Sarah championed social equality and justice, and was especially keen on counseling young children. The Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum holds several photos of her at a training camp in the city of Poznán, two hundred miles from J?drzejów, in 1937. In one, she stands tall in front of a statue, wearing a tailored suit with a high collar, her hat tilted modishly to the side; she holds a book, serious, determined. The modern world was hers for the taking.
Women in Poland held both traditional and progressive roles, spurred on by a positivist education philosophy and by World War I, which had pushed them into employment. In the new republic, elementary school was mandatory, including for girls. Universities were opened to female students. Polish women received the vote in 1918, before most Western countries.
In western Europe, Jewish families were largely middle class and constrained by broader bourgeois mores, with women relegated to the domestic realm. But in the East, most Jews were poor, and out of necessity, women worked outside the home—especially in religious circles, where it was acceptable for men to study rather than toil. Jewish women were enmeshed in the public sphere: in 1931, 44.5 percent of Jewish wage earners were female, though they earned less than men. The average marriage age was pushed back to the late twenties, even thirties, largely due to poverty. This resulted in declining fertility and, in turn, women in the workplace. In fact, to some degree, their work-life balance resembled modern gender norms.
Centuries earlier, Jewish women were accorded “the right to know.” The invention of the printing press led to a proliferation of Yiddish and Hebrew books for female readers; religious rulings allowed women to attend services; new synagogue architecture included a female annex. Now Jewish women were poets, novelists, journalists, traders, lawyers, doctors, and dentists. In universities, Jews made up a large percentage of the female students, enrolled in mainly humanities and science programs.
While the Zionist parties were certainly not “feminist”—women did not hold public office, for example—young women experienced a degree of parity in the socialist youth realm. One youth group, The Young Guard, to which Renia’s older brother, Zvi, belonged, founded the idea of the “intimate group,” with a dual leadership structure. Each section was led by a man and a woman. “Father” was the learning leader, and “Mother,” the emotional leader; equally powerful, they complemented one another. In this family model, “their children” were like siblings.
These groups studied Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, as well as female revolutionaries like Rosa Luxemburg and Emma Goldman. They explicitly advocated emotional discussion and analyses of interpersonal relationships. Members were primarily in their late teens, an age where many women were more mature than the men and, consequently, became organizers. Women led self-defense training; they were taught to be socially conscious, self-possessed, and strong. The Pioneer （Hechalutz） Union, the umbrella organization that included several Zionist youth groups and promoted agricultural training for pioneer life in Palestine, had an emergency plan B in case of conscription to the Polish army, which put exclusively women in charge. Countless photos of 1930s youth show women standing alongside men, dressed in similar dark coats and belts, or work clothes and pants; they too hold up scythes like trophies and grasp sickles like swords, preparing for lives of hard manual labor.
Sarah was a devoted Labor Zionist. Bela, the sister between her and Renia, joined Freedom too, and Zvi was fluent in Hebrew. Renia, too young to join, spent her early teens absorbing her siblings’ passions, and one can picture her dropping in on meetings, sports games, and festivities—the little sister tagging along, taking it in, wide eyed.
In 1938 fourteen-year-old Renia was completing elementary school. A small group of Jewish students received general secondary education at the Coeducational District Secondary School in J?drzejów, but she was not able to attend high school. In some accounts, Renia blamed this on antisemitism; in others, she explained that she needed to earn money instead of continuing her studies. Many young women’s memoirs of the time speak of their ambitions to be nurses and even doctors, but perhaps J?drzejów’s more traditional setting, or Renia’s urgent financial needs, made her seek out a secretarial career. She enrolled in a stenography course, hoping to set off on a life of office work. Little did she know that the work she was soon to take on would be of a rather different nature.