History News Network
April 4, 2021
In 1959, writing about the Holocaust, scholar Mark Bernard highlighted that Jewish resistance was almost always considered a miracle, ethereal, beyond research scope. Still today, this impression generally persists. And yet, Jewish defiance was everywhere during the war, carried out in a multitude of ways, by all types of people.
Read MoreHaaretz
April 4, 2021
It takes something special to be even more astounding than a Matt Gaetz alibi, but Judy Batalion’s new book, “The Light of Days,” achieves that and much, much more.
Read MoreThe Globe and Mail
April 2, 2021
My grandmother, “Bubbe Zelda,” raised me. On 1980s afternoons, she took me to Mackenzie King park in the Côte-des-Neiges neighbourhood of Montreal, a verdant area flanked by Jewish community centres. Bubbe had survived the Holocaust and frequently told me stories about the murdered sisters she so missed. I
Read MoreElle Canada
April 2021
As a Jewish girl growing up in Montreal, Judy Batalion saw Hannah Senesh—one of the few female resistors in the Second World War—as a role model for female Jewish bravado.
Read MoreSmithsonian Magazine
April 1, 2021
When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, sparking the beginning of World War II, the leaders of a Warsaw-based chapter of the Zionist HeHalutz youth movement instructed its members to retreat east. Initially, Frumka Płotnicka, a 25-year-old Jewish woman from the Polish city of Pinsk, complied with this request. But as historian Judy Batalion writes in The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler's Ghettos, “[F]leeing a crisis did not suit her, and she immediately asked … [to] leave the area where her family lived and return to Nazi-occupied Warsaw.”
Read MoreGood Morning America (Book Club)
April 1, 2021
This epic, sweeping tale of Jewish women resistance fighters in WWII is powerful, incredibly well-written by genius Judy Batalion, and truly changes history. Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment already has a big screen version of this in the works!
Read MoreJewish Telegraphic Agency
March 31, 2021
They hid revolvers in teddy bears and dynamite in their underwear. They learned how to make lethal Molotov cocktails and fling them at German supply trains. The girls with “Aryan” features who could pass as non-Jews flirted with Nazis – plying them with wine, whiskey and pastry before shooting them dead.
Read MoreWall Street Journal
March 30, 2021
They were nicknamed the “ghetto girls” but the label does not do justice to the defiant, mostly forgotten Eastern European Jewish women in their teens and 20s who, acting in resistance to the Nazis, undertook one mission impossible after another to disrupt the machinery of the Holocaust and save as many Jews as they could.
Read MoreLilith
March 22, 2021
Judy Batalion is a first-class disrupter. In her fascinating—and essential—new book, The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in in Hitler’s Ghettos(HarperCollins, $28.99) she cracks the myth of Jewish victimhood—and in particular Jewish women’s victimhood—wide open, and recounts so many instances of cunning and chutzpah that it will upend everything you thought you knew about the subject.
Read MoreHadassah Magazine
March 2021
It has been nearly 40 years since philosopher Joan Ringelheim and historian Esther Katz brought together Holocaust studies and women’s studies in the conference “Women Surviving: The Holocaust,” highlighting the lack of scholarship on gender issues during the cataclysm. Integrating women’s stories into Holocaust history is an ongoing task, and Judy Batalion’s extraordinary new book, The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos (HarperCollins), is an important part of the continuum of research begun at that historic 1983 conference in New York City.
Read MoreHey Alma
March 19, 2021
During World War II, armed resistance leader Zivia Lubetkin attacked German soldiers as they attempted to round up residents of the Warsaw Ghetto. Then she led fellow Jews to safety through the city’s sewer system.
Read MoreNew York Times
March 18, 2021
In 1943, Niuta Teitelbaum strolled into a Gestapo apartment on Chmielna Street in central Warsaw and faced three Nazis. A 24-year-old Jewish woman who had studied history at Warsaw University, Niuta was likely now dressed in her characteristic guise as a Polish farm girl with a kerchief tied around her braided blond hair.
Read MoreBustle
February 24, 2021
Renia Kukielka. Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell. Louise Little. Many may have forgotten their names and deeds, but these strong and influential women have been resurrected in a slate of new nonfiction titles. If your TBR needs a little nonfiction TLC, consider adding one of these seven books that celebrate history’s forgotten women to your list.
Read MoreDeadline
November 2, 2020
EXCLUSIVE: Amblin Partners is developing a screen adaptation to the soon to be released The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos from Canadian-born author Judy Batalion. The book documents the stories of female Jewish resistance fighters who served as saboteurs, couriers, and caretakers of those in hiding during the occupation of Poland during World War II.
Read MoreBooklist
June 1, 2020
Stories of Jewish women who resisted the Nazi regime have been woefully neglected in modern history. Their truths were overshadowed by male counterparts, censored, criticised, and occasionally regarded as outright false. Batalion (White Walls, 2016) sheds light on courageous women who came face-to-face with evil and refused to back down.
Read MoreThe Independent
May 29, 2020
Female suffering – and bravery – are themes running through some of the best novels and non-fiction books in June, another month in which publishers, booksellers and authors have battled the knock-on effects of the coronavirus pandemic.
Judy Batalion has written a fascinating history about a little-known group who took on the Nazis.
Read MoreReal Simple
June 2020
Ghetto Girls: Judy Batalion, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, documents the true story of a group of women resistance fighters during WWII. The Light of Days is about friendship, courage, love, loyalty, and resilience — and is written so vividly, it makes perfect sense Steven Spielberg has already optioned it.
Read MoreLibrary Journal
May 1, 2020
The month-long uprising that followed, as well as other acts of both visible and hidden defiance that occurred in Poland and other parts of Europe throughout World War II, form the backdrop for this fascinating account of the women involved in these resistance movements.
Read MorePublishers Weekly
March 28, 2020
Memoirist Batalion (White Walls) delivers a remarkable portrait of young Jewish women who fought in the Polish resistance during WWII.
Read MoreKirkus Book Review
February 24, 2020
“A welcome addition to the literature of the Shoah and of anti-Nazi resistance.”
Resounding history of Jewish women who fought the German invaders in World War II.
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