Over time, the stories changed. Nechama Tec, author of Resistance: Jews and Christians Who Defied the Nazi Terror and Defiance: The Bielski Partisans （later the film）， claims that there was a trend in American academia in the early 1960s to espouse Jewish submissiveness and even blame the victim. This “myth of passivity,” spurred in part by political philosopher Hannah Arendt, was biased, and not grounded in fact. Diner claims that by the late 1960s, the American Jewish community had become public and established; an explosion of later Holocaust publications drowned out earlier work, which perhaps is partly why Renia’s book disappeared from our collective memory.
Even today there are ethical complications in presenting this material in the United States. Writing about fighters might give the impression that the Holocaust was “not that bad”—a risk in a context where the genocide is fading from memory. Many writers fear that glorifying resisters places too much focus on agency, implying that survival was more than luck, judging those who did not take up arms, and ultimately blaming the victim. Further, this is a story that grays the victim-aggressor trope and unveils nuanced complications, foregrounding the intense discord within the Jewish community about how to deal with Nazi occupation. This tale inevitably includes Jewish Nazi collaborators and Jewish rebels who stole money to buy weapons—shaky ethics at every turn. The rage and violent rhetoric in these Jewish women’s memoirs are halting. So is the fact that many of these resisters were middle class and urban, more modern and sophisticated, more like “us,” than is comfortable. All these factors dissuade discussion.
And then there is gender. Women are routinely dropped from stories in which they played key roles, their experiences blotted out of history. Here, too, women’s stories were particularly silenced. According to Chajka’s Klinger’s son, the Holocaust scholar Avihu Ronen, this has partly to do with women’s roles in the youth movement. Women were usually the ones directed to escape with “the mission to tell.” They were the appointed documenters and firsthand historians. Many of the earliest chronicles of the resistance were written by women. As authors, Ronen argues, they reported on others’ activities—usually the men’s—rather than their own. Their personal experiences fell into the background.
Lenore Weitzman, a foundational scholar of women and the Holocaust, explains that soon after these women’s works were published, the major histories were written by men, who focused on men, not on courier girls who themselves downplayed their own activity. She suggests that only physical combat—which was public and organized—was held in esteem, while other undercover tasks were considered trivial. （Even so, many Jewish women did fight in the uprisings and engaged in armed combat, and should not be dropped from that tale either.）
Even when women tried to tell their stories, they were often deliberately silenced. Some women’s writings were censored to fit political motivations, some women faced blatant indifference, and others were treated with disbelief, accused of making it all up. After liberation, an American army reporter warned Bielski partisans Fruma and Motke Berger not to repeat their story, because people would think they were liars, or insane. Many women faced scorn—accused by relatives of having fled to fight instead of staying to look after their parents; others were charged with “sleeping their way to safety.” Women felt judged according to a lingering belief that while the pure souls perished, the conniving ones survived. So often, when their vulnerable outpourings were not received with empathy or comprehension, women turned inward and repressed their experiences, pushing them deep under the surface.
Then there was coping. Women self-silenced. Many felt like it was their “sacred duty” of “cosmic significance” to grow a new generation of Jews, and kept their pasts to themselves out of a desperate desire to create a “normal” life for their children—and for themselves. Many of these women were in their midtwenties when the war ended; they had everything ahead of them and had to find ways to move forward. They did not all want to be “professional survivors.” Family members also hushed women, worried that facing their memories would be too difficult, that lancing old wounds would cause them to unravel entirely.
Many women suffered from an oppressive survivor’s guilt. By the time Bia?ystok courier Chasia felt ready to share her past of weapon stealing and sabotage, Jews were opening up about their experiences in concentration camps. Compared with what they went through, she’d “had it easy.” Her narrative seemed too “selfish.” Others have spoken about the hierarchy of suffering in the survivor community. Fruma Berger’s son once felt shunned at a second-generation event because his parents had been partisans. Some fighters and their families felt estranged from close-knit survivor communities—and turned away.