What was a fifteen-year-old to do? Renia remained vigilant, knowing instinctively that she had to gather information and face the truth. She listened to rumors streaming in from other towns. People were starving to death en masse, begging for potato peels, food trash. Jews were taking their own lives and killing their own children so they wouldn’t fall into German hands. Whole transports—sometimes ten thousand Jews—were forced to walk from the ghetto to the train station; they left cities to unknown locations. People were sorted and allegedly taken to work. Jewish communities heard from a select few who, it was thought, were intentionally left alive by the Germans to misinform them. Most people simply disappeared. “They leave as if into an abyss,” Renia wrote. Where were they all going?
Collective punishment was the Nazi way. The SS decreed that any Pole who helped a Jew would be killed. Ghetto Jews feared that if they escaped, their entire families would be murdered in retaliation. Stay and protect your community? Or run? Fight, flight.
The slaughtering was constant. Extermination committees made up of folksdeutsch, “Ukrainian savages,” as Renia wrote, and “young, healthy Germans for whom human life meant nothing” set to work. “They were always bloodthirsty,” Renia explained about the Nazis and their collaborators. “It was their nature. Just like an addiction to alcohol or opium.” These “black dogs” wore black uniforms and hats decorated with skulls. When they showed up with their hardened faces, bulging eyes, and large teeth—wild animals ready to pounce—everyone knew that half the population would be executed that day. The second they entered the ghetto, people scurried to hide.
“For them,” Renia wrote, “killing a person was easier than smoking a cigarette.”
Chapter 5
The Warsaw Ghetto—Education and the Word
Hantze and Zivia
OCTOBER 1940
On Yom Kippur 1940, the dining room at 34 Dzielna Street was filled with comrades who’d traveled to Warsaw from the farms for a conference. Yet it was completely quiet, captivated by a lecture being given by Frumka’s younger sister, Hantze, who delivered it with her characteristic allure and sweet voice. The sermon was about Jewish pride; about the importance of staying human.
Four years her junior, Hanzte was in many ways Frumka’s opposite. Blonde to Frumka’s brunette. Bubbly to Frumka’s intensity. Gregarious to Frumka’s solemnity. Imaginative to Frumka’s analytic nature. “I’ve never had a more exciting, stirring meeting with anyone else,” the famous Israeli political figure Rachel Katzenelson wrote later of Hantze. “There was something magical about her laughter, the way she moved. There was something in her that exceeded mere beauty—openness, willingness to take whatever life throws at her, and optimism—that was captivating.”
An ebullient charmer to whom things came easily, from making friends to learning languages, Hantze had grown up leading the local kids, skipping and climbing trees, always at the head, usually laughing. Pampered by her father, Hantze diffused the family tensions as they argued politics after Shabbat dinners: the religious dad, Communist Zlatka （also Hantze’s teacher）， and her Zionist brother, Elyahu. Frumka kept her thoughts to herself, but Hantze threw in jokes. The sisters were usually referred to as “Hantze and Frumka,” with Hantze’s name first. That’s how it was whenever they walked into a room together, the younger sister’s energy stealing the attention.
When Hantze was just fourteen, Elyahu found her to be so preternaturally mature that he introduced her to Freedom just before he left for Palestine. Despite her childish gaiety, the girl exhibited intellectual depth and a desire to be challenged; she surprised comrades with her refined aesthetic taste and love of poetry. She became an active member and, with money sent by her brother, participated in seminars and events, although not always happily. In one letter written from a training camp, Hantze expressed feeling lonely and upset about how the girls talked about her when they thought she was asleep. （“She’s crazy . . . but pretty.”） She felt ambivalent about being the object of boys’ attention and was unsure about her potential romance with one Yitzhak: “He promised to edit my book of poems, and I’m butchering his short stories.” The sisters’ relationship was filled with both affection and conflict. They adored each other, but Hantze sometimes felt suffocated by Frumka’s worrying over her. Living together could be difficult: Frumka loved solitude; Hantze loved “movement, people, life.”