“For Freedom, for Fairness”: A Conversation with Judy Batalion

Los Angeles Review of Books
July 17, 2021

MONTREAL-BORN AUTHOR and essayist Judy Batalion, who wrote White Walls: A Memoir About Motherhood, Daughterhood, and the Mess in Between, embarked on an entirely different project more than a decade ago while living in London, pursuing her PhD in art history, and performing as an actor and comic. Batalion wanted to examine what it meant to be a descendant of Polish Holocaust survivors and how those relationships and history had affected her life. Inspired by the stories she’d heard in Hebrew school about resistance fighter Hannah Senesh, she was eager to research brave, Jewish women. What she found stunned her.

Senesh was far from the only female member of wartime resistance. In fact, Poland had had an incredibly intricate resistance effort, often led by women (like Zivia Lubetkin, who was part of the Warsaw Uprising, and Renia Kukielka, a courier and the woman gracing the cover of Batalion’s new book) who could more easily assimilate and pass for Catholic girls and women as they undertook risky missions. Every day, they smuggled people out of the ghettos, smuggled money, food, information, and weapons in, and perhaps most critically, helped Jews in Poland endure as Europe descended further and further into madness.

Batalion recently spoke with LARB about her new book, The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters In Hitler’s Ghettos.