Five Best: On Resistance

Wall Street Journal
Sept. 3, 2021

Selected by Jennifer Chiaverini, the author, most recently, of the novel ‘The Women’s March.’

The Light of Days
By Judy Batalion (2020)

1. “The Light of Days” illuminates the compelling if little-known stories of the courageous young women, some of them still in their teens, who helped turn youth groups into resistance cells in Nazi-occupied Poland. “These were women who acted with ferocity and fortitude—even violently,” Judy Batalion writes, “smuggling, gathering intelligence, committing sabotage, and engaging in combat.” Underestimated because of their gender but better able to conceal their Jewish identity than their male comrades, “ghetto girls” like the 18-year-old stenographer Renia Kukielka and the glamorous 23-year-old Tosia Altman were well-suited for the dangerous role of courier. Disguising themselves as Aryan Poles so they could travel between locked ghettos and occupied towns, they smuggled cash, weapons and forged documents, in addition to assisting Jews in hiding. They were, the resistance-fighter Chaika Grossman wrote in tribute to them after the war, “the nerve-centers” of the movement.