Fortunately, the truck’s blaring, angry honk convinced my driver to pull over. She promptly shut the engine, and stepped outside, pacing, smoking, and yelling into her cell.
“It’s a divorce thing,” my guide turned to the backseat to explain to me. “Her daughter is with her ex, and she’s very upset. Sorry about the delay.”
A mother of daughters myself, I couldn’t complain, especially since both the driver and the guide were charging me minimal fees for such an intense day of trekking—they were interested in Renia’s and the female fighters’ stories, too, and wanted to be part of this journey. I sat in that backseat drinking Diet Coke, hoping it would settle my nausea, and thinking about the issues faced by women researchers who were researching women. Being a mother had affected my own work countless times. I was offered a funded research residency that I had to turn down; I couldn’t move my family for a few months to a different city. Instead, I took many small trips, all of which were administrative feats, organizing childcare and drop-offs and small gifts for my daughters so they could mark off each day I was gone. My fridge door was a mosaic of pickup, lunch-packing and photo-day schedules, set down to the minute. I even had to bring my kids to Poland for several days （hence the fire alarm scenario）。 On other days, I walked so many miles that the age-old sciatica from my pregnancies flared, and my evenings were spent in the hotel bathtub.
And then, of course, there was always the issue of security. The late nights of research when I wanted to get dinner in a new city, and each step was anxious, preceded by a look around as I scouted for danger. Caution was a relic of my Jewish past and a reality of my female present. I could not wander listening to music—my ears and eyes had to be open. And then there I was, in rural Poland, in a truck’s way, barely traceable, no one knowing my precise location, a flimsy wireless connection. What had I done? At least I was with women, I consoled myself to the sounds of an upset chain-smoking mother who continued to pace. Per chance, I’d hired a woman local guide, who, in turn, hired this woman driver.
Three working women in the middle of nowhere. I thought of women’s histories, stories that also get stuck in the middle of nowhere, that get lost. At last, our driver hung up her phone, got in the car, and jerked us into action, and as usual for that day, all my research materials went flying onto the wet Skoda floor. “Sorry,” she turned back to me to say, “I’m starving.”
Though my fragile innards were not quite ready, I agreed to stop for an early dinner at the next restaurant—they warned me that eateries were few and far between on these country roads. There was no main highway in these parts, which is why the 150 miles took five hours; I kept imagining how long it took the couriers, in disguise, in 1943. The roadside café was in a glorious open field, shimmering orange and gold in the summer sun. Here in the middle of nothing but pastoral beauty, there had been Jews, and there had been a well-oiled ghetto-and-murder system to kill them. The Nazi assault was pervasive. There was nowhere to run.
Inside, I waited while my team smoked and reapplied lipstick. Then, while I picked at my plate heaped with dozens of mushroom pierogis （the only vegetarian item available）， and they quickly ate their beef stews and fried pork chops, I asked about their friendship. These two women, roughly my age, had met recently. They were both self-described feminists, a label that they wore proudly, defiantly. They had met at a feminist rally. “For what?” I asked.
“For everything.”
The government wanted to criminalize all abortion and disallow in vitro fertilization because it produced “wasted seed.” The all-powerful church ran Kraków’s top hotels but paid no taxes, they told me. My two companions were outraged at the misogyny, incensed by their government’s unjust treatment of women. I certainly understood.
“It sounds like the Poland I write about, of the nineteen thirties and forties, was more feminist than now,” I said.
“In some ways, it was!” they agreed, pounding fists on the wooden table.
We finally arrived at my last stop on this journey, in J?drzejów, at the address Leah had given me for Renia’s childhood home—the house where she was born on that Friday back in 1924, the beginning of it all. Klasztorna Street was easy to find, but number 16 did not seem to exist. If we counted plots, demarcated by trees well over a hundred years old, however, we ended up at a small stone structure, gray, with a triangular roof. Several matching houses surrounded a green yard, where a dog barked. My guide went ahead of me and found one of the inhabitants. I didn’t understand the rapid-fire Polish, but I did understand the negative nod of the woman’s head. “She says the addresses changed,” my guide told me. “Number sixteen must have been a wooden house that burnt down. She said she never heard of the family. She asked if they were Jews.”