I have relayed scenes as directly as possible from my sources. My reconstructions sometimes enhance feelings that were implied in the original text and take into account multiple perspectives of the same event, but all are nonfiction, based on research.
While the differences in accounts were intriguing, overall, I was more taken by the tremendous number of overlaps. Sources from different corners of time and place told the same obscure anecdotes, described similar situations and people. In addition to helping me establish veracity, it was touching and exciting. Each time I revisited the story from another lens, I learned more, dug deeper, felt that I was truly entering their universe. These young people and their passions were connected, figuratively and literally.
Another complex issue in this type of multilinguistic study is names, of both people and places. Many Polish towns sport numerous titles—Slavic, German, Yiddish—having been relabeled continually with fluctuating rulership. To use one name over another is often a political choice—not my explicit intention here. I have tended to use the contemporary place names as they are written in English.
As for personal names, the women in my story, like most Polish Jews, had Polish, Hebrew, and Yiddish names, and nicknames. Some had wartime aliases. Or several. Sometimes they used additional fake identities for emigration papers. （It was usually easier to leave Europe if a woman was faux married.） Then they changed their names to suit the languages of the countries where they ended up. （For instance: Vladka Meed began as Feigele Peltel. Vladka was her Polish undercover name; she married a Miedzyrzecka, which was changed to Meed when they moved to New York.） Further, I searched for these Slavic and Hebraic words in English search engines, based on combinations of Latin letters. I found Renia under Renia, Renya, Rania, Regina, Rivka, Renata, Renee, Irena, and Irene; Kukielka has infinite Anglo spellings as does its Yiddish Kukelkohn; and then there were her various false wartime document names: Wanda Widuchowska, Gluck, Neuman. （I spent at least a half day trying to determine if Astrit the courier was the same person as Astrid, Estherit, A., and Zosia Miller—I believe she was.） On top of this, there is an added layer that often complicates women’s traceability: the married name. “Renia Kukielka Herscovitch” （or is it Herskovitch, or Herzcovitz . . .） has endless permutations—she could so easily have slipped through, be missed, become unarchivable, lost forever.
Perhaps the ultimate example of name complexity: the three surviving Kukielka siblings ended up in Israel as Renia Herscovitch; Zvi Zamir, which sounded Israeli （Zamir is “cuckoo bird” in Hebrew）; and Aaron Kleinman—changed because he fought in Palestine in the 1940s and was wanted by the British. Even within an immediate family, discrepancies are endless.
A final word on words:
For ease, imitating Renia, I have used the term Pole to refer to a non-Jewish （Christian） Polish national; however, Jews were also Polish nationals, and I’m enhancing a division that I do not necessarily mean to inflate. Influenced by the scholars at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, I have used antisemitism as one word; to use a hyphen implies that “Semitism” exists as a racial category. The women in my story refer to the Nazis as “Germans,” which I have retained, since these were the Germans they were in contact with; of course, there were anti-Nazi Germans as well.
Several scholars have criticized the use of the term “courier girls.” Courier, they argue, is demeaning. It sounds trivial, passive, like a postman delivering letters. These women were anything but. They were weapons obtainers and smugglers, intelligence scouts, and, as in their Hebrew appellation, kasharyiot, connectors. The very act of courrying （from the French courir, or run） in the Holocaust was as risky as engaging in armed battle. Every time a Jew was found outside a Jewish ghetto or camp, she was punished by death. And these women spent months, sometimes years, crisscrossing the country, escaping from ghetto after ghetto. I found one account of a courier who apparently undertook 240 trips—per week. I, however, continued to use the term, among others, to describe their work in order to accord with existing research on the subject.
The word girls is also considered to be belittling. These were young women, around age twenty, some of them married. Again, I did use the term, among many others, to describe Renia and her cohorts. I also used boys for the youthful men of the movement. For one, I wanted to stress their youth. I am also writing in a context in which girls has been reappropriated and is employed widely in discussions of women’s empowerment.