There, Zivia spent afternoons haggling with the heads of the JDC and welfare organizations, exchanging information with youth group leaders, trading underground publications, and convincing rich Jews to loan her significant sums. She was in charge of the money sent to Warsaw for the Zionist youth groups, and the recipient of secret correspondence from foreign units. At night, Zivia toiled with her female comrades in the laundry. Eating little herself, and growing so thin she worried others, she was constantly giving members pep talks, listening to their woes, and, of course, jolting them with her straight talk. The young comrades adored her lack of pretension, quick decision-making, and frank advice.
In a climate of hunger and humiliation, Zivia felt responsible for feeding and housing the youth and tried her best to protect them from being abducted and sent to work camps. In Warsaw, all Jews aged twelve to sixty were subject to forced labor, a violent and abusive situation they all feared constantly. To obtain workers, the Germans would cordon off a street and snatch all the Jews who happened to be there—even those running home with a slice of bread for their children. People were herded into trucks and driven away to do hard labor while being beaten and starved. Zivia intervened on several occasions, freeing captured comrades, a string of cigarette smoke tracing each of her movements.
A main project of hers was negotiating the reestablishment and maintenance of communal training farms, which, so far, had been spared by the Nazis. During the war, the farms in Grochów and Czerniaków became important sites for labor, employing in the fields, flower gardens, and dairy farms youths who might otherwise have been abducted. They also served as centers for education, with singing and dancing. Zivia used to travel extensively in her attempts to coordinate educational activities in the regions, but she particularly enjoyed visiting these leafy landscapes, where at night she could expose her Jewish features and revel in the relative freedom, and which served as escapes from hunger, lice, and the rampant epidemics of Warsaw, not to mention random shootings and daily torture.
Later in the war, Zivia used to bribe a Jewish policeman, scale the ghetto wall, and leave via the cemetery. Then she’d fume at the waste of time it took to get out. This is also how Zivia would accompany émigrés out of the ghetto: slip cash at the right instant and then cross the gate, carrying a briefcase, appearing like an assured schoolgirl striding down the street, ready for a day’s work.
But for now, there was no walled ghetto in Warsaw. Despite despair, confusion, and the odd violent episode, there was not even the premonition of the imprisonment and murder that was to come; the youths’ worst fear was that pogroms would erupt among Poles when the Nazis inevitably lost and retreated. For now, these young Jews were simply busy social activists, passing on pioneer values by teaching history and social theory. For now, they were busy strengthening units that would soon come to serve a wholly, and holy, different purpose.
*
One day in spring 1940, Zivia returned to Dzielna to find the usual hum of activity. Also, Antek.
He too had returned to Nazi-occupied territory. Some suspected he’d followed Zivia. Guarding her emotions, Zivia wrote nothing about their personal relations; Antek, on the other hand, reminisced about their earliest interactions. Once, back in Kovel, when Zivia was sick, he trekked out in the mud to bring her fish and cake. Instead of a warm thanks, she scolded him for looking so messy. “I was amazed at her nerve,” he said. “She was talking like a wife.” Months later, he saw her deliver an impassioned lecture, pounding her fist with verve—and fell in love.
Antek joined Zivia and Frumka as leaders, and they built up Freedom in Warsaw and the provinces. Despite her “Jewish nose” and “halting” Polish, Frumka maintained connections between Warsaw headquarters and the Polish towns, offering support and recruiting new members. She traveled more and more, to lead seminars and maintain cross-country connections among the movement, but also, some guessed, to avoid Antek and Zivia. She was rather fond of Antek, but it was increasingly clear that his romantic interest was directed entirely at her best friend.
At Dzielna, Zivia （and Frumka, when she was there, and Antek） enhanced the mood in the evenings by sharing an anecdote from the day, a quiet song, a short play—all behind draped windows. The community drew courage from stories of bravery in Jewish history. They read books, learned Hebrew, and engaged in stormy discussions. They maintained their beliefs in compassion and social action in a world of terror, murder, and every man for himself. They hoped to build strong Jews who would survive the war （most of them, they still thought）。 They were preparing for a future they still believed in. A light mood existed among the members—a “spirit of freedom,” as was once articulated by the famed poet Yitzhak Katzenelson, who lived and taught at Dzielna for several months.