Spotlighting Jewish Women Who Outsmarted the Nazis

Shondaland
June 7, 2021

Judy Batalion, the author of the critically acclaimed The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos, was raised in a community of Holocaust survivors in Montreal and educated at Harvard. Raised by her mother and grandmother, Batalion grew up hearing her grandmother’s traumatic memories from childhood — as a Jew in Poland during the Holocaust, her grandmother lost her parents and three sisters and was imprisoned in Siberian gulags.

In 2007, Batalion experienced unsettling prejudice while working as an art historian and standup comedian in London, prompting her to revisit the Holocaust. It was the first time she’d experienced prejudice in her 30 years.

As she writes in The Light of Days, “To be so ‘out’ with my otherness caused discomfort.” This discomfort led to a need to bond with the strength of her Jewish female ancestors, to find her place among their stories.

This drove Batalion to the British Museum with the goal of learning about strong Jewish women during the Holocaust, other than Hannah Senesh, one of the few renowned female resistors in World War II.

While doing her research, Batalion discovered Freuen in di Ghettos (Women in the Ghettos), which she describes in The Light of Days as “an unusual, dusty 180-page book written in Yiddish.” She expected vague, dry discussions alluding to traumatic experiences replete with stories from the Jewish Torah but instead found “memoirs and testimonies” from unsung war heroines.

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