But the woman ignored the warning. It simply sounded too crazy to be true.
*
Zivia however, knew: “This is wholesale planned murder.” In the days after the couriers’ return, she walked around the bustling, anxious ghetto, already imagining everyone dead. The only thing that kept her from suicide was the sense that she had a purpose: maybe not to save lives, but to salvage honor, to not go quietly. Pushing aside her feelings, Zivia knew to act. Her Freedom comrades also knew the truth; the movement had to pivot once again and now make defense its primary goal. But setting up a resistance battalion to fight Hitler was cosmically daunting, for reasons of resources and experience, as well as internal conflict—with the Judenrat, with Jewish leaders, between youth movements, and within the movement as well.
As a youth group, Freedom had no contact with the growing Polish underground, and Zivia was concerned that they wouldn’t be all that keen to help Jews—the comrades needed the “adults’” help. The leaders of several youth movements convened and met with the community heads, hoping for them to acknowledge the threat and take charge. But the adult leaders’ faces blanched from fear and anger. “They reproached us for irresponsibly sowing the seeds of despair and confusion among the people,” Zivia later wrote. She and Antek were cautioned by the head of the Joint Distribution Committee to act with restraint. Though the man understood the significance of the murders, she explained, he warned them that hasty actions would result in a grave situation and that the Jewish nation would never forgive them. The Warsaw Judenrat supervisors, on the other hand, either did not believe the rumors or would not react at all, worried that any action would provoke the Nazis to greater violence. They were hopeful that lying low and playing by the rules would spare the Jewish community—and perhaps themselves. Middle-aged, with families and children, they did not want to endanger the entire population because of some youngsters’ idealistic vision of guerilla warfare for which they had no training.
Freedom members grew wildly agitated as these meetings dragged on. Feeling “frustration and helpless rage,” Zivia and her comrades knew they had to work on their own. First, they needed the support of the masses. They would have to expose the horrifying reality to their fellow Jews themselves. “It is our duty to look at the truth as it is,” Zivia believed. To her, “Our greatest enemy was false hope.” The public would never resist, even hide, until they accepted the fact that death was imminent.
Freedom comrades knew how to publish an underground bulletin to get out the message, but were generally at a loss about how to form an army. As Zivia remarked, “None of us knew what had to be done when the Germans were armed and powerful—whereas we had only two revolvers.” Before the war, the Bund and the Revisionist Zionists—the right-wing faction who championed private enterprise and Jewish military units—had established self-defense leagues. But the Labor Zionist youths were trained primarily to debate social theory. They studied self-defense but were not organized to fight. Freedom needed allies with connections or military training.
Zivia persisted. Drawing on years of honed negotiation skills and resilience, she continued to work on the community leaders but was met with partisan politics again and again. In March 1942 she helped initiate a meeting of Jews from a variety of parties in the Bund’s kitchen. Antek, representing Freedom, pleaded with leaders to understand the urgency of preparing a response, and proposed a program for establishing a collective Jewish defense movement. The meeting ended with no practical outcomes. The Zionists wanted to work with the Bund, which had connections with the Polish parties; the Bund, however, didn’t trust the bourgeois, Palestine-obsessed Zionist groups and preferred to fight with the Polish underground, which actually had a few weapons. The main party leaders rebuked the youth movements, accusing them of being na?ve and hasty alarmists with zero soldierly experience. Agreement with the well-armed Revisionist Zionist youth group, Betar, was impossible.
Feeling sickeningly helpless, the Zionist youth tried to contact the Polish resistance themselves. Then they participated in the Anti-Fascist Bloc initiated by the Jewish Communists. The Communists wanted to collaborate with the Soviet Red Army outside the ghetto, but Zivia, who was in a leadership role, argued for internal defense. Before they could agree on a way forward, the Communist leaders were arrested, and the alliance fell apart. Now Freedom’s members had no idea where they’d get weapons. Even Zivia was stumped.