The movements tried harder than ever to renew their Polish base, even sending emissaries to train stations to convince “Asians” to join their ranks. Zivia returned to Warsaw to work with survivors, setting up safe communes and attracting Jews to Freedom. As always, she was the mother figure whom everyone looked up to, yet she kept her own feelings private.
Suffering from exhaustion, in 1945 Zivia finally requested to make aliyah. The socialist Zionist from Byten arrived in Palestine—her long-delayed dream. It was as if she’d been miraculously resurrected from the dead, especially after so many obituaries had been published, but life was not easy. She lived in a hut on a kibbutz from which the British carried out raids on Yishuv leaders—episodes that reminded her of ghetto Aktions. The kibbutzim, she felt, did not do enough to welcome survivors. Though her sister was there, she didn’t have time to see family and friends due to movement work, and she missed Antek, apparently fearing that his flirtatious nature was embroiling him in affairs with other women. Her depression and guilt soared. She was supposed to have been in Mila 18. She was supposed to have died.
Zivia was immediately sent on a speaking tour—“a circus,” she called it. She received invitations from countless groups and felt she could not turn down any; too many organizations wanted her support, craved the glow of her heroism.
In June 1946 six thousand people gathered at Kibbutz Yagur to hear Zivia deliver an eloquent, firm, eight-hour testimony in Hebrew, orating without notes, articulate thoughts streaming from her head and heart. Everyone was riveted, stunned. “She stood there like a queen,” an audience member observed later, noting that she gave off a feeling of holiness. Her lectures were about the war, the movement, the ZOB, and never about her feelings or personal life. Zivia defended the Jewish masses in the ghettos and called for empathizing with survivors, but most listeners wanted to hear about the uprising. Her ghetto fighting history was used by some left-wing politicians to further their agendas; Zivia’s fighter stance echoed the militant philosophies of the burgeoning state. As requested, apparently, she toned down her criticism of the Yishuv for not sending more support to Warsaw. Appealing to women, promoting the importance of weapons and heroism, she was adored and helped the party gain support, but this exposure and its politics exhausted her. Each speech ripped open wounds, reawakening her suffering and guilt. She wanted to be alone, to breathe.
The following year, Zivia was selected for a major role at the Zionist Congress in Basel. She and Antek met up in Switzerland, where they were secretly married by a rabbi. She returned to Israel pregnant—in the same dress that she wore at Yagur, but now it was snug. Antek followed a few months later. However, despite the heroic reputation of this power couple—they were the last remaining Zionists of the Warsaw ghetto uprising command—they never achieved high political positions in Israel, possibly because the Yishuv politicians felt threatened by their mythic status. Antek worked in the fields; Zivia, in the chicken coop. She shunned the public eye. According to those close to her, she did not think of herself as special, just as someone who did what had to be done.
In Zivia’s writings, she emphasizes that she’d been trained for this. Most Jews simply did not know what to do, but the Jewish youth was educated to make goals for themselves and carry them through. When Chasia’s daughter was asked what factors led to her mother’s wartime behavior, her immediate response was that Chasia got her tolerance from her father and her strength from The Young Guard. As Chasia herself reflected six decades later, “We knew how to share, to work together, to defer to one another, to surmount obstacles, to outdo ourselves. We did not realize then how badly we would need [these skills] in the years to come.” The youth movements had emerged in a context of Jews feeling threatened. They taught participants to deal with existential problems as well as to live and work together, to collaborate at all levels.
Now, feeling the need for a community that understood them and to memorialize their past, Zivia and Antek decided to found their own kibbutz—no easy feat. The movement feared that this kibbutz would focus on the traumas of yesterday; the ghetto fighters had to continually prove that they wouldn’t break down mentally. After some struggle, they successfully established the Ghetto Fighters’ House kibbutz, composed mainly of survivors. Zivia relied on work and motherhood—a constant balancing act—to mute her past and forge forward. Like many survivors who lived with the sense that “catastrophe could hit with no notice,” fearing thunder and lightning （which reminded them of bombings）， people on the kibbutz suffered from post-traumatic stress and night terrors. Overall, however, they worked hard to become a productive entity. Later, Antek opened Israel’s first Holocaust memorial museum and archive there, in an elegant brutalist building with curved high ceilings. Controversies arose surrounding the nature of the narrative they presented, even among the kibbutz members. Discords with The Young Guard and Yad Vashem have faded with time, but one can still sense them just under the surface.