Visits from the girls were welcome, especially when they brought hopeful words about movement activity. On her second mission outside Warsaw, Chana traveled with a valise full of underground literature: book chapters about Jewish history, workers’ literature, and national holidays. “It was dangerous to travel with such ‘stories,’” she recounted, but she was determined to disseminate the material. On one trip, Chana wrote, a five did not assemble, but two fives did. They all sat in a wooden house, in the dark, and she told the ten comrades about Freedom’s activity, stressing that not everything had been destroyed and that they should draw strength from their history. The youths listened with bated breath; later, they spread out, each to his or her own corner and to his or her own worries, but glowing with renewed courage. Chana’s golden words had brought knowledge and reprieve, helping young Jews feel “strong against the clouds in these stormy times.”
These girls, known as “Zivia’s girls,” were developing a role that would soon become one of, if not the, most important of the resistance.
Chapter 6
From Spirit to Blood—Becoming the ZOB
Tosia, Zivia, and Vladka
DECEMBER 1941
Vilna, 1941. A December snow, light and fluffy, swirled in the wind. Six months earlier, the Nazi war machine had rumbled east, taking control of the region. The towns to which Zivia and the youth had fled in 1939, where they carried out Zionist and Bundist activity under Soviet and Lithuanian rule, were no longer safe. Before 1941, Jews still had jobs, relative freedom of movement, and education. （In fact, many women spoke gratefully of the superior instruction they received under the Russians.） But all that came to an abrupt halt. Ghettoizing, anti-Jewish laws, and torture were imposed immediately, the Jews’ lives descending into darkness, the abyss.
A little Nazi occupation, however, would not deter Tosia Altman. If anything, this mission was one of her most critical.
The twenty-three-year old Young Guard leader arrived in Vilna, her thick, golden locks catching snowflakes and bouncing along with her springy steps. To get to the tiny ghetto, set in the old Jewish area, she passed the formidable Neris River, snow-filled parks, medieval buildings built along cobblestone streets, and the Jewish libraries, synagogues, yeshivas, and archives that had blossomed in this town, a centuries-old Polish center of Yiddish poetry, rabbinic scholarship, and intellect. Tosia had also fled to Vilna at the start of the war, so she knew the city. She’d spent the better part of the past two years traveling nonstop throughout Nazi-ruled Poland, her itinerary appearing like a mad scribble, indiscernible with her number of trips. Dealing with the Germans of Vilna was just another day’s work.
Tosia had been a Young Guard leader well before the war, and, like Zivia and Frumka, was a key figure in the group’s plan B. Born to a well-to-do, cultured, and loving family, boisterous Tosia grew up in W?oc?awek, a small town in central Poland where the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus was schooled, and where, centuries later, her father owned a watch and jewelry shop. A Zionist, he was very involved in the community. Tosia, too, became active in the movement, and with her curiosity, social ease, and desire to be at the heart of the action, she rose quickly through the ranks. Her own aliyah to Palestine was curtailed as she was made head of youth education for The Young Guard in Warsaw. She envied her friends now residing in the promised land, where they no doubt led action-packed lives, and regarded her somewhat older Polish coleaders as a bit too serious. With time, however, she connected with them.
Tosia was considered a fashionable Polish type. She was a “glam girl”—a well-educated, well-spoken young woman who wore sporty outfits—and a “hussy” with many boyfriends. In particular, she was obsessed with the inventive and intellectual Yurek Horn （whose aloofness her father did not like）。 She was a romantic, and a bookworm—constantly sitting in the corner cross-legged with her nose in a tome. Tosia was afraid of dogs and darkness, so she forced herself to walk out at night during a pogrom to overcome her anxieties. She hummed tunes and was always laughing, displaying large, pearly teeth. A joker who made friends easily, she scrupulously avoided social arguments and was perturbed by misunderstandings.