On the last night of the Aktion, September 13, a few dozen comrades sat together at 63 Mila Street. The ones who were riled up, hungering for a hotheaded response, were sent to a different room. The older members, those in their midtwenties, stayed to discuss what to do next. Conversation was despondent. “We came together and sat,” Zivia wrote, “mourning and bleeding.” Consensus was that it was too much, too late; they were too traumatized. It was time for a group suicide mission. They would take the petrol, kerosene, and single gun that they had left, and set fire to German warehouses, shoot some Nazis, and be killed, but with honor.
Zivia, a pessimist, was outspoken: it was time to die.
It was Antek who spoke up against his colleagues, and his love. First in a whisper, then loudly: “I reject the proposal. . . . The crisis is great, and the shame is great. But the proposed act is an act of despair. It will die with no echo. . . . It is an act that is good for each of us on a personal level, because under such circumstances, death can appear as salvation. But the strength that has held us until now and motivated our activity—was it only in order to allow us to choose a beautiful death? Both in our fight and in our death, we wished to save the honor of the Jewish people. . . . We have a legacy of countless failures, and we shall have a legacy of defeats. We have to start all over.”
His words clashed with the fighters’ moods, arousing incredible anger—he was stalling their only chance. But eventually those who craved a drastic-heroic act couldn’t refute Antek’s logic, and the mass suicide plan was abandoned. The comrades had to stand tall with weapons in their hands and go fight, Zivia knew. Their movement, above all, believed in the collective over the individual. From now on, resistance was the raison d’etre. Even if it killed them.
Zivia got to work gluing the movement back together for its next phase: a militia.
Chapter 7
The Days of Wandering—Homeless to Housekeeper
Renia
AUGUST 1942
On a warm August morning in 1942, during the period of mass murders in the Warsaw ghetto, the sun in Wodzis?aw was blazing orange, the air fresh. Seventeen-year-old Renia woke from sleep. Her nightmares had rattled her: dreams of turmoil where she was “fighting, but then falling like a fly,” leaving her weak. But the glorious morning soothed and reinvigorated her. “My head bursts out of its place, and I want to devour life . . . my face is shining. I am alive. I am invincible!”
But one glance at her parents changed her mood. Their faces sank into their hands. They looked crazed. That night, there’d been a deportation in nearby Kielce. People who tried to escape were shot or buried alive, regardless of age or sex. The Nazis had promised no more deportations, promised to return all deportees after England had demanded that the Jews were not to be harmed.
All lies.
“Your father and I are still young, but we’ve had joy in life,” Renia’s mother told her, as always, to the point. “But these poor babies, what wrong did they do? I would gladly die right here, right now, to spare the babies’ lives.” Leah, in her midforties, was frantically concerned with hiding her youngest, saving them from death.
In the past weeks, stories of atrocities abounded. Escapees from nearby villages who’d evaded being shot by Germans or turned in by Poles had come to Wodzis?aw, where they’d heard Jews still lived. They were barely able to stand, carrying with them nothing but worn satchels and horrific tales—often of the children. One man told the story of his wife, who’d pulled their two babies out of the deportation line. A German, foaming at the mouth, lunged at her and killed the infants by kicking them with his spiked boots. The mother was ordered to watch, then dig them graves. The German crushed her skull with the butt of his rifle. For a long time, the man recounted, his wife convulsed in pain until she finally died.
On another day, Renia saw a group of half-insane women, raggedy, pale, blue-lipped, and shaking like willows. Through hysterical sobs, these starving women told her that their town had been surrounded. Gunshots flew in every direction. Their children had been playing outside and ran to their houses. But a Nazi caught them and beat the kids to death, one by one. The women, half naked in nightgowns, barefoot, fled to the fields and forests, begging for food from kind farmers’ wives, wandering aimlessly.