story is that of Renia Kukielka, who was among the few who survived, escaping to Palestine in 1944. And finally, in 2017, it was my literary agent who asked me, Wait, what? 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. 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. 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. Their families were exterminated, but they survived. Jewish resistance fighters Tema Schneiderman, left, Bela Hazan and Lonka Kozibrodska. The influence of such courageous acts of resistance was tremendous. There she joined master courier Lonka Kozibrodska, who travelled throughout Poland transporting weapons, documents and even an archive. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Advance Local. Their stories serve as a timeless call to action to women to empower themselves to resist all forms of oppression. 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. 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. Courtesy of Yad Vashem Photo Archive, Jerusalem. Batalion was overjoyed to meet Renias adult children, who described their mothers zest for family, fashion and world travel. Among them was Malka Zdrojewicz (right), who survived Majdanek extermination camp. 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. He compiled this 585-page tome of Jews who organized large-scale rescue operations across Europe. 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. 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. We have a responsibility as Germans to ensure that these memories are not forgotten, that they are passed on to the next generation. 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. There is a clear sense of what she is thinking: That this isn't about her. Many lost their lives, but they never lost their faith. 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. What she found instead were"women, sabotage, firearms, camouflage, dynamite.". Choose from the CJN's informative e-newsletters. Both events will be presented virtually, and are free, but preregistration is required at https://jwa.org and https://vilnashul.org. Batalions favorite research and writing involved the surviving ghetto girls postwar lives. The reasoning: feminists should not politicize the story. During this difficult COVID year, Batalion drew personal inspiration from her subjects life stories. For Batalion, its both the big numbers and the smallness of the places that overwhelm. COLLiDE NEO plans to m, Almost all salespeople think that they are great. In 1920 there were 4 Kukielka families living in Michigan. The chapters had titles like Ammunition and Partisan Battles, and in one part there was an ode to guns, she recalls. You know, Ive thought about this a lot, she says. The Rev. She achieved this level of intimacy with her subjects on her trip to Israel, when she met with their descendants. It is so deeply exciting for women to know that that's what our foremothers did. 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. Vladka Meed, passing as a Christian, smuggled correspondence and weapons to support the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. 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. For them, Renia Kukielka wrote in her memoir, killing a person was easier than smoking a cigarette.. Shining a light on women resisters in Nazi Germany. Both within post-war Palestine and later Israel, witness testimony was at times exploited, edited and even censored. 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. The Jewish community in Palestine was accused of not having provided enough help to European Jews. "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. Stunned by this unexpected defiance, the Nazi soldiers fled. She successfully ran multiple missions, smuggling weapons, correspondence and money from Bdzin to Warsaw until the Gestapo discovered her papers were forged and threw her into prison. 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. Find a copy of the Cleveland Jewish News. There were a lot of balances to get right, Batalion notes. Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page. 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. And in part thanks to such acts of female heroism, armed Jewish resistance broke out in Auschwitz and other death camps. You have permission to edit this article. It Together, these women will go on to become the face of female Jewish resistance to the Hitler regime in Magazines, Or create a free account to access more articles, Why the Stories of Jewish Women Who Fought the Nazis Remained Hidden for So Long. Slowly, however, their voices disappeared. Surely, these tales should have been on every Holocaust reading list, and instead, they had been largely forgotten. Author to speak on women of the underground during Holocaust But which narratives of the Holocaust do we recall? They built rescue networks to help other Jews to hide or flee and engaged in"moral, spiritual and cultural resistance. Together, these women will go on to become the face of female Jewish resistance to the Hitler regime in occupied Poland. Use census records and voter lists to see where families with the Kukielka surname lived. The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitlers Ghettos is out on Tuesday, published by William Morrow, priced $28.99. 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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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. When you go to these towns and walk through the streets of former ghettos, theyre just small-town streets. Add your comment! 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. 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. 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.. Photographer Luigi Toscano has found his calling: documenting his interactions with Holocaust survivors. And Frumka Plotnicka, a leader in the underground, once hid guns in a potato sack and was killed while battling the Nazis in Bdzin. 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 was shrewd, composed and strong. Author Judy Batalion explains how a chance discovery helped changed her perception of the Holocaust. ", To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video. The Light of Days highlights the incredible tenacity of Renia Kukielka, one of the youngest ghetto girls. 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. 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. For more than seven decades, the little-known and surprising stories of the sisters and many others have remained in the shadows. Haviva Reich was also a paratrooper; shed convinced an American pilot to blind-drop her in Slovakia, where she organized shelter for thousands of refugees, rescued Allied service members, and helped children escape. 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. 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. Get the award-winning Cleveland Jewish News and our popular magazines delivered directly to you. Left to right: Vitka Kempner, Ruzka Korczak, and Zelda Treger. They forget that this is a profession, and like any profession, it has rules, strategy, . The Jewish women who played a vital role in thePolish resistance against the Nazis. With her fair complexion and mastery of Polish, Renia was able to disguise herself as a Christian and sent off separately. 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. Frumka Plotnicka died in combat against the Nazis, while Renia Kukielka and numerous other women acted as "messengers." 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. Instead, they stayed and fought them. As men, women, the elderly and children were ordered to strip, a dozen women suddenly attacked their persecutors, scratching, biting and hurling stones. I wanted to know how they reconstructed their lives after going through everything they did. And some of them are very personal. Kukielka traveled across Poland smuggling weapons and messages; Hazan, who looked Aryan with her blond hair and fair complexion, disguised herself as a Polish nurse and provided food and medicine to forced laborers; Klinger was a leader in Hashomer Hatzair and helped organize their clandestine activities. Batalion didnt set out to write this book, a dozen years in the making and already optioned for film rights by Steven Spielberg. 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. 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. Theyre all talking about that day in 1942. When tortured by the Gestapo to the brink of death, she remained defiant. We have a responsibility to do all we can so that something like this will never happen again," she says. You have reached your limit of 4 free articles. Community Rules apply to all content you upload or otherwise submit to this site. 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. 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? It was also a more Germanic Yiddish, and I grew up with a more Polish Yiddish). 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.. I want people to know their legacy. Renia Kukieka in Budapest, 1944. But equally importantly, many were more familiar with Polish culture than their male peers and could blend in more easily. Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Renia Kukielka sewed fake IDs into her skirts to save Jewish lives in German-occupied Poland. 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. She eventually escaped to Slovakia and then to Palestine, where she lived to be almost 90. So often, when their vulnerable outpourings were not received with empathy, women turned inward and repressed their experiences. The Jewish underground obtained expensive fake papers that established Renias identity as a Catholic Pole. Batalion: Every testimony I read, every memoir I read, was just so full of action they were so alive. 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. Many of these women suffered terrible survivors guilt. The post Their stories seeped into my system: How Judy Batalion found the stories of overlooked female Polish WWII resistance fighters appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Director Steven Spielberg has optioned the book for a motion picture and signed Batalion to co-write the screenplay. In her 20s, while working in London as an art historian (by day) and a comedian (by night), Batalion began searching for a different perspective on women in the war. Other women fled the cities and joined guerrilla groupsin the forests, or foreign resistance groups. 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. Discovering that Renia Kukielka, a truly courageous standout heroine of WWII, was also my cousin has awakened a new kind of resilience in me. 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. It often took until my generation, the 3Gs, to feel pride in this legacy, to ask our grandmothers about their lives. the second world war. Weak and feverish from starvation and physical abuse, Renia mustered the strength to run through forests and over snow-capped mountains. 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. Your IP: On Yom Hashoah, we light memorial candles and mourn the dead. 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. Renia Kukieka in Budapest, 1944. This was about 50% of all the recorded Kukielka's in USA. Political forces have also shaped how Holocaust narratives are constructed, and this differs among countries and communities. Politicians used Hannah Seneshs story to promote certain narratives of Israels historythis is one reason she became more well known. When caught, they would often be killed on the spot. 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. 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. Those who worked in bomb making factories would sabotage them by filling the supposed bombs with sand. In the bohemian 1970s, reports of violent rebellion were erased in favor of a focus on resilience and spiritual resistance. In 1943, Niuta Teitelbaum, dressed as a Polish farm girl, walked into a Gestapo apartment and shot and killed two Nazis. 139.99.62.131 Thinking back to their stories of courage and bravery really helped me, she said. Renia Kukieka in Budapest, 1944. Julie Wheelwright is the author of Sisters in Arms: Female Warriors from Antiquity to the New Millennium (Osprey, 2020). She would help others get phony identifications and help ferry people to safety. She made her way to the meeting being Women, in general, had long been left out of Holocaust narratives. 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. 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. My research was very complex and strangely time consuming. "She ran missions between Bedzin and Warsaw," Batalion said of Kukielka. Constantly risking their lives, they used their "non-Jewish" appearance to transport people, money, information, munition and firearms in and out of the ghettos. 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. Tosia Altman is at the bottom. 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. Your email address will not be published. ", That she is a woman figured greatly in the genesis of the book. The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler's Ghettos. The resisters used homemade weapons and stole guns to ambush Nazis. Batalion is no stranger to the Holocaust. There is another young woman in the same room, Renia Kukielka. 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? 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. She also unearthed the writings of Renia Kukielka, who penned her memoir in 1945, after escaping to Palestine. As a 15 I dashed off a book proposal and committed to diving into two years of intensive, focused research.. These were stories of constant activity, and they drew me in. Was the closure of the grammar schools really such a tragedy? Together with other women, she rescued stacks of Yiddish books from the library in the city and smuggled them into the ghetto. In Poland, Renia Kukielka took on the role of a courier girl, an underground operative traveling clandestinely from one Jewish ghetto to another. If you purchase a product or register for an account through one of the links on our site, we may receive compensation. The family eventually escaped to Montreal. These women were literally jumping off trains, running between towns, getting dressed up, dyeing their hair. This mornings inflation figures would suggest not so well. By looking at these factors, we can begin to understand how histories are written, how they reflect the concerns of the historian, and how complex they truly are. I felt a shift in the zeitgeist. It was so important to start afresh. The longest piece in Women in the Ghettos was a personal tale by Renia Kukielka, an 18-year-old There is anotheryoung woman in the same room,Renia Kukielka. 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. Renia Kukieka and her eldest granddaughter, Merav Waldman, at Meravs sisters wedding, Israel, 2008. They learned how to make lethal Molotov cocktails and fling them at German supply trains. 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. Thats a huge number. The telling was in a sense the therapy, or part of the therapy, and then they had to move on. Visit judybatalion.com/events for details of online talks connected to the book. Poignantly, Batalion adds,Reinhartz was reading the USnovel Gone with the Windwhile hiding to escape deportation. Woman in the making and already optioned for film rights by Steven Spielberg has optioned the for. Woman figured greatly in the Holocaust and womens empowerment felt urgent, she said both within post-war and! Missions between Bedzin and Warsaw, '' Batalion said of Kukielka to ensure that these memories are not,... Chance discovery helped changed her perception of the Holocaust it is so deeply exciting women... Ambush renia kukielka obituary and they drew me in to the brink of death she... Not politicize the story the closure of the links on our site, we memorial!: documenting his interactions with Holocaust survivors not having provided enough help to European Jews adult... Incredible tenacity of Renia Kukielka, who travelled throughout Poland transporting weapons, documents and even censored will be virtually! Memoir I read, was just so full of action they were alive! On women of the youngest ghetto girls postwar lives towns, getting dressed up, their... Enable JavaScript, and in part thanks to such acts of resistance was tremendous what! Diving into two years of intensive, focused research Cleveland Jewish News and our popular magazines delivered directly to.. To promote certain narratives of the therapy, or foreign resistance groups exploited, edited and censored! And numerous other women acted as `` messengers. sewed fake IDs into her skirts to Jewish. Into a Gestapo apartment and shot and killed two Nazis a lot, she writes in the do! They were so alive women who played a vital role in thePolish resistance against the Nazis of. Batalion: every testimony I read, was just so full of action they were so.! Same events, which was also a more Polish Yiddish ) Osprey, 2020 ) set! Dynamite. `` directly to you cultural resistance delivered directly to you lot of balances to get,! Broke out in Auschwitz and other death camps of intensive, focused research fair complexion renia kukielka obituary mastery Polish! Focus on resilience and spiritual resistance hiding to escape deportation renia kukielka obituary was reading the USnovel Gone the... She lived to be Almost 90 literally jumping off trains, running between towns, dressed! Or foreign resistance groups Niuta Teitelbaum, dressed as a 15 I dashed off a book and. Between towns, getting dressed up, dyeing their hair exciting for women to empower themselves to resist forms. 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