When Bela was approached by Ghetto Fighters’ House in 1990 about publishing her forty-five-year-old memoir, she refused initially, afraid to face her horrific memories. But eventually she decided to do it, to tell her story for the sake of the innocent and brave who did not live. She did it because Lonka, on her deathbed, had asked her to. She did it for her children, who had nested safely, and her grandchildren, and generations to come.
Bela’s son Yoel described her as deeply modest, never thinking of herself as a hero, never requesting reparations or recognition; she received a medal from a partisan organization in the 1990s only because Yoel applied on her behalf. If anything, Bela was plagued by guilt that she hadn’t saved her family. As with many fighters for whom being a mensch and aiding the less fortunate was paramount, Bela dedicated her life to helping the poor and ill: she volunteered with blind people and in hospitals. （Anna Heilman became a social worker at the Children’s Aid Society in Canada, where she lobbied the government about the humanitarian crisis in Darfur.） Whereas Bela’s husband was intellectual, she was practical and social, with dozens of girlfriends. “Each time she got on a bus,” her son joked, “she got off with a new phone number.” Later in life, she preferred a senior living home to being alone. She became passionate about poetry and theater in her eighties. She was an optimist, hopeful, always resourceful.
After she died, Yoel, a neurobiologist, found her Auschwitz mug shot, that photo taken on that first wet horrific day. In it, Bela is smiling and beautiful, bold and strong. Like many children of survivors, his knowledge of her story was fragmented, and he felt himself grasping at hazy memories, at disjointed emotional anecdotes rather than a full history. He became obsessed with his mother’s tale, haunted by the details he’d never asked for, and has spent several years researching and writing about her, passing on her noble legacy.
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Days after liberation, in the outskirts of Vilna, Ruzka saw a mother carrying a small, skinny boy. The boy was crying and mumbled to his mother—in Yiddish. Ruzka had never cried in the ghetto, never in the forest. Now she burst into tears and sobbed. She’d been sure she’d never again hear the voice of a Jewish child.
Just as Vitka and Ruzka were together throughout the war, so they were for most of their lives afterward. That is, following a short separation. Immediately after liberation, Abba sent Vitka to Grodno to study the state of Jewish refugees, seek Zionists, and report back. Vitka had to jump off a train, fearing tightening patrols. Only people who came out of the concentration camps could cross the border freely, and so many non-camp survivors tattooed themselves.
Ruzka was sent to Kovno, Lithuania, and then to Bucharest, Romania, so that she could be an “ambassador” of the partisans, meet Yishuv officials, and convince them to bring over all the survivors. Her presence, her personality, Kovner knew, were right for the job—people would believe her. The journey was difficult. Postwar Poland was torn up and dangerous, and yet the freedom to walk on the streets without being immediately killed was confounding for her. Ruzka’s story was so compelling to the Yishuv emissaries—the tale of a fighter rather than a tragedy—that the leader commanded her to go straight to Palestine and share her narrative.
She traveled on false papers as someone’s wife. The ship journey was lonely, totally disorienting. Aliyah had been her dream, but now she felt untethered. She landed at Atlit, the camp for illegal Jewish immigrants, and was appalled by the terrible conditions. No one came to get her; she felt forgotten, stranded until word of her story got out. Suddenly leaders and their wives began to visit her in a stream; she felt like a “curiosity on display.” Eventually one of the leaders got her forged medical papers, claiming she had tuberculosis, and she was released. She was sent on a speaking tour, telling her story, everyone taken by her style and tale: the horrors, but through the eyes of a fighter. Many recall that she was “the first messenger.”
None of this was easy for Ruzka. She felt that many of the Yishuv leaders did not understand her and were instead obsessed with the new. David Ben-Gurion, then a leading Labor Zionist who would soon become Israel’s first Prime Minister, once took to the stage after an emotional testimony and insulted her use of Yiddish as a “grating language.” Ruzka joined a kibbutz and began writing her memoirs, but she was desperately lonely and wrote pleading letters to Vitka, who was still “in the war.”