(Courtesy of Merav Waldman) The Light of Days highlights the incredible tenacity of Renia Kukielka, one of the youngest ghetto girls. They even used an 11-year-old American boy, Donald Heath, to be a carrier of secrets that could be smuggled out of the country alerting the rest of the world of the atrocities being committed by the Nazis. You have reached your limit of 4 free articles. 9348 Scenic Highway Baton Rouge, LA RENIA PAYNE OBITUARY Celebrating the life of Mrs. Renia Carter Payne. Judy Batalion: I was slow with this book because it was so challenging emotionally, intellectually and practically. (Beowulf Sheehan). This was a horrific genocide, and these were teenagers who tried to organize to overcome.. 2023 Advance Local Media LLC. Im writing here in the U.S., where a huge percentage of the millennial population doesnt even know what Auschwitz is, she says, referring to the 2018 survey that found two-thirds of millennials had never heard of the death camp. In 2007, while living in London, Batalion, then in her 20s, was researching Hannah Senesh, the young Jewish heroine of World War II who was executed by the Nazis. Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Prices start at $65 per year. Along with other scholars I interviewed, he suggests that a myth of Jewish passivity was perpetrated by Israels early politicians. She channeled her torment into words. Author Judy Batalion explains how a chance discovery helped changed her perception of the Holocaust. One such example of cultural resistance is provided by Batalion through the biography ofHenia Reinhartz, a young woman in the ghetto of Lodz. Political forces have also shaped how Holocaust narratives are constructed, and this differs among countries and communities. Haviva Reich was also a paratrooper; shed convinced an American pilot to blind-drop her in Slovakia, where she organized shelter for thousands of refugees, rescued Allied service members, and helped children escape. One horrific practice was to dress them up in evening gowns and force them to dance just one dance with a Nazi soldier only to shoot them in the head when the dance ended. These women were literally jumping off trains, running between towns, getting dressed up, dyeing their hair. Niuta Teitelbaum as a schoolgirl in od, 1936. Her grandparents escaped from Warsaw to Siberian work camps, and her mothers was born in then Soviet-ruled Kyrgyzstan as the war raged. Its very tricky to tell a story about the Holocaust, because I want to explain the deeply horrific nature of this genocide, but I also want to tell a story of the people that fought it. "It was an underground library,"she remembered many years later. Zivia Lubetkin speaking at Kibbutz Yagur, 1946. Women are achieving so muchright now. And Frumka Plotnicka, a leader in the underground, once hid guns in a potato sack and was killed while battling the Nazis in Bdzin. We were actors in a play that had no intermission.. Jewish resistance fighters Vitka Kempner, left, Ruzka Korczak, and Zelda Treger. Then, there, they got real married, altering their names yet again. For more than seven decades, the little-known and surprising stories of the sisters and many others have remained in the shadows. Author to speak on women of the underground during Holocaust Galvanised by largely left-wing youth activists and connected by mainly female couriers, Jewish defence groups were soon staging armed attacks and operations across occupied Poland. The reasoning: feminists should not politicize the story. Batalion hopes the stories of female heroism she resurrected serve to inspire future generations of all faiths, especially her own two daughters, both in elementary school. A few weeks on: hows that going? Her full name was Renia Kukielka, and she was brought up in Poland in the 1930s in a world of sophisticated Yiddish theater and literature, and some 180 Jewish newspapers. It was an unusual book for the British Library to hold, since it was in Yiddish. There is anotheryoung woman in the same room,Renia Kukielka. When caught, they would often be killed on the spot. Twenty-five years ago, I dont know how many women historians would be pitching to women agents and women editors who would have been supportive.". But 2007 wasnt the right time for her to emotionally commit to such a mentally exhausting project. Judy Batalion Knowing that there would be no mercy in capture, only torture and a brutal death, the women bribed executioners; smuggled pistols, grenades and cash inside teddy bears, handbags and loaves of bread; helped hundreds of comrades to escape; and seduced Nazis with wine and whiskey before killing them with efficient stealth. Including womens experiences helps us write a different story, one which has the potential to teach us new things about women, the Jewish people, and humanity.. Many of these women suffered terrible survivors guilt. Michigan had the highest population of Kukielka families in 1920. Email: padrealex@yahoo.com; Twitter: @padrehoboken. Anyone can read what you share. Yet, womens stories became mired in the politics and dismissed. Some of the young women Batalion showcases were partisans, literally fighting the Nazis deep within the forests of Eastern Europe. Women subjected to medical experiments often died, but some survivors were called Rabbits because they were deliberately disabled or a leg had been amputated without their consent to help a Nazi soldier who had lost his. In the larger context of the war, their victories were small and their sacrifices great. Renias older brother, Aaron, had been taken away as part of a roundup of young Jewish men and sent to a Nazi labor camp. Frumka Plotnicka died in combat against the Nazis, while Renia Kukielka and numerous other women acted as "messengers." Thats a huge number. But equally importantly, many were more familiar with Polish culture than their male peers and could blend in more easily. The Jewish underground obtained expensive fake papers that established Renias identity as a Catholic Pole. Women felt judged according to a lingering belief that while the pure souls perished, the conniving ones survived. Your IP: It is so deeply exciting for women to know that that's what our foremothers did. As if indiscriminate murder isnt the height of abuse, Batalion writes about the routine rape and sexual abuse of young Jewish women with Aryan features. Rainfall near a half an inch. You have permission to edit this article. Poignantly, Batalion adds,Reinhartz was reading the USnovel Gone with the Windwhile hiding to escape deportation. Together, these women will go on to become the face of female Jewish resistance to the Hitler regime in The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitlers Ghettos is out on Tuesday, published by William Morrow, priced $28.99. "And the second is the experience of women in the Holocaust, which has been addressed more and more in recent years, but certainly not before that.". Woman who allegedly gave birth in N.H. woods, left newborn in freezing tent, due in court Man whose body found in White Mountains on Christmas latest in troubling trend of lone It is also impossible not to read The Light of Days and see it as the current Polish governments worst nightmare in light of its controversial, some would say revisionist, stance regarding the role its citizens played in World War II: a book that presents the Holocaust in all its complexities, depicting some non-Jewish Poles as heroes but many others as aiding and abetting the Nazis or committing their own atrocities. Julie Wheelwright is the author of Sisters in Arms: Female Warriors from Antiquity to the New Millennium (Osprey, 2020). Why were women chosen for these tasks? Immediately post-war many of these stories were shared and even published. Against terrifying, oppressive odds, Renia lived to tell her story in a memoir she began writing at 19. These were stories of constant activity, and they drew me in. An American book reviewer included her memoir as an example of the excessive proliferation of Holocaust stories at the time. Renia Kukielka Herscovitch (or possibly Irena Kukelko Herskovitch or Renata Kukilka Neumann Herzcovitz) has endless English permutations. Why, Batalion wonders, had she not heard these womens stories before? They upheld the idea that European Jews were weak and that the new Israeli Jew was strong, which helped build morale for a developing country. Members of The Young Guard in Wocawek, Poland, during Lag BaOmer, 1937. 139.99.62.131 As men, women, the elderly and children were ordered to strip, a dozen women suddenly attacked their persecutors, scratching, biting and hurling stones. Most were still young: rather than becoming professional survivors they wanted to lead normal lives. Kukielkas story supplies the books narrative spine. Described by Batalion as a savvy, middle-class girl who happened to find herself in a sudden and unrelenting nightmare, she was just 15 when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. Together with their descendants, they return to the grounds of the infamous death camp. Batalion, who spent her mid-20s in London working as an art historian by day and stand-up comedian at night, is not a Holocaust scholar accustomed to reading graphic primary sources. That autumn, the Nazi occupying forces in the ancient town of Lubliniec, in southern Poland, had forced the Jewish community to assemble in the square. This is a visible source of pleasure to Batalion, but she remains humble in her conversation with DW. Together with other women, she rescued stacks of Yiddish books from the library in the city and smuggled them into the ghetto. When Batalion read Renias memoir she felt as if shed discovered a kindred spirit a thoughtful writer processing her experiences. Renia Kukieka and her eldest granddaughter, Merav Waldman, at Meravs sisters wedding, Israel, 2008. They forget that this is a profession, and like any profession, it has rules, strategy, . I wanted to understand what the ride from Krakow to Warsaw looked like from the train window and experience a taste of what they did, she said. (JTA) They hid revolvers in teddy bears and dynamite in their underwear. "It just felt like something I had to do,"she finally says. On Yom Hashoah, we light memorial candles and mourn the dead. Cloudflare Ray ID: 78baf86979572ea7 Judy Batalion introduces her groundbreaking study of Polish resistance against the Nazis by describing her 12-year search for the Jewish women who played a vital role. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. She has talked to survivors and their children and grandchildren all over the world. He compiled this 585-page tome of Jews who organized large-scale rescue operations across Europe. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our, Digital Politicians used Hannah Seneshs story to promote certain narratives of Israels historythis is one reason she became more well known. Renia Kukieka in Budapest, 1944. She almost set it aside, but the historian in her forced her to pick it up and examine it. For many years, memoirs and personal accounts were considered unreliable source material. When the Nazis invaded their hometown of Bdzin in 1939, the Kukielka family had fled to relatives in nearby Jdrzejw where they were later forced into a ghetto, one of the 400 established throughout the country. But soon into my sleuthing, I happened to come across a 1946 anthology about dozens of young Jewish women who took similar risks. She was shrewd, "While I was translating the book and reading about what the Germans had done to these Jewish women, I felt a great sense of shame. Find a copy of the Cleveland Jewish News. The Gestapo headquarters [in Warsaw] is a four-story building, its so regular which is equally troubling, in a way.. Neither do we. I worked on it in dribs and drabs when I could, Batalion said of her years of off-again, on-again research and writing. These rebel women had Polish, Hebrew, and Yiddish names, as well as nicknames. She visited the places that her heroines wrote and spoke about. Among them was Malka Zdrojewicz (right), who survived Majdanek extermination camp. In the bohemian 1970s, reports of violent rebellion were erased in favor of a focus on resilience and spiritual resistance. Low around 35F. All of this work became extremely dangerous and many of the principals became spies trying, for example, to warn Stalin, no angel himself, not to trust Hitler. Was the closure of the grammar schools really such a tragedy? Of course, Jewish men in the resistance performed heroic feats as well, but because of the womens ability to blend into the background they were often assigned more daring roles. Despite all the hardships and loss they endured, the young rebels would take time to practice makeshift holy days, like Sukkot, while hiding in the forest. With her sister Sarah, the Kukielka sisters were couriers for Freedom, one of the prewar youth movements that provided a network for the resisters. As a 15 The family was ultimately confined to the Jewish ghetto in their hometown. Renia Kukielka sewed fake IDs into her skirts to save Jewish lives in German-occupied Poland. These young people were outnumbered but many managed to escape. Germany boasts 1,700 years of Jewish history, but that history is often overshadowed by the Holocaust. All Rights Reserved. To them, this is Polish history; this is their story too. Renia Kukieka in Budapest, 1944. I think many of these rebels had strong impulses and trusted their gut and just moved.. It really startled me.. Or Zivia Lubetkin, who was in her mid-20s when she played a key yet long overlooked role in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1943 as part of the Jewish Fighting Organization (also known by its Polish acronym, the ZOB). She was expecting another "boring" elegy on female strength and courage. The 20 young Jewish women she spotlights lived remarkable lives during World War II, and its easy to see why Steven Spielbergs Amblin Entertainment snapped up the film rights at manuscript stage in 2018. There were a lot of balances to get right, Batalion notes. Shed published a book-length memoir in Hebrew in 1945, which had been popular among the Jewish community in Palestine; it was excerpted into Yiddish in Women in the Ghettos then fully translated to English in 1947 with a foreword by a founder of Brandeis University. Others were silenced by modesty, the disbelief they encountered, or the concern that focusing attention on active resisters implied criticism of others. Judy Batalionthe granddaughter of Polish Holocaust survivorstakes us back to 1939 and introduces us to Renia Kukielka, a weapons smuggler and messenger who risked death traveling across occupied Poland on foot and by train. So, things were silenced for many reasons, and a lot of it had to do with these women feeling very determined to create families, to create a new generation of Jews and they didnt want to hurt them. Through this painstaking work, she has managed to reconstruct a history that had been lost for decades in fact, one that has never been properly told: how Jewish women resisted the Nazi occupation in Poland. Judy Batalions powerful book refutes one of the abiding misconceptions about the second world war that the Jews of Europe went passively to their deaths. Many of these women knew each other, sharing news and contacts as well as their aims to rescue fellow Jews, to fight and if necessary die with dignity, and to leave a record of resistance. But the biggest initial challenge was to work out the chronology of events and how lots of separate stories might mesh together. 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