Why the Stories of Jewish Women Who Fought the Nazis Remained Hidden for So Long

TIME
April 8, 2021

On Yom Hashoah, we light memorial candles and mourn the dead. But which narratives of the Holocaust do we recall? Why have certain stories predominated our understanding while others have seemingly vanished?

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. She was the only person I’d ever heard of who volunteered to return and fight Hitler. But soon into my sleuthing, I happened to come across a 1946 anthology about dozens of young Jewish women who took similar risks. As I learned more about these Jewish female ghetto fighters, forest partisans, and “courier girls”—who 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 handbags—I marveled equally at these stories and their obscurity. 

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