Brave Women Fighting Nazis in ‘The Light of Days’

The Boston Globe
April 15, 2021

The Polish Jewish heroines of “The Light of Days” threw off gender norms and ghetto constraints to resist Nazism, and sometimes survived to tell their stories.

A multilingual museum curator and the granddaughter of Polish Holocaust survivors, Judy Batalion first stumbled on their accounts in an unexpectedly riveting Yiddish-language book in the British Library. “I was jolted by these tales of agency,” about “women who acted with ferocity and fortitude — even violently,” she writes.

Batalion’s discovery launched an emotionally fraught 12-year project. Steven Spielberg, whose 1993 Oscar-winning classic “Schindler’s List” also foregrounded Holocaust heroism, has optioned the film rights to her book.

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