While Eyal works in human resources, organizing people just like her grandmother did, her sister Roni followed in Zivia’s fighting footsteps. Roni was the first female fighter pilot in the Israeli army, standing out in formation with a long braid dangling down her back. Roni rarely speaks publicly—partly because of her military status but largely because she inherited her grandmother’s reserve. With her own “hypermorality,” she lives for her grandmother, whom she never met but whose “quiet leadership” she finds beautiful. The Zuckerman way, the sisters joked, was to keep everything close to your chest; to answer any question with one word. Most of all: “Zuckermans don’t cry.” What she learned most from her grandparents, Eyal said, was that “you never have full control over circumstances, but you have control over how you respond. You need to trust yourself to get through life.”
“All I did was try to die, but I survived,” was Zivia’s refrain. “Fate determined that I should survive, and I am left with no other way.” Despite her victorious life, Zivia was plagued by guilt. She could have saved more, done more, done things earlier. The remorse that began in Warsaw—the sense of missed opportunity, the fighters she lost—never subsided, but instead grew with survival. Why did I make it through? was a constant presence.
Another constant for Zivia was her cigarette habit. In her sixties, her smoking and remorse eating away at her, she developed lung cancer, and despite all her attempts to keep on working as usual, she died in 1978 at the age of sixty-three. As per Antek’s request, only her first name appears on her tombstone. “Zivia is an institution,” her son explained. No further words were necessary.
Without her, the fragile existence that Antek had rebuilt shattered. He did not want to live in a world without Zivia. Against doctor’s orders, he drank. “He worked on dying,” Eyal said. Despite his charm and happy nature, Antek was deeply haunted, unable to let go of the past, reproaching himself for not having saved his family, and plagued by decisions he’d made during wartime. He never stopped considering the murder of a potential informer. What if the man had been innocent? Antek’s regret only sharpened with time, “like lava gushing out of the ground and sprouting up” he said, reflecting on how his past and present became entwined. To lead the Warsaw ghetto uprising and then pick fruit on a kibbutz was a difficult life course. Many fighters never truly found themselves after their traumatic and hyperdramatic twenties. Antek died three years after Zivia, in a taxi on the way to a ceremony in her honor.
“Zivia was the branch, and Antek was the stem,” Yael said. “If the branch bends, the stem falls, no matter how strong it looks.”
*
Israel was a hard environment, but it was not easy for Polish resistance fighters in postwar Poland, either, which was governed by the USSR for decades. In a climate of surveillance and fear, anyone who had shown allegiances to the Home Army during the war could have been considered a “Polish nationalist” and therefore a rebel against the Soviet regime—and in mortal danger. Many Poles who’d helped Jews hid their heroic actions for fear they’d be accused of being on the wrong side of the state. One Polish woman who had sheltered a family that moved to Israel had to ask them to stop sending thank-you gifts with Israeli flags because the presents made the neighbors suspicious.
Even some Jews in Poland repressed their pasts and cut off contact. “Halina,” who helped save Renia from prison, was actually Irena Gelblum. After the war, she and Kazik, her boyfriend, went to Israel. But she soon left, studied medicine, worked as a journalist, and became a famous poet in Italy, where she changed her name to Irena Conti. Eventually she settled back in Poland, but constantly changed her identity and friends, her past a deeper and deeper secret.
Others lived their lives more openly. Irena Adamowicz, the Catholic Scout, worked at the Polish National Library. She never married but cared for her mother and spent her time with friends she made during the war. Irena kept up written correspondence with the Jewish women she had worked with and visited Israel in 1958—a highlight of her life. She lived with a terrific fear of dying alone, and yet, as she aged, became reclusive. One day in 1973 she suddenly expired on the street at age sixty-three. In 1985 she was named a Righteous Among the Nations at Yad Vashem.