Elizabeth Michaelson Monaghan
April 5, 2021
Assassinating Nazis, escaping death via sewers, and saving fellow Jews in World War II Poland sounds like an action movie, but it was real life for the Jewish women profiled in
(HarperCollins, $28.99).
Author Judy Batalion first encountered these women in a 1946 Yiddish compilation about Jewish women in the resistance. The heroines, including Renia Kukielka, Tosia Altman, Chajka Klinger, Zivia Lubetkin, and others, so intrigued Batalion that she started researching their stories.
The Light of Days, with its more than 450 pages of narrative, hundreds of detailed footnotes, and 11-page bibliography, is the result.
Lilith has chronicled the stories of many of these women over the years. Most of the women who regularly risked their lives to rescue Jews and deliver news, medicines, and weapons were members of an organized, armed Jewish resistance that emerged from the Jewish youth movement that flourished in Poland between the wars.