“If I’m destined to go down,” Renia said, personally uttering Abba Kovner’s mantra of resistance. “I will not die like a clueless sheep sent to the slaughter.”
Her zeal fanned a hot fire that was already burning among the B?dzin youth.
Chapter 9
The Black Ravens
Chajka and Renia
OCTOBER 1942
Chajka Klinger sprinted through the streets and alleyways of B?dzin. Her first mission. In her bag, hidden flyers. Her curly, short, brown hair was tucked behind her ears, her eyes surveilled, her heart pounded. Each step was sheer danger but also contained careful joy. She was heading out to distribute news about guerillas, mass deportations, and politics. The truth. Hands shaking, she taped one notice to a door, then handed another to a pedestrian. She even ventured outside the Jewish area.
At last, she was doing something!
The B?dzin that Renia came to was already sizzling with the spirit of resistance. One of its most vocal proponents: twenty-five-year-old Chajka Klinger.
*
Born in 1917 to a poor Hassidic family in B?dzin, Chajka was brainy and fiery, clever and passionate. Her family was barely supported by her mother’s grocery store; her father studied Torah and Talmud all day. She received a rare scholarship to attend the secular Jewish Furstenberg Gymnazium, a top-tier prep school, where she became fluent in numerous languages and dreamed of becoming an intellectual. B?dzin, with its sizable Jewish middle-class population, was an early host of many Zionist movements. Relatively free from antisemitism in the 1930s, the town served as a passionate hub of twelve youth groups. Chajka’s school, a beacon of B?dzin’s well-to-do, liberal community, supported socialist Zionism, and outside of school, Chajka was entirely taken by the intellectual rigor and philosophies of The Young Guard—a rare choice of groups among her peers because of its strictness.
The Young Guard, which invented the “intimate group” model, blended the striving for a Jewish homeland with Marxism, heavy romanticism, and beliefs in the superior state of youth and life in the wild for a sound body and mind. They read a profusion of European revolutionaries, promoted a culture of conversation and self-actualization, and aimed to create a new type of Jew. Committed to truth, the group had its own ten commandments, including laws of purity: no smoking, alcohol, or sex allowed. The psychoanalytic study of sexuality was encouraged, but the act was considered too distracting to the collective cause.
Chajka, in her collared shirts and wire-rimmed glasses, adopted these radical views zealously, seeing The Young Guard as an avant-garde movement that would eventually lead the Jewish nation to a complete social and national revolution. Rebelling against her own background, she felt connected to its mantra of intergenerational conflict. Also, her first boyfriend was a dedicated member. Chajka was extroverted, sensitive, and always falling in love.
Devoted, she was critical of others but also of herself when she did not live up to The Young Guard’s high standards. She quickly became a counselor, then an editor, and then a regional movement leader.
Her boyfriend had been drafted into the Polish army. While he was serving, she became aware of tall, slim David Kozlowski, a comrade who had pockets stuffed with newspapers, and a terrible stutter. They met at the library when the librarian refused to give Chajka a book because David wanted it, and he was their top reader. He smiled at her. Upset, she pretended not to know him. （He never forgave her.） Then he submitted a poem to the newspaper Chajka edited, and she was overwhelmed by its lyricism and yearning. Suddenly she noticed how velvety brown his deep-set eyes were, how much pain they held, “the eyes of a dreamer.”
In the late 1930s, the couple joined a kibbutz to prepare for aliyah; this was a significant decision for David, whose elite parents forbade it, and for Chajka, who knew that she’d be giving up her intellectual ambitions for a life of austerity on the land. Sensitive, shabby David, a rabid leftist in theory, endured a difficult proletarianization: he could wax poetic about China’s Chen, the Soviet Union and the Spanish Revolution, but could not bear the monotony of sitting behind a sewing machine. Chajka, an incurable romantic, felt it her duty to help this “delicate savior,” this “young tree” blossom, and she supported him until he became a spiritual leader of the group. They were supposed to move to Palestine on September 5, 1939.