THE LIGHT OF DAYS | BOOK FEATURE
Rhonda Lee Reali takes a deep dive into a new work by Judy Batalion, a Canadian author seeking to highlight what the book’s subtitle calls the “untold story” of women’s role in the Jewish resistance against the Holocaust.
The Warsaw ghetto during World War II, into which the Nazis forced over 400,000 Jews. Photographs of a family marched out, of female fighters before their execution. Films such as Partisans Of Vilna and others, about the Warsaw ghetto and Sobibor revolts and escape. TV series Holocaust, from 1978, featured Tovah Feldshuh’s superb portrayal of a Jewish Czech who joins partisans. Books detailing life in the ghettos, pushbacks and battles and Jewish women heroines – poet Hannah Senesh probably the best known.
Now added to this canon is Judy Batalion’s The Light Of Days. Subtitled Women Fighters Of The Jewish Resistance: Their Untold Story, it’s an intense and absorbing retelling of female Jews among the resistance in Poland. Though women have led and fought battles throughout history, war and military books are predominantly written by, about and for men. In this context, Batalion’s book is a revelation. Most of these women’s stories were left untold, mainly because of their premature deaths, but the author brings their forgotten experiences and actions to light and life. Notably, it’s set to become the basis for a movie, directed by Steven Spielberg and with Batalion [pictured, top] writing the screenplay.
The author’s grandparents and other family were Polish Jews who lived through the Holocaust; raised in a community of survivors, Batalion wanted to write about strong Jewish women and had learned about Senesh in school. Now studying in London, she visited the British Library to find out more. One book she ordered, Freuen In Di Ghettos (Yiddish for Women In The Ghettos), was published just after WWII but went out of print, its recollections and stories falling by the wayside. It demonstrated, though, the depth of this sisterhood, who eventually would be overlooked and forgotten.
It took Batalion 12 years to write this book, scouring through thousands of books, memoirs, diaries, letters, photographs and testimonies in several languages; travelling worldwide to meet families and descendants of the women cast in The Light of Days. From a list of hundreds of women, she concentrates on 20 or so. One, Renia Kukielka, forms the nucleus of the book: almost 15 when Poland was invaded, Renia had to grow up fast after she and her older sister Sarah were separated from their family.
The majority were from Zionist or political youth movements such as Freedom and The Young Guard, were in their teens and twenties, and all came under the banner of the Jewish Fighting Organization – ZOB, in its Polish-language acronym. Some had specific duties, others a dangerous variety. Kashariyot, or couriers, carried ammunition, weapons, explosives, fake papers and passports [pictured, above], food, letters, money and medicine – on their bodies, concealed inside handbags or bread. Others collected intelligence, were assassins or saboteurs, blowing up German transport trains and towns’ waterworks and electricity. They paid off Gestapo guards in liquor, food and other favours. “Human radios” relayed news, including devastating revelations of mass killing, from outside the ghettos. If heroism is a word applied too frequently today, these young heroines were truly undeterred at tremendous risk to themselves, rarely betraying their fellow Jews, even under torture.
We are taken, in a descriptive sense, on missions spelling certain death if discovered – throughout occupied Poland and into the Soviet Union, then Third Reich territory. These young women were chosen over men for such tasks for various reasons: while boys went to religious schools to study sacred texts, Polish girls’ education meant they learned the country’s culture, customs, cooking, gestures – and spoke the language without a Yiddish accent. Many could “pass” as Poles with a non-semitic appearance, and avoid the Jewish male issue of circumcision and the “pants-drop test”.
Batalion doesn’t flinch when it comes to the Nazis’ particularly sadistic ways of rape and murder, giving examples of Jewesses at parties being shot like moving targets at a funfair while made to dance. Others were exploited as naked servants, abused and disposed of. Dogs weren’t only used to hunt and rip apart escapees, Germans utilized them to violate women, also. And then there were the “joy divisions” – sex slave areas in the camps.
Of more than 1,000 ghettos throughout central and eastern Europe – including ones for non-Jews, and over 400 ghettos opened in Poland alone – Jewish underground groups operated in around 90 of them, Batalion informs us. The Warsaw ghetto uprising, beginning on the eve of Passover in April 1943 and ending a month later, was the largest, with over 100 Jewish women fighting; we are there at the headquarters of the resistance, then escaping through Warsaw’s sewers with a small group of survivors. Other revolts and smaller defiant acts occurred, and we witness these through the eyes of young female fighters coming and going from the ghettos.
Why have these incredible women and their feats been sidelined in history? Batalion puts forward many reasons. Writing about fighters might lead to “judging those who did not take up arms, and ultimately blaming the victim,” or even give the impression the Holocaust was ‘not that bad.’ Post-war, the new state of Israel’s leaders favoured a policy of highlighting those who fought for their country over Holocaust survivors. Sexism reared its head: “For many female survivors, silence was a means of coping. They felt it was their duty to create a new generation of Jews. Women kept their pasts secret in a desperate desire to create a normal life for their children, and, for themselves.”
And the main, heartwrenching fact: most of these young women were killed. Several female fighters had a chance to escape and chose not to. They wanted to die with dignity, extracting some vengeance and fighting to the last. Conversely, it’s a relief that as many of these freedom fighters survived as they did, and it’s deeply moving to learn of their lives after the Shoah.
The scope of this work is wide: with many women to keep track of, the book jumps between them, though the timeline is chronological. A reference map and list of characters are valuable inclusions. Various fighters’ names are dropped in like parachutists, some never mentioned again. Notes are extensive but very informative, Batalion having a matter-of-fact way of writing about history; written mostly as third-person narratives, this lends a tone almost like a historical novel and adds to the “you are there” experience, though I would have preferred the character’s experiences told in first-person.
The Light Of Days chronicles these courageous women’s tales of remarkable deeds, gives back their voices and honours them with a labour of love. It’s a landmark book that needs to be in curriculums and libraries, keeping these names and memories alive: a fitting remembrance to those women who fought back and lived to tell their stories, and those who did not.
The Light Of Days is published by Virago. Price: £20. Info: here.
A discussion between Judy Batalion and Molly Crabapple, livestreamed in April, is also available to view here.
words RHONDA LEE REALI photos BEOWULF SHEEHAN