And then there are the narrative tropes that have reigned for women over the decades. Hannah Senesh may have been a good role model because she showed the Yishuv’s involvement. But scholars mention that Hannah became famous over her fellow parachutist Haviva Reich—who convinced an American pilot to blind-drop her in Slovakia, where she organized food and shelter for thousands of refugees, rescued Allied servicemen, and helped children escape—because Hannah was young, beautiful, single, wealthy, and a poet. Haviva was a thirtysomething, brown-haired divorcee with a checkered romantic past.
For North American Jews, this is all distant past, and, still, the stakes are high. In Poland, where people continue to reel from years of Soviet rule, the women’s collaboration with the Red Army takes on a different meaning. Poland’s senate recently passed a law （later revised） dictating that Poland could not be blamed for any crimes committed in the Holocaust. The memory of the Polish resistance is wildly popular in Poland today, its anchor symbol graffitied on buildings. One is held in esteem if there was a Home Army fighter in your family. The narrative remains under construction, the resistance and its role tenuous. How the war is presented—to ourselves and to the outside world—can explain who we are, why we act as we do.
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It was not just the silencing of their life stories that was immediately difficult for survivors and fighters, but also freedom.
This cohort of young women were homeless twentysomething adults who had lost their childhoods, who had not had the chance to study or train for a career, who did not have normal family networks, and whose sexual development had often been skipped over, traumatized, or deeply intensified. Many of these women—especially those who did not ascribe to strong political philosophies—simply did not know where to go, what to do, who to be, how to love.
Faye Schulman, the partisan who spent years wandering the forest, blowing up trains, performing outdoor surgeries, and photographing soldiers, wrote that liberation was not the epitome of joy but “the lowest point in my life. . . . Never in my life had I felt so lonely, so sad; never had I felt such yearning for the parents, family, and friends whom I would never see again.” After the brutal murders of her family members, and all her losses, the rigor, duty, and social cohesion of partisan life had kept her sane, focused, and with purpose: survival and revenge. Now she was absolutely alone in the world, with nothing, not even a nationality. While fellow partisans sat around the campfire contemplating the end of war, dreaming of reunions and celebrations, she felt otherwise:
When the war was over, would I have a place where I belonged? Who would wait at the station to meet me? Who would celebrate freedom with me? There would be no homecoming parades for me, no time to even mourn the dead. If I did survive, where would I return? My home and my town had been razed to the ground, its people killed. I was not in the same situation as the colleagues surrounding me. I was a Jew and a woman.
Faye received a medal from the Soviet government but had to return her weapons. Without a sense of protection or identity, she decided to enlist in the Soviet army and continue to fight in Yugoslavia. On her way to the military bureau, she met a Jewish-looking officer who convinced her to stop risking her life. Faye became a government photographer in Pinsk. She was able to track down her surviving brothers, her access to trains and officials made possible by showing her medal. Through one brother, she met Morris Schulman, a partisan commander whom she’d encountered once in the forest and who knew her family from before the war. Some surviving women idealized dead fathers and struggled to form intimate bonds, but Faye’s and Morris’s feelings for each other were immediate, and Faye refused many other proposals for him. “We felt an urgency to proceed quickly with whatever love was left in us,” she reflected.
Though they were a relatively wealthy, successful Soviet couple, the Judenrein city of Pinsk was too depressing. In numerous difficult and dangerous trips, they crisscrossed Europe, one couple among millions of displaced people who roamed the Continent; they were forced into an awful refugee camp that reminded Faye of the ghetto. Soon after, they joined the Bricha, an underground organization that illegally smuggled Jews to Palestine, where immigration quotas remained enforced. But Faye had a baby and craved safety. She and Morris changed course and spent the rest of their lives in Toronto, growing careers and a family. Faye spoke publicly about her war experience for decades. “Sometimes [the] bygone world feels almost more real to me than the present,” she wrote. A part of her always remained rooted in her lost universe.