Later, I found out that Renia’s writings in Freuen were excerpted from a long memoir that had been penned in Polish and published in Hebrew in Palestine in 1945. Her book was one of the first （some say the first） full-length personal accounts of the Holocaust. In 1947 a Jewish press in downtown New York released its English version with an introduction by an eminent translator. But soon after, the book and its world fell into obscurity. I have come across Renia only in passing mentions or scholarly annotations. Here I lift her story from the footnotes to the text, unveiling this anonymous Jewish woman who displayed acts of astonishing bravery. I have interwoven into Renia’s story tales of Polish Jewish resisters from different underground movements and with diverse missions, all to show the breadth and scope of female courage.
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Jewish lore is filled with tales of underdog victory: David and Goliath, the Israelite slaves who tantalized Pharaoh, the Maccabee brothers who defeated the Greek Empire.
This is not that story.
The Polish Jewish resistance achieved relatively miniscule victories in terms of military success, Nazi casualties, and the number of Jews saved.
But their resistance effort was larger and more organized than I ever could have imagined, and colossal compared with the Holocaust narrative I’d grown up with. Jewish armed underground groups operated in more than ninety eastern European ghettos. “Small acts” and uprisings took place in Warsaw as well as in B?dzin, Vilna, Bia?ystok, Kraków, Lvov, Cz?stochowa, Sosnowiec, and Tarnów. Armed Jewish resistance broke out in at least five major concentration camps and death camps—including Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Sobibor—as well as in eighteen forced-labor camps. Thirty thousand Jews joined forest partisan detachments. Jewish networks financially supported twelve thousand fellow Jews-in-hiding in Warsaw. All this alongside endless examples of daily acts of defiance.
Why, I kept asking myself, had I never heard these stories? Why had I not heard about the hundreds, even thousands, of Jewish women who were involved in every aspect of this rebellion, often at its helm? Why was Freuen an obscure title instead of a classic on Holocaust reading lists?
As I came to learn, many factors, both personal and political, have guided the development of the narrative of the Holocaust. Our collective memory has been shaped by an overarching resistance to resistance. Silence is a means of swaying perceptions and shifting power, and has functioned in different ways in Poland, Israel, and North America over the decades. Silence is also a technique for coping and living.
Even when storytellers have gone against the grain and presented resistance stories, there has been little focus on women. In the odd cases where writers have included women in their tales, they are often portrayed within stereotypical narrative tropes. In the compelling 2001 TV movie Uprising, about the Warsaw ghetto, female fighters are present but classically misrepresented. Women leaders were made minor characters; “girlfriends of” the protagonists. The sole female lead is Tosia Altman, and though the film does show her fearlessly smuggling weapons, she is depicted as a beautiful, shy girl who took care of her sick father and passively got swept up into a resistance role, all wide eyed and meek. In reality, Tosia was a leader of The Young Guard youth movement well before the war; her biographer emphasizes her reputation for being a feisty “glam girl” and “hussy.” By rewriting her backstory, the film not only distorts her character but also erases the whole world of Jewish female education, training, and work that created her.
Needless to say, Jewish resistance to the Nazis in Poland was not a radical woman-only feminist mission. Men were fighters, leaders, and battle commanders. But because of their gender and their ability to camouflage their Jewishness, women were uniquely suited to some crucial and life-threatening tasks; in particular, as couriers. As described by fighter Chaika Grossman, “The Jewish girls were the nerve-centers of the movement.”
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The eminent Warsaw ghetto chronicler Emanuel Ringelblum wrote about the courier girls at the time: “Without a murmur, without a second’s hesitation, they accept and carry out the most dangerous missions. . . . How many times have they looked death in the eyes? . . . The story of the Jewish woman will be a glorious page in the history of Jewry during the present war.”