They died with honour: Resistance to the Nazis in occupied Poland

TLS
July 23, 2021

In The Light of Days, Judy Batalion has uncovered a trove of unknown or forgotten information about the Holocaust of genuine import and impact. The book proceeds from an accidental discovery. In 2007, at the British Library, Batalion came upon a book published in Yiddish in 1946, called Women in the Ghettos. Luckily Batalion, who grew up in Canada in a family of Polish Holocaust survivors, can read Yiddish; and as she looked through the old volume, she realized that it contained entirely unfamiliar stories of Jewish women who were integral to anti-Nazi resistance during the Holocaust in Poland, and whose acts of wiliness, physical resilience and sheer fearlessness in the face of deadly danger belong in the annals of exceptional heroism.

Batalion locates her narrative in the context of Polish–Jewish relations, beginning with the interwar period, which witnessed both the rise of nationalist antisemitism in the newly independent Poland, and a flourishing of Jewish education and culture. (Warsaw alone saw the publication of 180 Jewish newspapers in Yiddish, Hebrew and Polish.) The period also saw the creation of several Jewish youth groups, whose ideology ranged from Zionism to socialism and the Bund, which believed in solving problems within Poland itself. All the groups contained charismatic and well-educated women, including The Young Guard, which had a “dual leadership structure”, with “Father” and “Mother” figures taking on different roles, and which advocated “analysis of interpersonal relationships”, even as they (like other groups) read Marx and Freud, Rosa Luxemburg and Emma Goldman.

In the pre-war period, these groups drew on youthful enthusiasm and optimism to play and work together, and to imagine better futures. But when occupied Poland became the centre of the Nazi extermination project, the groups were crucial to resistance activities, not only for strategic reasons, but because solidarity and camaraderie gave their members the conviction and courage to perform deadly dangerous tasks. As news of relatives’ deaths reached them with increasing frequency, the groups really did become their families.

In telling the story of the darkest years, Batalion focuses on the figure of a young woman named Renia, who came from a small provincial town, and while still in her teens, was initiated into a Labor Zionist group called “Freedom” by her older sister. Renia was well-educated, spoke Polish without a Yiddish accent, and favoured fashionable clothes. These were distinct advantages when she had to hide…