When Judy Batalion moved from Canada to England she realized that not everywhere in the world could she proclaim her Jewishness. Having arrived in London at the turn of the millennium in her early twenties, she worked in an art gallery and moonlit as a stand-up comedian at night.
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As she juggled the two worlds, she realized that the British preferred she keep her Jewish identity to herself, in complete contrast to the open and free environment she grew up in back in Montreal.
In an effort to deal with the unfamiliarity of her new surroundings, Batalion decided to write a show dedicated to the only Jewish heroine she had learned about in school: Hannah Senesh. While searching for material, she came across a book at the British Library that piqued her curiosity. Little did she know that it would change her plans for the show, and to a certain extent, even her life.
It was a Yiddish book published in 1946 titled "Freuen in di Ghettos" ("Women in the Ghettos") comprising a collection of memoirs of young Jewish women who revolted against the Nazis in Poland. Batalion, who knew Yiddish from home as she comes from a family of Holocaust survivors from Poland, was amazed to discover the courageous stories of the Jewish heroines she had never heard about before.
Thus began Batalion's long and personal journey into the history of Jewish women who participated in the underground movement in Poland, and other countries under German occupation. It resulted in her work, "The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler's Ghettos," which has recently been translated and published in Hebrew.
It details how the women refused to surrender to fate and worked to save other Jews, gather intel and smuggle weapons, and actively participate in the uprisings that erupted in dozens of ghettos across occupied Eastern Europe.
Working on this book was indeed a personal journey for me, even though my family was not involved in the underground activities, Batalion told Israel Hayom. It was a journey designed to allow me to better understand my heritage and my family in the context in which my parents grew up, fled, and survived. I did set out with the intention of writing such a book.
I spent my youth running away from the subject of my family background and the Holocaust. My parents were survivors from Poland. The period of their survival was very difficult, they had many emotional difficulties, which were passed on to future generations.
There was darkness and heaviness around the family past. When I became a teenager, I tried to escape it in different ways, to be the opposite of my family. I grew up in a house of hoarding and became a minimalist, I moved from a Yiddish-speaking home to London, where I worked in an art gallery in an environment where Yiddish was never heard. I spent a lot of time trying to break the connection with that heavy and suffocating personal history.
Q: Did your grandparents speak about their experience during the war?
My grandmother shared what she had gone through, which is quite rare. She would talk about it with great anger. I was very close to her. She was the one who raised me. We would watch TV comedies in her living room or the dining room, and then she would start talking with great rage: 'My sisters were murdered, turned into soap.' My grandfather never talked about it. My mother was born in 1945 and grew up in Poland, where her parents returned in an attempt to rebuild their lives. It didn't work so they left. But my mother doesn't talk about what she went through either. I don't think she had many memories of those days.
Batalion continued, Sixteen years ago, when I was living in London, I started thinking about this issue, about my Jewish identity and the trauma that was passed down the generations. It was the first time in my life that I was not in a Jewish community. I was "the only Jew in the village." I am a very anxious person, and then I started thinking how much this anxiety stems from my personal background, how much the Holocaust tradition shaped me and my reaction to daily threats, and how I deal with danger, with risk. And so I decided to write about women who faced threats and dangers.
Batalion, 45, now living in New York, has a PhD in art history, which is why she wanted the book to have a historical basis.
I thought to myself, what Jewish did I know of that faced danger? And immediately Hannah Senesh came to mind, she recalled. I was interested not in her character as a heroine, but rather I wanted to understand the intricacies of the soul of a person who acts heroically. Who decides to go fight the Nazis? What poet decides to jump out of a plane? What was the motivation behind her behavior, courage, and conviction? That's what I wanted to understand. I was looking for a biography of her, a study that treated her as a three-dimensional character and not just as a simplistic narrative of a heroine.
I went to the British Library and looked for books about Hannah Senesh. There weren't many, so I ordered them all, and among them, I found an unusual, old, Yiddish book, with a blue cover and golden letters, called "Women in the Ghettos." I started to look through it. Senesh was mentioned only in the last few pages, but I found dozens of stories about young Jewish women, some in their teens, who fought the Nazis mainly from the ghettos in Poland.
It had photographs, essays, and poems, and chapters with titles like "Ammunition", "Partisan Combat," "Poem for Rifles." I have never heard of these stories of Jewish women jumping off and blowing up trains. These were angry stories, screams against Nazism, and cries of pain for what had happened to their families. I could feel their suffering. That's when the project was actually born, and since then, in one way or another, I've been working on it until its completion.
Q: What was special about the women who fought the Nazis, and how were they different from the men?
Women contributed to the resistance movement in a different way than men. It was easier for Jewish women to pretend to be Christian and this allowed them to do work on the Arian side, outside the ghettos and camps. One of the obvious reasons is because of circumcision Jewish men were easily identifiable.
If a man was suspected of being Jewish, he was demanded at gunpoint to take off his pants and underwear. Women did not have this identification on their bodies. Beyond that, Jewish women were more involved in non-Jewish society than men.
"In Poland, education was compulsory for both boys and girls. In many families, the boys were sent to Jewish schools, and the girls, to save on expenses, were sent to public ones. That was a generation of Jewish girls who were more educated than the boys and also spoke fluent Polish without a Yiddish accent. Their friends were Catholic. Although they did not know the Christian prayers, they knew about them. They also studied Polish history.
When men went on missions outside the ghettos and camps, they usually took women with them, they were the ones who conducted conversations with others, bought train tickets, or ordered coffee. The men were immediately recognizable by their accents. And of course, there was the sexist culture of the Nazis. They did not think that women were capable of engaging in resistance. Why would a pretty girl carry a bag full of ammunition? The Jewish girls used their femininity. They flirted with whoever they needed to, in order to avoid suspicion and capture.
Q: What kind of resistance tasks were the women assigned?
"They did everything. Mainly, they were the ones who did the work outside the ghettos and camps. They were the ones who made contact with outside parties and those in the ghettos and other camps. They passed on information, passed on the news to other communities, they were the first to pass on the news about the genocide that the Nazis were committing against the Jews.
Jews were not allowed to own radios or read newspapers in the ghettos. Thanks to the women who moved from ghetto to ghetto, they knew what was happening in the outside world. They also brought fake certificates, medicine, and supplies, underground newspapers, books. They would meet on the Arian side with arms dealers and smuggle weapons and ammunition – guns, pistols, explosives, materials for making bombs.
They also saved people and tried to get people out of the ghettos and camps, and move them to hide in cities, forests, or other places. They took care of those who were hiding, brought them supplies and money, and moved them to a different location when there was danger. But they also participated in guerrilla warfare inside the ghettos and camps and participated in uprisings in the ghettos. They threw Molotov cocktails and shot and assembled explosive devices. They also commanded units in the forests.
Q: There was also sexual exploitation, mainly of women who came to the partisan units. How common was it?
It's hard to say because women didn't talk about it, during and after the war. Women were afraid that if they told what happened to them, they would never be able to get married. So they kept quiet about the sexual exploitation they had gone through. It's hard to give a number, but some experts have written about it and I quote them in my book. They estimate that this was a fairly common occurrence.
Q: And what happened to these women after the war?
A significant part of "The Light of Days" deals with the post-war period, Batalion continued. It speaks about not only how some of them survived, but how they survived the survival, how they continued with their lives. It speaks about the different characters, who had different reactions and answers later in their lives. Some of them put the past behind them, as much as they could. It was very important to them to start anew, move on, and not talk about what happened.
Some of them had very rich and full lives after the war. For others, the trauma was not something they could overcome, and their lives were much more difficult after the war. One of the women, unfortunately, committed suicide.
One of the most surprising things about the women of the Jewish resistance was how relatively easily they could enter and leave places that were seemingly blocked off – the ghettos and camps, and even travel within Poland.
I was also most amazed by this, Batalion said, even more than the stories about obtaining ammunition. I didn't know at all that people could leave the ghettos other than for forced labor. In my mind, it was not possible. In retrospect, it is not so simple, and many women were caught and murdered when they tried to sneak out. I am mainly referring to those who succeeded and carried out their tasks.
There were different ways to leave the ghetto, all dangerous and difficult. It varied from ghetto to ghetto, and there were hundreds of ghettos in Poland. In some, people could escape through the roofs of houses. In others, the border of the ghetto was a river, which could be crossed by swimming. There were also ghettos that were surrounded by houses with basements.
They could crawl through holes in the walls between basements or attics. They often bribed the guards of the ghettos. Sometimes some of the guards were agents of the resistance movement, so during their shifts, it was possible to escape. Women went in and out with groups of forced laborers.
For example, the Warsaw ghetto, which had the most famous uprising, had houses with separate entrances on the Jewish side and the Arian side, and you could pass between them. These women often walked around with money to pay a ransom to those who stood near the exits and looked for the escapees, so that they wouldn't be reported to the Gestapo. Sometimes they would enter the ghettos under the cars or jump on the trains and trucks. There were many ways.
In her book, Batalion also speaks about lesser-known ghetto uprisings too
Most weren't big or militarily successful, she said, but they happened. There were armed revolts in Czestochowa, Vilnius, Bedzin. The latest research I found shows that in 90 ghettos in Eastern Europe there were armed Jewish underground groups. Sometimes they had as few as two guns. But it certainly wasn't just the Warsaw ghetto uprising.
Q: You also describe a very problematic attitude on part of the Poles toward the Jewish population during the war.
My book is based mainly on the memories of these women. I tried to be their voice. That is, to tell the story from their point of view. In these stories, we see many Catholic Poles who betrayed the Jews, and also many Catholic Poles who helped the Jews. I think I left my research work on the book more sympathetic toward them.
Poland was an occupied country. When one of the heroines, Renia Kukielka, was arrested, the Nazis were sure she was a Christian, a member of the Polish underground, and she was brutally tortured, not as a Jew but as a Christian Pole. This complexity gave me more understanding.
Q: In your opinion, why weren't the stories of these brave women known until now?
I thought about this a lot, and there was a point where I thought the book should deal with this question: Why are their stories not known? What happened to the stories of the Holocaust and how were they shaped? I think this is due to personal reasons, the spirit of the times, and partly political reasons.
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Many of these women were killed, and their stories died with them. Of those who survived, most didn't share their experiences, sometimes because they were not believed or because they were accused of acting only to ensure their survival. I have often heard the claim that "the pure souls were murdered and those who survived did something immoral to survive." These women left their parents and families to join the underground. Most of them felt guilty about it.
There was one fighter from the Bialystok ghetto who wrote that she did not deserve to tell her story because compared to the suffering that other Jews went through in Auschwitz she did not suffer so much. Most of them were in their 20s. As a result of the war, they lost a significant part of their education and social development.
They moved to new countries that spoke a different language. They felt an obligation to give birth to children for the sake of the Jewish people and raise them in a normal atmosphere and environment. They didn't want to talk about the past. And so the stories were not told until a much later stage.
Q: Do you think history being mostly written by men has anything to do with it?
In this case, women were sometimes assigned the task of documenting what happened during the war. But they concentrated on the male characters. They often made sure to be objective in what they wrote and avoided writing personal stories. But yes, history is usually recorded and told by men. But in the last decade, many more stories have emerged about women as part of the feminist movement.
Q: And how has writing the book impacted you personally?
I was also trapped in the idea of Jewish passivity during the war, and I followed it unconsciously, and here I discovered that the Jews during the Holocaust were constantly in a state of resistance, defiance, and struggle. But they faced a brutal and sadistic military force that murdered them. The book changed my understanding of what happened then. On a personal level, I came to the topic out of interest in how trauma that trauma was passed down in my family. But it is not only trauma that gets passed down the generations, but strength and power, courage, passion, and compassion too. I realized that I inherited trauma, but also passion and courage.
