Jewish Women Spied, Smuggled, and Sabotaged Under the Nazis’ Noses

Christian Science Monitor
April 19, 2021

In 1942, two years before his death at the hands of the Gestapo, Polish-Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblum, in a diary entry written from the Warsaw Ghetto, praised the courage of female resistance fighters. “How many times have they looked death in the eyes? How many times have they been arrested and searched?” he marveled. “The story of the Jewish woman will be a glorious page in the history of Jewry during the present war.” 

Alas, Ringelblum’s prediction did not come to pass. Instead, as Judy Batalion observes in her thrilling, devastating new book, “The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos,” the heroism of the female resisters has been largely forgotten. 

Batalion embarked on the project after coming across a neglected Yiddish volume in the British Library called “Women in the Ghettos,” published in 1946. The stories of young women “smuggling, gathering intelligence, committing sabotage, and engaging in combat” astounded her, not least because the author, whose grandparents were Polish Jews who fled the Nazis, had grown up thinking of escape as the only means of resistance available to Europe's Jews during the Holocaust.  

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