Could this be true?
I was stunned.
*
I had been searching for strong Jewish women.
In my twenties, in the early 2000s, I lived in London, working as an art historian by day and a comedian by night. In both spheres, my Jewish identity became an issue. Underhanded, jokey remarks about my semitic appearance and mannerisms were common from academics, gallerists, audiences, fellow performers, and producers alike. Gradually, I began to understand that it was jarring to the Brits that I wore my Jewishness so openly, so casually. I grew up in a tight-knit Jewish community in Canada and then attended college in the northeast United States. In neither place was my background unusual; I didn’t have separate private and public personas. But in England, to be so “out” with my otherness, well, this seemed brash and caused discomfort. Shocked once I figured this out, I felt paralyzed by self-consciousness. I was not sure how to handle it: Ignore? Joke back? Be cautious? Overreact? Underreact? Go undercover and assume a dual identity? Flee?
I turned to art and research to help resolve this question and penned a performance piece about Jewish female identity and the emotional legacy of trauma as it passed over generations. My role model for Jewish female bravado was Hannah Senesh, one of the few female resisters in World War II not lost to history. As a child, I attended a secular Jewish school—its philosophies rooted in Polish Jewish movements—where we studied Hebrew poetry and Yiddish novels. In my fifth-grade Yiddish class, we read about Hannah and how, as a twenty-two-year-old in Palestine, she joined the British paratroopers fighting the Nazis and returned to Europe to help the resistance. She didn’t succeed at her mission but did succeed in inspiring courage. At her execution, she refused a blindfold, insisting on staring at the bullet straight on. Hannah faced the truth, lived and died for her convictions, and took pride in openly being just who she was.
That spring of 2007, I was at London’s British Library, looking for information on Senesh, seeking nuanced discussions about her character. It turned out there weren’t many books about her, so I ordered any that mentioned her name. One of them happened to be in Yiddish. I almost put it back.
Instead, I picked up Freuen in di Ghettos （Women in the Ghettos）， published in New York in 1946, and flipped through the pages. In this 185-page anthology, Hannah was mentioned only in the last chapter. Before that, 170 pages were filled with stories of other women—dozens of unknown young Jews who fought in the resistance against the Nazis, mainly from inside the Polish ghettos. These “ghetto girls” paid off Gestapo guards, hid revolvers in loaves of bread, and helped build systems of underground bunkers. They flirted with Nazis, bought them off with wine, whiskey, and pastry, and, with stealth, shot and killed them. They carried out espionage missions for Moscow, distributed fake IDs and underground flyers, and were bearers of the truth about what was happening to the Jews. They helped the sick and taught the children; they bombed German train lines and blew up Vilna’s electric supply. They dressed up as non-Jews, worked as maids on the Aryan side of town, and helped Jews escape the ghettos through canals and chimneys, by digging holes in walls and crawling across rooftops. They bribed executioners, wrote underground radio bulletins, upheld group morale, negotiated with Polish landowners, tricked the Gestapo into carrying their luggage filled with weapons, initiated a group of anti-Nazi Nazis, and, of course, took care of most of the underground’s admin.
Despite years of Jewish education, I’d never read accounts like these, astonishing in their details of the quotidian and extraordinary work of woman’s combat. I had no idea how many Jewish women were involved in the resistance effort, nor to what degree.
These writings didn’t just amaze me, they touched me personally, upending my understanding of my own history. I come from a family of Polish Jewish Holocaust survivors. My bubbe Zelda （namesake to my eldest daughter） did not fight in the resistance; her successful but tragic escape story shaped my understanding of survival. She—who did not look Jewish, with her high cheekbones and pinched nose—fled occupied Warsaw, swam across rivers, hid in a convent, flirted with a Nazi who turned a blind eye, and was transported in a truck carrying oranges eastward, finally stealing across the Russian border, where her life was saved, ironically, by being forced into Siberian work camps. My bubbe was strong as an ox, but she’d lost her parents and three of her four sisters, all of whom had remained in Warsaw. She’d relay this dreadful story to me every single afternoon as she babysat me after school, tears and fury in her eyes. My Montreal Jewish community was composed largely of Holocaust survivor families; both my family and neighbors’ families were full of similar stories of pain and suffering. My genes were stamped—even altered, as neuroscientists now suggest—by trauma. I grew up in an aura of victimization and fear.