Once, unable to return to the ghetto on her usual route because dogs were barking and curfew had passed, Vitka stumbled into a German shooting range. She was nearly gunned down. She pretended to be lost and approached a Nazi in tears. The soldier pitied her and ordered two others to walk her out. She claimed later that whenever she was in a dangerous situation, she was overcome by an “icy calm,” a sense that she was viewing the situation from a distance, and, as such, was able to assess it and proceed in a way that would extricate her safely.
On a warm July night, she exited the ghetto with two boys and a girl. Slender Vitka usually slipped in and out of cracks in the ghetto wall, but this time she led them over chimneys and rooftops. Under their jackets, pistols, grenades, and a detonator. Under her jacket, a bomb built by Abba, made from a pipe. （Ruzka was part of the Paper Brigade, a group that smuggled Jewish books for safekeeping. In Vilna’s Yiddish Scientific Institute, or YIVO, library, she came across a Finnish pamphlet, written when the Nordic country was preparing for a Russian invasion. The pamphlet provided a course in guerilla warfare and building bombs, including diagrams. This became their recipe book.）
Vitka led the group to the perfect spot that she’d found and, in darkness, affixed the contraption to the tracks, looking up intermittently to check for the approaching train. Then she hid with her fighters in the woods. Suddenly the rushing locomotive—a wild orange blazed through the sky. Vitka ran by the train as it sped, lobbing additional grenades. Then the train derailed, cars lay smoking, the engine sunk in the gorge. Germans shot madly into the forest, killing the girl she’d brought with her. Vitka buried her in the forest, then ran back to the ghetto before dawn. Though in the coming seasons, wrecking Nazi trains would become common subversion among partisans, at the time, Vitka’s was the first such act of sabotage in all of occupied Europe.
A few days later an underground newspaper reported that Polish partisans had blown up a train transport, killing more than two hundred German soldiers. The SS killed sixty peasants in the nearest town as retribution. “This is not something I felt guilty about,” Vitka said later. “I knew that it was not me killing these people—it was the Germans. In war, it is easy to forget who is who.”
After that, Vitka constantly crept in and out of the ghetto, helping two hundred comrades escape to the forest. She spent days wandering through Vilna, walking dozens of miles, searching for areas where groups of Jews could pass without being noticed. Vitka used to see them off. First, though, she’d take them to a cemetery where guns and grenades had been buried in a fresh grave. （“The Germans did not allow one living person through the [ghetto] gate,” Ruzka once wrote, “but the dead were allowed to leave.”） Vitka distributed the weapons to her comrades, explained the route she’d scouted for them and kissed each one good-bye. She herself was one of the one hundred FPO fighters to stay in the ghetto to fight. Her battalion was immediately ambushed. One of the only survivors: Vitka. “She had just walked off, her strides carefree and confident, like she had somewhere else to be,” a chronicler later described. “No one stopped her.”
Without the Jewish public’s support, the FPO’s dream of a grand ghetto battle was a shattering disappointment, with only a few shots fired. Arranged and led by Vitka, the fighters escaped the ghetto through Vilna’s sewers and reached the forest, raring to fight, energized to shift gears from defense to offense. Abba became the commander of the Jewish brigade, which was split into four divisions. He led the “Avenger” unit, while Vitka commanded her own scouting corps.
In the forest, the Soviet officers with whom their brigade was affiliated told Abba to build a family camp to house the girls, who would do cooking and sewing. Kovner, recognizing no difference between men and women, refused. Everyone who could fight would fight, he said. Everyone would borrow a weapon from the communal arsenal and get a chance to restore their self-respect. Plus, he’d witnessed the remarkable courage of these women. According to Vitka, Abba insisted that at least one girl go on every mission, even though the boys were not pleased—the explosives could weigh up to ten kilos, the treks thirty miles, and most girls did not share in the carrying.