pocket
„Lasst uns nicht wie Schafe zur Schlachtbank gehen.“ So redeten die Jugendlichen bei ihren Treffen. Der Satz fiel immer öfter, hatte sich eingepflanzt. Gerüchte machten die Runde, in den Lagern der Deutschen geschähen böse Dinge. Polnische Juden wurden deportiert und waren nie wieder gesehen. „Als wären sie in einem Abgrund versunken“, vertraute eine der jungen Zionistinnen ihrem Tagebuch an.
Es gab einen Moment, da ward das Reden vom Widerstand ein Schwur. Als ein Mädchen das Massaker in einem Wäldchen bei Wilna 1941 überlebte und erzählte. Sie war in einem Massengrab neben ihrer toten Mutter zu sich gekommen. Sie hatten sich nackt aufstellen müssen und waren in die Grube geschossen worden. 75.000 Juden waren es am Ende gewesen.
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Judy Batalion s new book, The Light of Days, details acts of heroism by Jewish women in the ghettos of eastern Europe - and even within the death camps. She documents how female couriers hand-carried crucial messages, weapons, and ammunition as part of the resistance in besieged Jewish ghettos. Special correspondent Malcolm Brabant presents the report for Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Read the Full Transcript
Judy Woodruff:
Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, now 76 years since the end of the Second World War in Europe.
A new book out this week, The Light of Days by Judy Batalion, details acts of heroism by Jewish women in the ghettos of Eastern Europe, and even within the death camps, who risked their lives to challenge the Nazis.
Renee Ghert-Zand is a reporter and feature writer for The Times of Israel.
From left: Renia Kukiełka in Budapest, 1944. (Courtesy of Merav Waldman); Tosia Altman (Courtesy of Moreshet, Hashomer Hatzair Archives); Courier Hela Schüpper (left) and Akiva leader Shoshana Langer disguised as Christians on the Aryan side of Warsaw, June 26, 1943. (Courtesy of Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum, Photo Archive)
Comrades from the pioneer training commune in Białystok, 1938. Frumka Płotnicka is standing second from the right. (Courtesy of Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum, Photo Archive)
Gusta Davidson (left) and Minka Liebeskind at an Akiva summer camp, 1938. They both became members of the Krakow ghetto underground. (Courtesy of Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum, Photo Archive)
Listen • 10:59 The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler s Ghettos by Judy Batalion. (Courtesy)
Host Peter O’Dowd speaks with
Judy Batalion, author of the new book “The Light of Days,” which tells the stories of young women resistance fighters in Polish Jewish ghettos during World War II.
Book Excerpt: ‘The Light Of Days’
By Judy Batalion
Spring 1943. It had been six months since Renia Kukiełka had arrived in Bedzin, a town in southwest Poland now annexed by the Third Reich. After fleeing a ghetto, escaping a forced labor camp, running through forests, jumping off a moving train, and pretending to be a Christian housekeeper, nervously genuflecting at weekly church services, she’d come here to join her sister in the Jewish underground. Renia, aged nineteen, quickly became a “courier” in Hebrew, a “kasharit,” or connector. “Courier girls” risked death to connect the locked ghettos where Jews wer