“Did you tell her?”
“I tried to avoid the question,” my fixer said, trying to fix things. “They get scared here,” she whispered, “worried that the Jews will return to take back their property.”
I was not invited inside.
I took some photos of the outside, then we headed back into the Skoda to drive through the Kielce region at dusk, the bleeding sun, the fertile fields, this secret pocket of beauty between Warsaw and Kraków, still. Nothing like the gray-hued Poland of my imagination. Things go backward and forward, but here we were, three women from very different backgrounds—a Pole, a Lithuanian, and a Jew—brought together by Renia and the female fighters, all of us ready to reclaim, to fight, all of us feeling strong, agent, and, for a brief moment, safe.
Author’s Note: On Research
Unsurprisingly, conducting research around the world, using sources that span decades, continents, and alphabets, led to various research challenges and conundrums.
The primary source material for this project comprised mainly memoirs and testimonies. Some were oral and recorded on video or audio, some were written—in Hebrew, Yiddish, English, Polish, Russian, German. Some were translated, some were translations of translations, some I translated myself. Some were composed privately, others, for an interviewer. Some were fact-checked, edited, even cowritten with scholars and published （generally by small and academic presses）; others were diaries, raw testimony, filled with passion, writing fueled by fury. Some were written immediately after the war or even during the war while in hiding, and contain mistakes, contradictory details, and omissions—things were simply not known or altered for security reasons, or emotional ones. （Some survivors found it too difficult to write about certain people’s deaths.） Some were written quickly, fingers burning, in a desperate attempt not to forget, a purging of experience composed with a fear of being caught. Renia often used initials instead of names （her byline was “Renia K.”）， which I believe was for safety—she was writing in wartime about covert underground operations that still held terrific danger. She was also writing at a time when she genuinely did not know how other people’s stories turned out; she herself was awaiting news of whether her friends and relatives were alive. Like many early scribes, Renia wrote out of a desire to tell the world what happened objectively, trying to veer away from her personal stance. Characteristically, she uses the word “we,” and at times it can be hard to discern whether she is referring to herself, her family, her community, or to the Jewish people at large.
Other testimonies were offered later, especially in the 1990s, and though they are often composed with the depth of insight gained over time, the memories may be altered by contemporary trends, others’ memories they’ve heard over the years, and the survivor’s current concerns and goals. Some people argue that those who were traumatized suppressed many memories and that the fighters who were not tortured in camps have stronger recollections—“a surplus of memory,” according to Antek. Others argue that traumatic memories are some of the most pungent, accurate, and relentless. I also sifted through ephemeral primary documents （articles, letters, notebooks） and interviewed dozens of family members—each of whom had his or her own versions of stories, often contradicting one another’s.
Memory twists and turns; memoirs are not “cold data.” Many differences came up among these dozens and dozens of accounts: the details of events were often at odds, and dates, all over the place. Sometimes the same person provided personal testimonies on several occasions over the years, and her own tellings differed dramatically; at times I found inconsistencies within the same text. I found discrepancies between primary and secondary sources; for instance, academic biographers and historians shared accounts of these women that differed from the women’s own stories. Sometimes the differences in primary sources were intriguing—they had to do with taking responsibility, with whom to blame. When this was relevant, I tried to highlight it, usually in the endnotes. I attempted to understand where these differences were coming from and to cross-reference stories with historical analyses. I aimed to present the versions that seemed most reasonable and rich. At times I merged details from many accounts to build a full picture, to present the most emotionally authentic and factually accurate story that I could. Ultimately, when in doubt, I deferred to the women’s testimonies and truths.