While Frumka had been the initial Freedom member to return to Warsaw to care for the comrades left behind, Tosia was selected by The Young Guard to be one of that organization’s first. She was not an authoritative ideologue but was chosen for her passion, energy, and ability to connect with people of all ages; also because of her glowing blue eyes and wealthy, non-Jewish looks. She agreed to the mission immediately, intellectually accepting that movement life took priority over individual life. Privately, however, this caused her great emotional turbulence. She cried only to her closest friends, sad that she would have to leave Vilna and forego Palestine, which had been her dream. Regardless, she went forth with gusto, and though it took her three tries to cross the border, she finally made it to Warsaw. With her blonde charm and fluent Polish, her “iron softness,” in the words of her Hebrew biographer, she quickly became The Young Guard’s main messenger, constantly traveling through the county to connect chapters, bring information, organize seminars, and encourage clandestine educational activity, her wide smile and whippy hair a treat for every host. Tosia often dressed like a country girl, donning layers of skirts, hiding contraband in their folds. Her work had its share of setbacks, but the young woman’s sassiness, bravado, and keen instinct usually led her to emerge relatively unscathed. In one account, she was caught in Cz?stochowa by a Nazi border guard, but she twisted out of his arms and ran fifteen miles by foot to a farm in ?arki.
Countless comrade memoirs recount “the day that Tosia arrived” in their ghettos. Her appearance was like an injection of sunshine into their dark lives—“a jolt of electric energy.” People did not sense her ambivalent interior; they rejoiced, cried, and hugged her close. She brought warmth, “inexhaustible optimism,” a sense of connectedness, the relief at not being forgotten, the feeling that things might somehow be okay. Even in wartime, Tosia taught comrades “the art of living” and how not to be so serious all the time.
Now in wintery Vilna, it was similar. The journey had been particularly brutal: long, dangerous, replete with checkpoints. Tosia had spent sleepless nights in freezing filth clutching a stash of fake IDs. When she arrived, she needed a moment to defrost, but then thawed into her old cheerful self. “If you were not there under those ghetto walls with us, you simply cannot understand what it meant that this ‘phenomenon’ crossed the borders of the ghetto,” wrote Vilna-based Young Guard leader Ruzka Korczak. “Tosia came! Like a happy spring, the information spread among the people: Tosia is visiting from Warsaw, as if there was no ghetto, Germans and death around us, as if there wasn’t danger in every corner. . . . Tosia is here! A well of love and light.”
Tosia entered The Young Guard headquarters, where comrades slept on tables and unhinged doors. Filled with inexplicable happiness and youthful passion, she told them stories about Warsaw—the terror and hunger, but also how the comrades continued to work. “She opened up for us a new, almost unbelievable world,” Ruzka later reflected. “We heard how in the darkness of Warsaw ghetto life, there emerged a new song that was filled with vigor.” Even after two full years of Nazi occupation and inhuman conditions, they were not broken and still believed in a higher purpose.
As with all the ghettos she visited, Tosia brought news. Tonight, in Vilna, she was also to confirm news. She had been sent at the same time as a couple of Freedom couriers. Back in Warsaw, they’d heard rumors of mass executions. But were they true? And what could she do to help? She was prepared to aid the Vilna group in relocating to Warsaw, which the comrades assumed was safer.
The next night, Abba Kovner, the local Young Guard leader, called a meeting of 150 ghetto youths from several movements, The youth’s first mass gathering took place in a damp, candlelit room in the Judenrat building under the guise of a New Year’s party. Once everyone had arrived, Abba read a pamphlet in Yiddish. Then he immediately gestured to Tosia and asked her to deliver it in Hebrew, to show that a leader from Warsaw was committed to his radical ideas. She was stunned by what she heard; what she had to relay.
One young Vilna girl, Sara, was taken to Ponary, at one time a popular vacation site. Now it was a mass killing ground where, over the course of the next three years, seventy-five thousand Jews were stripped and shot next to massive twenty-foot-deep pits that collected their bodies. Shot but not killed, Sara awoke in the ditch of frozen cadavers, naked, staring into the eyes of her dead mother. She waited until dark and climbed her way out, then hid for two days in the forest before running back to Vilna, arriving unclothed and hysterical, relaying the massacre that she’d witnessed. The head of the Judenrat did not believe her, or at least claimed not to, and warned her not to tell people, so that they didn’t panic.