“With all our strength, we tried to give them back a bit of their sweet childhood, a bit of laughter and joking,” one female comrade wrote. “When German inspectors came, they . . . ate and did nothing more. Children of eleven, twelve years old learned to hide like adults, behaving in a way that did not accord to their age.” The Freedom children’s choir and dramatic groups attracted thousands of Jews seeking emotional sustenance.
Dzielna’s address was well known on the Jewish streets. The Freedom community, run largely by women, claimed more than a thousand members. The comrades spent hours singing with the children, taking them out for walks and to play in fields—that is, among the destruction that was left standing between the walls. Older Jews would stand and watch the children having fun, a spark of hope.
*
For all this teaching, Freedom needed books.
An integral part of the early resistance was literary. The occupying Germans banned and burnt Yiddish and Hebrew volumes, as well as titles by Jewish writers and political opponents. Needless to say, anti-Nazi publications were forbidden, and even carrying one brought imprisonment or death. To keep a diary and “compile evidence” against the Nazis was equally punishable. Jews, long known as people of the book, resisted by writing—to distribute information, to document, and for personal expression. Readers, they rebelled by saving stories.
As no new books were being published, and most old books were no longer accessible, Freedom formed its own imprint. Their first book, published on a mimeograph, was a historical literary anthology full of stories of Jewish suffering and heroism; they wanted to present young people with powerful examples of Jewish courage. Several hundred copies were smuggled to branches across the country. They published educational handbooks, as well as Katzenelson’s biblical play, Job, which their drama group produced. While Antek made copies, the movement kids sang in their loudest voices, to cover up the noise of the machine.
Communication in the face of the Nazi-imposed information blackout was crucial. Jews from all factions printed underground publications to distribute across the country, offering information about the ghettos and camps. Freedom published an underground newspaper in Polish and Yiddish that discussed the questions of the day; later, its members put out a Yiddish weekly with news they heard over their secret radio. According to historian Emanuel Ringelblum, “Political publications sprouted like mushrooms after the rain. If you publish your paper once a month, I’ll publish mine twice a month.” Overall, some 70 periodicals containing political debate, literary works, and news from outside the ghetto were secretly printed in Polish, Hebrew and Yiddish on Gestetner cyclostyle copiers using whatever paper they could muster. Print runs were small, but each copy was read by multiple people.
Reading was a form of escape and a source of critical knowledge; saving books was an act of cultural and personal salvation. Libraries were forbidden, so one woman member explained the movement’s idea for creating its own form of a catalogued library in Warsaw: “If we’re not allowed to concentrate the books in one room, then we will make lists of all the books found in each house and make them available for all inhabitants.”
Many others across Poland developed secret home libraries. Henia Reinhartz, a young Bundist in the ?ód? ghetto, explained that a group of Bundists rescued piles of books from the city’s Yiddish library and brought them to her family’s apartment. Along with her sister and a few friends, she sorted the volumes and then built shelves to hold them. “Our kitchen thus became the ghetto library,” she explained later. “This was an underground library, which means that it was kept secret so that neither the ghetto administration nor the Germans were to know about it.” Henia traced her love of reading to the ghetto. “Reading meant escaping into another world,” she wrote, “living the lives of the heroes and heroines, sharing their joys and sorrows, the joys and sorrows of a normal life in a normal world unlike ours, full of fear and hunger.” She read Gone with the Wind in Polish while hiding from a deportation.
With many out of work and out of school, stuck in small spaces, hungry and listless, isolated and bored, writing became a convenient and common pastime. Jews wrote personal accounts to maintain their humanity and a sense of agency over their lives. Autobiographical writing records inner development; introspection validates identity and strengthens individuality. As in the famous example of Anne Frank, or the less famous diary of Rutka Laskier, a B?dzin-based teen, Jewish women explored their shifting perceptions and sexuality, their fears and social analyses, their frustrations with their suitors and their mothers. Anne and Rutka, like many other women, were well educated; they believed in a liberal humanism that was destroyed. Writing provided a sense of control over their destinies, an attempt to refute terrifying social decay and preserve faith and order. In writing, they searched for meaning among senseless brutality, for a way to repair their collapsed world.