During the first weeks of the war, Freedom sent Hantze east to Lvov, to bolster movement activity. She inspired everyone with her energy, reminding them of their good fortune to be on the Soviet side, and generally boosting morale. In Pinsk, she visited her parents with her radical news. A friend wrote: “I will always remember the moment when Hantze told her parents that she had decided to go back to the Nazi part of Poland. Suddenly it was quiet in the house. A world was broken and turned to stone. One could not see even the smallest movements on the faces of her parents while she made the difficult announcement. After a moment of dreadful silence, her father became fully alert and said, ‘Nu, little daughter, if you feel that you must go, then go, with the help of God.’” Of course she needed to go. When her first attempt to steal across the border failed—Hantze froze up when she entered the cold river she was supposed to swim across—she insisted on trying again.
Now, on the holiest day of the Jewish year, in the Freedom dining room in Warsaw, far away from her hometown, Hantze, wearing her usual swinging braids, a kerchief over her head, and a floral blouse with puffy, short sleeves, was giving a speech about dignity—when her sister Frumka burst through the doors.
Frumka delivered the news: the Jewish Quarter was going to be sealed off. They would lose ties to the outside world, to work, to the other groups, to food, to everything. The members were familiar with ghettos in the provinces but hadn’t imagined that this would happen in Warsaw, a European capital city. Zivia and Frumka knew that the movement was going to have to redeploy its resources, reorganize, and retrain. Once again, another twist.
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When the ghetto gates were locked, confining more than four hundred thousand Jews to a tiny area surrounded by tall, thick walls topped with broken glass, Freedom’s focus on aid, education, and cultural activity did not wane, but waxed. This, Zivia believed, was how they would maintain their spirits and weather German occupation.
Freedom was not alone. Many organizations hosted cultural and aid activities. Thousands of ghetto Jews risked their lives to perform in shows: amateur and professional, Yiddish and Polish, rehearsed spectacles and competitions. Jews staged satirical performances in coffeehouses and educational performances in theaters. Actors participated in secret shows in basements to earn extra money. There was a “Broadway” in the Warsaw ghetto consisting of thirty performance venues on one street alone. The Bund also hosted concerts. They opened seven soup kitchens and two tearooms, and founded a large-scale school system, day camps, sports organizations, an underground medical school, literary events, and the Socialist Red Cross. Given that political meetings were illegal, communal kitchens served as clandestine sites for many rendezvous.
For Freedom, education was a priority. Dzielna hosted three large seminars in 1940–41, despite Judenrat opposition. The first was attended by fifty people, from twenty-three branches across Poland, as well as luminaries including poet Yitzhak Katzenelson, historian and social activist Emanuel Ringelblum, and educators Janusz Korczak and Stefa Wilczynska, all of them friends of Zivia’s from the Judenrat corridors. For six weeks, attendees studied and pondered the future. Dzielna’s ongoing cultural program offered Bible classes, literary readings, science speakers, and a drama group.
With all Jewish schools having been forcibly closed, Zivia worried that ghetto children were becoming idle and boorish. In response, Freedom established underground elementary and high schools, serving 120 students, including Hantze, who was the most senior. Thirteen teachers worked with no supplies, permanent classrooms, or guaranteed salaries, teaching secular and Jewish subjects. They roved from apartment to apartment, crowded into tiny rooms where whole families were forced to live. The instructors were starving, their legs swollen from the winter cold, yet they’d lecture on Bible studies, biology, mathematics, world literature, Polish language, and psychology. They taught students who were shivering and bloated from starvation “how to think.” The poet Katzenelson inspired his students to love their heritage; the whole household would break into song. This “flying gymnasia,” which even administered exams, existed for two years. It was a hotbed for future underground fighters.
Young children were also a priority. Dzielna offered a training course on caring for youngsters; nursery and kindergarten specialists ran a day care center. Orphanages, previously overseen by the Polish government, fell into disrepair, so Freedom girls gathered clothes and writing kits, taught the children plays, stories, and folk songs, and arranged holiday festivities. Many ghetto children lived on the streets, trading goods or begging for bread. Zivia, Antek, and people from other groups organized a “children’s kitchen” to feed and teach boys and girls reading, writing, Hebrew, and Yiddish.