*
Renia spoke to her brothers on the phone every single morning. The five survivors of the Bia?ystok ring, including Chaika Grossman, who became a well-known liberal Israeli member of parliament, spoke every single night at ten o’clock. Fania stayed in touch with several women from the Union Factory who’d signed the handmade heart card, and visited their families across continents. Many of the Vilna partisans remained close over the years; their offspring still gather for annual commemorative events. Countless forest romances among Jews who risked their lives for one another lasted for decades. Today there are twenty-five thousand descendants of the Jews saved in the Bielski group, “Bielski babies.” “Sisters” from camps, ghettos, and forests became surrogate families; the only people they had left from their early lives.
Yet not everyone shared such postwar camaraderie. Perhaps because she’d been alone, living a fake life for so much of the Holocaust, Bela Hazan’s postwar experience was also solo, her memories mostly kept to herself as she created a new world. “I raised my children and immersed myself in daily life. I tried to contain my personal story,” she wrote. “I didn’t want my children to grow up in the shadow of the Holocaust.” But, of course, her story remained “alive inside of me with the same strength.”
Back on January 18, 1945, as the Russians neared Auschwitz, where she was working in the infirmary, Bela was sent on a death march to Germany. In rags, without shoes, she slogged through the snow for three days and nights with no food or drink. Anyone who marched out of tempo, who stood for a moment, who bent over to pick up snow to quench their blistering thirst, was shot on the spot. Thousands died en route. As a presumed non-Jew, Bela, terribly ill herself, was shipped to a subcamp of Ravensbruck, and then to a labor camp near Leipzig, where she volunteered to work as a nurse, and from which she escaped while carrying sick prisoners out to the American side. Her memoir, written nonstop in 1945, opens with the chapter “From Death March—to Life.”
The Americans, who cried with her when they saw her emaciated body, helped Bela reach the Zionist office in Paris, where she finally discarded her Aryan identity as Bronislawa Limanowska, years of awful disguise at last undone. She met up with Jewish Brigade soldiers from Palestine, who took her to Italy. One of them, journalist Haim Zelshinki, interviewed her and wrote up her story. Bela spent three months in Italy working as a counselor, guiding and listening to the harrowing tales of forty-three girl survivors aged six to fourteen, mainly from the partisan family camps. The group was called “the Frumka Group,” after Frumka P?otnicka, who was posthumously awarded a Polish Order of the Cross.
（Similarly, Bia?ystok courier Chasia established a children’s home in ?ód?, where, without any formal training, she counseled a ragtag assembly of seventy-three traumatized Jewish orphans who had been hiding in convents, Polish homes, partisan bases, Soviet territory, death camps, cupboards, and forests. Years later, a number of child “reclaimers” questioned their earlier actions: Was it right for them to uproot these kids who had already been so traumatized, who craved stability, who wanted to be part of a family, not part of a people? But according to Chasia, at the time, they feared for the children’s and their protectors’ safety in Poland, and it seemed morally unacceptable to allow the few remnants of Polish Jewry to assimilate into Christianity. Over a two-year journey, Chasia reached Palestine with her orphans, and she kept in touch with them all her life.）
In 1945, Bela, along with her group of girls, immigrated to Palestine, where she married Haim the journalist, changed their name to the more Israeli Yaari, and raised two children. Despite her Freedom background, she never felt connected with the underground fighters and sensed that Ghetto Fighters’ House was a closed society. She kept her story to herself—but never forgot it.
One day Bela was contacted by Bronka Kilbanski, one of the Bia?ystok couriers who went on to work at Yad Vashem. Back in the ghetto, Bronka had become romantically involved with Mordechai Tenenbaum, Tema’s fiancé before she was killed. Bronka had hidden his archive of the Bia?ystok ghetto; he’d also given her Tema’s copy of the incriminating Gestapo Christmas party photograph of Bela, Lonka, and Tema for safekeeping. Now Bronka passed it on. Bela placed this heirloom next to her bed, where it stood for the rest of her life.