Renia never accepted the advances of her would-be beaus. In her twenty years of widowhood, she did not have even one boyfriend. Her dedication to her husband was a model of loyalty for her children and grandchildren. “Family is the most important thing,” she never stopped telling them, certainly a lesson from her painful losses. “Always stay together.”
Renia’s grandchildren （and great-grandchild） were her utmost treasures, but their births also reminded her of all that had vanished. She hosted Friday-night and holiday dinners with zeal, and attended their weddings dressed in glimmering frocks and oversized smiles. But she also told them her stories: tales of the war, of her siblings who were murdered, passing on as much of her heritage as she could. Many survivors formed easier connections with their grandchildren, who were not “substitute family” and with whom they had less fraught dynamics. They were less protective of their grandkids, and their own fears of intimacy—stemming from having lost close relatives—had diminished over the decades. Renia may not have taken her own children, but she took her grandchildren to the Ghetto Fighters’ House on Holocaust Remembrance Day, recognizing how important it was to send her story into the future. Like many third-generation children, her grandkids—who had learned about the Holocaust in school and had an intellectual response to it, too—asked her many questions, which she gladly answered. This opened her up to talking with Leah about her past as well. Renia’s adolescence may have been hidden away, but it never disappeared.
On Monday, August 4, 2014, nearly ninety years after she was born on that Sabbath eve in J?drzejów, Renia passed on. She was buried at the Neve David Cemetery in Haifa among lush grass and trees, just by the sea, and next to Akiva, exactly where she wanted to be. She had outlived most of her friends, but her funeral was filled with seventy loving people from her old-age home and the health clinic where she once worked, as well as many of her children’s decades-old friends upon whom she’d made a lifelong impression. But mostly, there stood the strong family unit she had cultivated from nothing, the new branches from a decapitated tree. Her grandson Liran gave a eulogy, reminiscing about her sparkling conversation and, in particular, her sense of humor. Gesturing at Renia’s generations, he said: “You always fought like a real hero.”
Epilogue: A Missing Jew
Spring 2018. More than a decade after I first found Freuen in the dimly lit British Library, I boarded a flight to Israel. Those women who’d lived in my head for years—well, now I was going to have coffees with their kids. I would sift through boxes of their photos and letters. I would see where they ended up, lived the next phase of their lives, died. I chewed two pieces of gum at a time, reeling with anxiety. I had become a fearful flyer in general and was nervous about being in Israel, which I hadn’t visited in ten years, and never alone. That week was a particularly pungent one, even by Israeli standards: Syria bombings, Nakba Day protests in Gaza, conflict with Iran, the US embassy moving to Jerusalem, and a heat wave. I was a flee-er who was headed into the fire.
There were not many books about these warrior women, but I’d brought what I could find with me on the plane, cramming for my interviews as if for an exam. I kept reminding myself that my project was not about abstract characters anymore. I was meeting the comrades’ children, the people whom these women had birthed and raised. Then I worried again about my own young children, who I was leaving behind in New York for ten days—the longest time and farthest distance I’d ever been away from them.
I’d been shocked by the silencing of this story of Jewish women in the resistance, but the truth was, I too had been silent. It would take me a full twelve years to finally complete this book, a whole birth-to-bat-mitzvah period. Some of this time span was due to the difficulty of the project. My Yiddish was rusty, to say the least, and translating Freuen’s 1940s prose rife with Germanic words （which differed from the Polish dialect I heard at home and the Canadian one I studied at school） was arduous. Freuen was a scrapbook of writings by and about a slew of characters with hard-to-pronounce names. There were no annotations, footnotes, or explanations; there was zero context, especially challenging for a reader in pre-smartphone days.