Now Zivia was here too.
*
Frumka and Zivia found themselves a secluded corner in a quiet room, and Frumka filled Zivia in on all that she’d achieved at Dzielna over the past three months. The commune provided refuge for youth fleeing their towns; most of its residents were women. Frumka led them in establishing aid initiatives and became known around town for providing food, employment, and comfort in these times of hunger, confusion, and scattered families. The ethos of Freedom had shifted: it no longer focused solely on its movement and pioneering goals but on helping the suffering Jewish masses. Zivia, who’d always championed social equality, was immediately on board.
With support from “the Joint”—the American Joint Distribution Committee, or JDC, founded in 1914 to aid Jews across the world—Frumka established a public soup kitchen that fed six hundred Jews. She set up study groups, spearheaded collaborations with other movements, and housed nonmovement people in any available room. Just across from the infamously brutal Pawiak Prison, in an area filled with police, spies, and lethal gunshots, this buzzing nest of revolutionaries inspired new thoughts and action. According to a female Freedom youth group counselor, “The Pioneers longed to live, to act, to realize dreams. . . . Here one did not run away from the truth, but also, didn’t make peace with it. . . . The work broke bodies and ruined spirits, but in the evening, when everyone assembled in our house on Dzielna, we felt no anger.” Zivia sensed the warm camaraderie and positive spirit that infused the space, thanks to Frumka and the young women around her.
Frumka had also been working outside Dzielna, even outside Warsaw, prescient about the need to forge long-distance connections. She’d dressed up as a non-Jew, covering her face with a kerchief, and traveled to ?ód? and B?dzin to glean information. The Freedom kibbutz in B?dzin ran a laundry and served as a hub, helping local refugees. In ?ód?, the commune was led almost entirely by women who had refused to flee, including Frumka’s sister Hanzte, as well as Rivka Glanz and Leah Pearlstein. The women sewed for the Germans who, on many occasions, threatened to confiscate their equipment. Each time, feisty and responsible Leah stood up to the Nazis. She always won.
*
That first evening, together with other Freedom leaders, Zivia and Frumka decided to focus on finding escape routes to Palestine as per their Zionist goals, and also on community aid. To do both, they needed to uphold the movement’s values, while keeping its regional kibbutzim strong.
Not to be outdone by Frumka’s activity, Zivia barely took a moment to rest at Dzielna before she was off. First, to make connections and begin lobbying at the Judenrat.
Early on, the Nazis decided to pit Jew against Jew. The ghettos, they decreed, would be managed and whipped into shape by Jews themselves—not the elected kahals, that had governed Jewish communities for centuries, but by Nazi-controlled councils, or Judenrats. Each Judenrat registered all Jewish citizens, issued birth certificates and business permits, collected taxes, distributed ration cards, organized labor forces and social services, and oversaw its own Jewish police or militia. In Warsaw, these militiamen—who wore caps and boots and wielded rubber clubs—were mainly educated middle-class men, often young lawyers and university graduates. To many, including Renia, the militias enlisted “only the worst type of people,” who dutifully fulfilled Gestapo orders, searching, regulating, and surveilling Jews. Some Jews claimed that they were forced into the Judenrat at the risk of being killed; some hoped that by volunteering to participate, they would save their families （they didn’t） or even help the larger community. The Judenrats as an institution were a tool to suppress Jews, but the subjective will of their many individual members varied, and their tone varied by ghetto. These were heterogeneous groups, with players ranging from heroic helpers to Nazi collaborators.
Unlike others who feared the Judenrat, seeing them as Gestapo puppets, Zivia badgered them for additional food ration permits. Hair unbrushed, a cigarette dangling permanently from her lips, as if her “vexations dissolved in the rings of smoke that she blew,” she became an enduring fixture in the halls of the main Jewish community organizations. She spent entire days at 5 Tlomackie, the Jewish Self-Help organization, with its white, marble pillars and grand, open hallways. Built adjacent to the Great Synagogue in the 1920s, the building had been Warsaw’s Judaic Library and the first Jewish research center in Europe that focused on both theological and secular studies. In wartime, it became the center of Jewish mutual aid.