The Light Of Days Unearths the Story of the Unsung Heroines of Hitler's Warsaw Ghetto

Daily Express
April 20, 2021

ZIVIA Lubetkin was ready for death. The shattered, burning buildings and corpse-strewn streets of the wartime Warsaw Ghetto, created to house Jews before they were deported to extermination camps, had been the backdrop to her existence for weeks. The Nazi "aktions" against Jews in the Polish capital were increasing in barbarity and regularity by the start of 1943.

As a mainstay of the ZOB (Jewish Fighting Organisation), Zivia was one of the leading female resistance fighters who, incredibly, managed to strike blows against the mass murder being committed against her people. Now on the morning of January 18, as German soldiers began searching houses in the ghetto, looking to root out the remaining Jews, hidden in bunkers and cellars, the moment for Zivia’s fighting unit had come. With only four hand grenades and four shotguns between them, Zivia knew it was highly likely she would be killed – but at least she would die with honour.

“For six months, Germans had been murdering Jews but not a single shot had been fired against them,” says Judy Batalion, author of a new book, The Light Of Days, which details the forgotten female “ghetto girl” heroes of the Jewish resistance.

All that was about to change.

As Nazi troops stormed into the apartment building on Warsaw’s Zamenhofa Street, the soldiers saw nothing except a group of huddled, passive looking Jews, seemingly resigned to their fate.

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