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There are many reasons the stories of Jewish women in the resistance went underground. The majority of fighters and couriers were killed—Tosia, Frumka, Hantze, Rivka, Leah, Lonka—and did not live to tell their tales. But even for survivors, female narratives were silenced for both political and personal reasons, which differed across countries and communities.
The politics of Israel’s earliest years, as it developed into a nation, influenced how Holocaust stories came to be known. When Holocaust survivors arrived to the Yishuv （the Jewish settlement in Palestine） in the mid and late 1940s, tales of ghetto fighters were compelling to the left-wing political parties. Not only was anti-Nazi activity more palatable than horrific torture, these fighting stories helped bolster the party image and the call to fight for a new country. Like Renia, several women ghetto fighters were given a platform to speak—and they did so prolifically—but, at times, their words were edited to toe party lines. Some survivors accused the Yishuv of being passive and not supporting the Jews in Poland. This is when Hannah Senesh was made a symbol. Though she never carried out her mission, aside from boosting morale, her story of leaving Palestine to fight in Hungary proved that the Yishuv took an active role in helping the European Jews.
Soon after, scholars explain, early Israeli politicians tried to create a dichotomy between European Jews and Israeli Jews. European Jews, the Israelis said, were physically weak, na?ve, and passive. Some sabras, or native-born Israelis, referred to the new arrivals as “soaps,” from the rumor that the Nazis made soap out of murdered Jewish bodies. Israeli Jews, on the other hand, saw themselves as the strong next wave. Israel was the future; Europe, for more than a thousand years a cradle of Jewish civilization, was the past. The memory of resistance fighters—the Jews of Europe who were anything but feeble—was erased in order to reinforce the negative stereotype.
The resistance tale fell into further oblivion. A decade after the war, people were ready to hear about concentration camps, and trauma became the public interest. In the 1970s, the political landscape shifted, and tales of individual rebels were replaced by stories of “everyday resistance.” In the early 2000s, Warsaw ghetto fighter Pnina Grinshpan （Frimer） was invited to Poland to receive an award. She stood on the stage, pained, apathetic. “Why do I need to come to Poland to receive a prize?” she asked in a documentary, reflecting that she escaped from that country. “Here [in Israel] we are so tiny.”
Controversies continue today. Mordechai Paldiel, the former director of the Righteous Gentiles Department at Yad Vashem, Israel’s largest Holocaust memorial, was troubled that Jewish rescuers never received the same recognition as their Gentile counterparts. In 2017 he authored Saving One’s Own: Jewish Rescuers During the Holocaust, a tome about Jews who organized large-scale rescue efforts across Europe. Some Jews are critical that the underground activity of the Revisionist youth （Betar’s ZZW） has gone largely unappreciated. This could be because so few survived; others say it’s because historians tend to be left wing and only commemorate their own kind. Still, others point out that Menachem Begin, the early leader of the Israeli right wing and the country’s sixth prime minister, escaped to Russia and did not fight in the Warsaw ghetto; he downplayed the uprising altogether. The Bund （based mainly outside Israel）， the Zionists, and the Revisionists continue to disagree on who was responsible for initiating the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Even among left-wing Zionists, Freedom, The Young Guard, and the Zionist Youth each has its own Holocaust-based archives, galleries, and publishing houses in Israel.
History is different in the United States. In popular conception, the story goes that American Jews did not discuss the Holocaust in the 1940s and 1950s—presumably out of fear, guilt, and because they were busy becoming suburban and wanted to fit in with their middle-class non-Jewish neighbors. But as Hasia Diner shows in her groundbreaking book We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence After the Holocaust, 1945–1962, this narrative is unfounded. If anything, there was a proliferation of writing and discussion about the Holocaust in the postwar years. One Jewish leader worried that there was too much focus on the war, even citing Renia’s book as an example. As Diner points out, American Jews—in their new identity as the main Jewish community in the world—struggled with how to talk about the genocide, not whether they should.