Renia peeped through a crack from the attic where she was hiding with her family. She saw the local streets illuminated by burning houses. People were crouched in garrets and basements, doors shuttered, windows locked. Renia heard the nonstop cackling of machine-gun fire, walls being demolished, moans, cries. She craned her neck to try to make out anything else: a whole part of town was engulfed in flames.
And then. A knock at their gate. It was an iron gate, sealed with iron rods, but the German soldiers were not deterred. They smashed the windows. Renia heard their footsteps as they entered the house. Her family quickly, quietly, pulled up the ladder to the attic. Renia sat holding her breath as she heard Germans below, rummaging through the home.
Then, silence. The Nazis had left.
Unlike many of their neighbors, whose homes were looted, and whose men and boys were taken outside to be shot in a courtyard, the Kukielkas were safe. Unlike the town’s wealthiest Jews, who were locked inside the grand synagogue which was doused in gasoline and set aflame, unlike locals who jumped out of burning buildings only to be shot in midair, Renia’s family was not found out. Not this time.
At nine o’clock the next morning, doors began opening. Renia carefully stepped out to digest the damage. One quarter of the population of Chmielnik, a town that had been 80 percent Jewish, had been burnt alive or shot.
That was night number one.
*
For ten days, as Renia’s shock began to thaw, a picture of her new life came into focus. Thirsty Jews were forbidden to go out on the streets to search for water. The roads stank of rotting cadavers. But after that, the Germans promised normalcy, promised no killing as long as people obeyed. Life and work resumed, but starvation had already entered their lives. Bread—now a gray, hard, and bitter substance—was rationed, and even though most bakers were Jewish, the Nazis pushed the Jews to the back of the lines. To think, Renia used to dread this time of year for its solemnity. A lover of the joyous springtime festivities of Passover and Shavuot, she’d recoiled at the sadness of the autumnal high holidays, the pleas, confessions, fasting. What she would give for a Rosh Hashanah challah now.
As soon as her father had returned, mercifully—with other men, he’d reached another town only to realize it was as dangerous as Chmielnik—the Kukielka clan decided to go back to J?drzejów. On the daylong walk home, “just as we saw on our way the Polish army running away from the fighting, hungry and ragged, now we see an arrogant German army, full of pride.”
Renia wrote, “It didn’t take long, and we learned to know the German.” The Nazi occupiers drove out and murdered the Jewish intelligentsia and shot groups of men accused of owning weapons. They planted a gun in a large apartment building occupied almost exclusively by Jews, and then—as a punishment for this pistol—took one man from each flat. They ordered that every single Jew in town gather for the execution. The Nazis left the innocent bodies hanging all day, swaying back and forth from the trees all along Main Street, the town’s peaceful artery slashed forever.
Chapter 3
Founding the Female Fight
Zivia and Frumka
DECEMBER 1939
It was New Year’s Eve, and Zivia Lubetkin was in the northeast of Poland, just outside Czyzew, a town already devastated by fighting. Cold air cuffed her cheeks. One foot in front of another. In darkness, she clambered up winding paths, snow up to her neck, her chin frozen. Every corner, each turn, was a potential end. Zivia was the only woman here, the only Jew. The Polish students who were being transported across the Soviet-Saxon border by the same smuggler hoped that if they were caught, it would be by the Germans rather than the Russian Bolsheviks, whom they loathed. But Zivia was “trembling with fear at the prospect of being caught by Nazis.” As dawn approached, they reached German territory without incident. Zivia was back in her old Poland.
The dream for most Jews was to flee Nazi occupation; Zivia came back.
While Renia began to experience the horrors of German occupation in J?drzejów, a new community with avant-garde ideas—one that would ultimately transform her life—was developing in other parts of Poland. Despite the war, the Jewish youth movements kept on. When the comrades returned from their summer retreats in September 1939, they did not disband but actually strengthened, constantly redeploying and reforming their missions under the leadership of a few ardent, courageous, and young leaders—many of whom could have easily fled but didn’t. They stayed, or even returned, and arguably, shaped the rest of Polish Jewry.