How Jewish Women Fought Back Against the Nazis During a 1943 Uprising in Poland

CBC The Current
April 20, 2021

When Montreal-born author Judy Batalion first learned about a group of Jewish women in Poland who rebelled against the Nazis during the Second World War, it was by total chance.

The granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, Batalion had been researching intergenerational trauma at the British Library in London, and spotted an unusual-looking book written in Yiddish — a language she happened to understand.

"I started reading through this, sort of just out of curiosity," Batalion told The Current's Matt Galloway. "And what I found stunned me."

Inside were nearly 200 pages of information about dozens of Jewish women who fought the Germans from inside ghettos — separate districts that German occupation authorities created during the Holocaust to isolate Jews from non-Jewish communities. The book had been published in 1946 to tell American Jews what Jewish women accomplished during the resistance, and was filled with chapter titles like Weapons, Ammunition, and Partisan Combat.

"It was simply nothing like any Holocaust narrative that I'd ever heard," Batalion said.

Now she's written about the often-forgotten stories of those women in her new book, The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler's Ghettos.

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