Sara was hospitalized. There, Abba Kovner met her. Kovner did believe her; to him, the Nazi plan to kill all Jews was very clear. At the New Year’s eve meeting, Tosia read his conclusions: “Don’t believe those who are deluding you. . . . Hitler plotted to exterminate all the Jews of Europe.” She ended with what became his famous resistance mantra: “Let us not go like sheep to the slaughter!” Abba insisted that all Jews must be warned and must fight back. The only answer: self-defense.
Tosia, a woman of plans, never sat in one place for long. Now she needed to travel to ghettos to deliver not comforting words of the movement but this horrific, urgent message. The Nazis planned to kill all Jews. All.
It was time to resist.
*
How do you react to news that you are going to be killed? Do you try to stay optimistic, to harbor delusions in order to maintain your sanity? Or do you face the darkness straight on and look the bullet in the eye?
When Zivia heard the news from Tosia and the Freedom couriers—the same news also brought back by religious Jews and Polish activists—she didn’t doubt it for a second. Vilna was simply a confirmation. Other Jews had escaped from death camps such as Chelmno and shared their shocking stories back in the ghettos. Hitler’s threats, which she’d dismissed—they’d all dismissed—as “the hollow phrases of an arrogant madman,” suddenly, piercingly, rang true.
If anything, Zivia was hit by a torrent of guilt. Of course, this was happening. Why hadn’t she seen it all more clearly? Why hadn’t she grasped that the Nazis had developed a sickening systematic plan to annihilate the Jewish people? Why had she shied away from community leadership, concentrating only on the youth, assuming those more senior would step up to the task? Why hadn’t she focused on self-defense and procuring weapons? Why hadn’t she done something sooner? Precious time had been wasted.
Zivia tried to explain away these regrets. How could anyone have known what atrocities were being planned, especially when the Nazis took great pains to keep them secret specifically to avoid retaliation and global censure? How could a suffering minority fight an army that was conquering entire countries? How could people who were starving and ill make tactical plans for military action? Had they not focused intensely on promoting self-respect, education, and camaraderie during those early years, there may not have been the spirit, trust, and ethos that enabled a fighting force. But still, she was consumed by regret.
Numerous courier girls, including Frumka, spread the news of the mass execution at Ponary and the underground’s understanding of the Final Solution. Runaway witnesses also testified in front of large gatherings of community leaders. But they were often not believed. Many Jewish communities were reluctant to accept stories that simply seemed too monstrous to process. They refused to believe that similar atrocities would be carried out in western Poland, where, despite torturous living conditions, there been no inklings of mass murder. Their communities supplied the Reich with indispensable slave labor; it made no sense economically for the Nazis to execute them all.
Many Jews harbored the illusion that it was still possible to survive. They wanted to believe the best, wanted desperately to live. No one wanted to think that their mothers, their siblings, their children had been dispatched against their will to be slaughtered—or that their own impeding deportation almost certainly meant death. And Warsaw, of all places, was in the heart of Europe. How could they deport a whole capital city? Polish Jews had previously lived in segregation for centuries—they never imagined that Hitler’s ghettos were part of a murder machine. Jews had prepared psychologically for what they knew: World War I. Unfortunately, this was not that war.
In Tosia’s final letter to Palestine, dated April 7, 1942, she wrote of the torment of seeing such destruction yet being unable to stop it: “Jews are dying before my eyes and I am powerless to help. Did you ever try to shatter a wall with your head?”
In one account, a young Jewish woman tells of embarking a train to Auschwitz. Suddenly she saw a note card being pushed through the boards of the train, between the wooden slats. She read: “[T]his train is taking you to the worst death camps. . . . Do not enter this train.”