Ruzka was selected to go on the initial Jewish-led sabotage operation, along with four men; they were to hike forty miles and blow up a munitions train. Back in the ghetto, Ruzka, whose trusting, calm demeanor earned her the moniker “Little Sister,” not only smuggled books but also recruited fighters, maintained fervor, and was second in command in the ghetto fighting unit. Abba knew her toughness would prove the worth of Jewish women in combat.
Ruzka and the men set out early evening in the freezing cold, each one carrying a gun and two grenades. Tiny Ruzka insisted on taking her turn carrying the mine, which weighed more than fifty pounds. They crossed frozen paths to a river, where water flowed just under the surface. The unit had to traverse with all their ammunition by inching along a log. Ruzka fell in. She caught the log and hauled herself up, even though her legs were numb and heavy. The commander saw her soaking wet and ordered her back to camp so she wouldn’t freeze to death. But she insisted on staying: “You will have to put a bullet in my head to keep me from this mission.” So, a few miles later, the group broke into a peasant home and stole dry clothes for Ruzka—men’s clothes, which she had to roll up and stuff with socks. Then they held a peasant at gunpoint, and he directed them to their site. Fifty Nazi soldiers were killed as a result of the mission, and a storehouse of German weapons destroyed.
“I remember our first ambush on the Germans as if it happened today,” Ruzka wrote later. “The greatest happiness for me since the war first broke out was that moment when I saw, lying in front of me, a destroyed car with eight smashed Germans. We carried it out. I, who thought I was no longer capable of feeling happiness, celebrated.” Ruzka became the patrol unit commander.
Alongside her daring combat duties, Ruzka was also the quartermaster. Life in the forest could be surprisingly developed. Partisan camps differed based on location and how long they were staying put, but some encompassed a whole village of underground huts, with a clubhouse, printing press, infirmary, transmission radios, cemetery, and “shvitz bath” made by heating stones in water. Food, boots, clothes, coats, and supplies were mainly stolen from peasants, often at gunpoint. Partisans cooked only at night to avoid the smoke revealing their location. They filled containers pilfered from villagers with water from springs and rivers that were sometimes located hours away from camp. In the winter, they melted snow and ice for drinking water, and slept dozens in a row in underground, camouflaged ziemlankas: dugouts made of branches and logs, covered with grass and leaves, and sloping so that snow would not collect. From aerial and side views, the ziemlankas resembled brushy ground, little hills. These well-built hideouts were crowded, the air “putrid and nauseating.”
In the Avengers, Ruzka ran camp health. Flu, scurvy, lice, pneumonia, scabies, rickets, gum disease, and skin sores from lack of vitamins proliferated. （Vitka once lent her coat out, and it came back full of lice. She threw her coat over a horse and let all the insects transfer to the animal.） Ruzka established laundry: twice a week, partisans brought their clothes to a pit where they were boiled in water and ashes. She assessed their frostbite. She divided bread rations—a treasure among the exclusively meat-and-potatoes diet—and gave it to the sick.
Medications, like weapons, were hard to come by, and both were retrieved by couriers who trekked to Vilna. Tiny, golden-haired, blue-eyed Zelda Treger was a major kasharit. In her quiet but determined way, she completed eighteen trips from the forest to the city, traveling solo on pathless routes through swamps and lakes. Zelda was raised by her dentist mother who died when Zelda was fourteen. She studied to be a kindergarten teacher. When war broke out, she escaped the ghetto and found work on a Polish farm where the farmer registered her as a family member, giving her an official Christian identity. Months later, Zelda developed an infection from a hand injury and returned to the ghetto, seeking Young Guard comrades and joining the FPO.
Thanks to her looks, Zelda immediately became a kasharit, transporting weapons in coffins and wrapped as peasant parcels. She found routes for fighters escaping to two different forests （one, some 125 miles away） and chaperoned groups out of the ghetto. She fought in the small revolt, then helped Vitka run the sewer escape. She aided in the rescues of hundreds of Jews from labor camps and ghettos, bringing them to the forest. She was caught on several occasions, but always escaped, often playing a na?ve countrywoman, acting like a devout Christian peasant who was visiting her sick grandmother, or stammering and pretending to be mentally ill, or simply grabbing her papers and fleeing.