Vitka was angry about Ruzka’s departure—part of her life had ended. She didn’t know how to respond to the letters, so she didn’t. She and Abba officially became a couple in Vilna. But Abba had to leave because the Russians were after him for being a Zionist. One day Vitka decided it was time to join him—she schmoozed her way onto a flight to Lublin, what she called a “town of drunkenness and murder.” There, the Zionists stayed in an apartment, talking, sharing, crying, laughing all day and night. They established Bricha, and Vitka worked on the underground railroad, shepherding Jews to the border by foot.
Abba, however, was still entirely intent on revenge. He and Vitka gathered Jewish fighters and became leaders of a new brigade of Avengers. Based out of Italy, obsessed with retribution and destruction, they deployed fighters across Europe and near camps where Nazis were being held under arrest. Zelda Treger, after being sent out to find survivors and to smuggle Jews out of the country, was recruited to work on the revenge mission, transferring funds, helping the activists, finding them safe houses. Abba traveled to Palestine to obtain poison for his plan, while Vitka visited the brigades, worried for their mental stability. Abba was captured on the way back and imprisoned in Cairo. He sent the poison to Vitka, who, with fake papers and numerous arrests, had made it to Paris. Abba’s note told her to carry out plan B. She did, “the CEO of Vengeance.” The bread for a camp near Nuremberg, where Americans were holding former Nazis, was successfully poisoned, causing thousands of Germans to fall ill. Abba decided that the Avengers should carry on their fight in Palestine. This caused much conflict; some returned to Europe on revenge missions, but ultimately Ruzka convinced many to stay in Palestine and defend the land.
Vitka arrived in Palestine in 1946 on the very last boat that the British allowed to dock; soon after, she settled on Kibbutz Ein Horesh in a house twenty yards from Ruzka’s. Despite that brief postwar split, Ruzka and Vitka spent most of their adult lives entwined, their children growing up together. Ruzka, married to an Austrian who’d made aliyah before the war, was the first to know of Vitka’s pregnancy. They had all stopped menstruating back in the forest and assumed they were barren. Their fertility came as an astonishing surprise.
Zelda and her husband, Sanka, a fighter from the forest, also came to Palestine. They decided not to settle on the kibbutz but in Netanya and then Tel Aviv. Zelda had two children, to whom she insisted on passing on Holocaust stories despite Sanka’s desire to detach. Zelda returned to her prewar career and worked as a kindergarten teacher. She also opened up a delicatessen in downtown Tel Aviv. From Nazi fighter to sandwiches—not an uncommon trajectory for these survivors.
Ruzka and Vitka, however, both worked on the kibbutz—at first in the fields, a tremendously cathartic social activity. Ruzka later became an educator and kibbutz secretary. With time, they developed additional careers. Ruzka was not allowed to study, as the kibbutz wanted all survivors to be “reeducated” as a priority, but eventually she and Abba founded Moreshet, a Young Guard center for the study of the Holocaust and the resistance, intended to differ from Freedom’s Ghetto Fighters’ House in its desire to consider the war from different perspectives, including a strong focus on women as well as on the complex and dynamic Jewish life in Poland before 1939. Ruzka was its head. An editor, writer, historian, and activist, she empathized, encouraged, and taught. Ruzka was ill for years, but kept her symptoms a secret, even from her family. In 1988, less than a year after Abba passed, Ruzka died of cancer. One of Ruzka’s three children, Yonat, a high school teacher, began to work at Moreshet, carrying on “the family business.”
Vitka, who became the quiet backdrop to her husband’s very public life, took her passions elsewhere. Unlike Abba and Ruzka, she never talked about her past—certainly not about her early life in Poland. When her first child was three, Vitka developed tuberculosis. Her doctor told her she had four months to live; she told him, “I will live.” She did. Vitka was put in isolation, not able to see her son up close for nearly two years. While recuperating, she enrolled in correspondence courses in history, English, and French. Though she was told she must never have another child, she gave birth to a daughter several years later. This, too, was fraught with difficulties: she was forced to maintain distance from her baby and not breast-feed for fear of infecting her.