First, though, Vitka had to carry out her mission. That morning, amid the workers and who went about their day as if all were normal, she seethed with hatred and found her targets. The boys would blow up the waterworks （the city’s sewers and taps）; the girls, the electrical transformers （the city’s lights）。 At dusk, the boys climbed down a manhole and planted the bomb. The girls entered Vilna’s factory area along the river. The humming electrical transformer grids were completely open. But Vitka’s mines—covered in paint—would not stick. They kept slipping, the clock ticking. Vitka furiously scratched away the paint with her nails until her fingers bled. The girls hid in the shadows, holding their breath each time German patrols passed. It took twenty minutes, but they managed it. Both boys and girls had set their timers for four hours.
The boys were tired and wanted to rest that night at the fur factory, but Vitka insisted that after the bombs went off, security would be tightened, and it would be dangerous to travel. The boys would endanger the lives of everyone in the factory. The boys scoffed: the Germans would never suspect the Jews of such a massive attack! The argument went back and forth. Eventually Vitka knew she was running out of time. She told Sonia to bring her all the people who were ready to leave—she was taking them to the forest immediately. The boys stayed.
Within an hour, Vitka was leading a group of sixty Jews down dark roads, out of the city. They heard the bombs explode and saw Vilna go black.
The next day, the boys were caught. “We made it, and the boys did not,” Vitka said, “because they were tired and we were tired, too, but the women were stronger than the men.” The women, Vitka felt, were guided by a moral code. Not only were they as capable fighters as the men, but also they did not relent, took risks, and rarely made excuses to get out of things. “Women had more stamina,” she reflected.
Years later, explaining why she smuggled those factory Jews into the forest against the commander’s orders, Vitka was nonplussed. “What can he do?” she had asked herself at the time. “If the sixty Jews come in . . . they’ll remain. And I will have disobeyed an order. No great tragedy!”
“She didn’t know what fear was, her heart did not know to be afraid,” Ruzka said of Vitka. “She was always sweet, full of energy and initiative.”
Ruzka, Vitka, Zelda, and the Jewish partisans continued to work through the difficult winter of 1943–44. They learned to walk without leaving footmarks in the snow; sometimes they walked backward to make it seem like they were going in the opposite direction. They blew up vehicles and structures, and invented safer types of bombs to do so. In 1944, Jewish partisans alone destroyed fifty-one trains, hundreds of trucks, dozens of bridges. They used their bare hands to rip down telephone poles, telegraph wires, and train tracks. Abba broke into a chemical factory and set barrels on fire, burning down a bridge. The Germans couldn’t cross the frozen lake. The Nazis and Jews just stood and stared at one another, the roaring flames reflected in the ice between them.
One April morning, the sun out, the girls were laughing and joking, and Abba approached with a sad smile. “Where am I going?” Vitka asked, sensing his mood.
She left for Vilna with a manifesto for the Communist rebels of the city to revolt, as well as a list of necessary medicines. En route, an old peasant saw Vitka and asked if she could join her for the journey. They crossed a bridge, and suddenly the peasant whispered to a Lithuanian soldier, standing with a Nazi. A partisan and a Jew, Vitka was worth a hefty reward.
Vitka was asked to hand over her papers. The Lithuanian deemed them phony. The German said she had blonde hair. The Lithuanian said, “But the roots are black.” Her clothes, he argued, were singed from partisan bonfires. Her eyelash tips, white.
Vitka ripped the manifesto and threw it in the air, but the peasant grabbed the pieces and handed them to the soldiers. They searched her and found the medicine list. “For people in my village,” she tried. They sent her to the Gestapo.
Vitka sat in the back of their horse cart, talking about her Catholic girlhood, not believing that this, here, now, was her end. Torture, then murder. Should she jump and have them shoot her in the forest? She watched their every twitch, noted each bump in the road, waiting for her moment.