Four days before that, when the Nazis attacked Poland, she attempted to escape the country, not with her family but with David. They took to the crowded roads, jumped off an air-bombed train, and dodged bullet after bomb after falling tree. But they couldn’t get out. They were preparing to flee east, when a message came from The Young Guard HQ instructing them to stay put in B?dzin and revive the movement. If the Jewish community remained in Poland, The Young Guard community would too, to “live, grow, and die with it.” As local leaders, Chajka and David heeded the order. They were, however, shocked by the Nazis’ brutality; to Chajka, Germany was an enlightened culture, and she’d even anticipated a progressive rule.
Because the Zaglembie region had been annexed by the Third Reich rather than form part of the General Government, the environment was more conducive to learning. The Jews in this area were forced to work in German factories. Zaglembie, which means “from the depth” and refers to its mining reserve, was a rich industrial region, and dozens of textile factories producing clothing, uniforms, and shoes were set up. Work in these “shops” was not easy. “Outside the windows, apple trees and lilacs are blooming,” one teenager wrote of her days, “and you have to sit in this suffocating and stinking room and sew.” Jews worked for meager salaries and scraps of food, but conditions were much better than at labor camps, and several owners protected their cheap labor from deportation.
One notable example was Alfred Rossner, a German industrialist who never joined the Nazi Party. After the occupation, he moved to B?dzin to take over one of the Jewish factories and employed thousands of Jews. Rossner’s workshop, which manufactured Nazi uniforms, was considered indispensable. Every worker had a yellow Zonder pass that spared him or her and two relatives from deportations. Similar to the now famous Oskar Schindler, Rossner was protective of and kind toward his Jewish workers; later in the war, he warned Jews of deportations and rescued them directly from trains.
Chajka reinstituted and led the local Young Guard, along with her boyfriend David and several other women—among them two sisters, Leah and Idzia Pejsachson, whose Bundist father had taken part in the Russian Revolution. The group of dear friends met clandestinely in private homes. Since aliyah was impossible, their main objective was to teach the youth language and literacy, culture, ethics, and history. Despite Chajka’s private disappointment, she went straight to work, focusing on nurseries, orphanages, and those aged ten to sixteen, who she feared were suffering from neglect and poverty, with no guardians. Dirty and unsupervised, the kids were smuggling pretzels, rolls, sweets, shoelaces, and corsets, and selling them on the streets. Chajka had no plan （for which she was typically self-critical） but a lot of zeal, and she began with the poorest children, finding them shoes and clothes, cleaning them and serving them lunch. She proposed to the Judenrat that they set up day care centers to help laboring parents. The Young Guard did all the planning but the Judenrat took over. Regardless, she was happy that the kids were looked after. These young orphans and refugees, she hoped, would one day implement their movement’s ideals.
In the first winter of occupation, B?dzin’s Young Guard organized a Purim festival. Traditionally, Purim was a merry holiday during which Jews dressed in costume, put on satirical sketches （Purim shpiels）， read the holiday scroll, and spun noisemakers known as graggers to drown out every mention of Haman, the evil Persian minister who planned to kill all the Jews in the land. Jews celebrated their savior Queen Esther, a Jewish woman who disguised herself as a non-Jewish queen and, using her intelligence and wiles, convinced King Ahasuerus to cancel Haman’s plans.
The B?dzin Jewish orphanage was packed, dozens of children in their best clothes, laughing. Chajka stood at the back of the room, flicking from rapture to keeping watch like a jail guard. Her dark eyes twinkled with pride as Irka, the third and youngest Pejsachson sister, conducted the group in a holiday ceremony. The children walked in singing loudly. They wrote and put on their own plays about Israel and about their hard life on the streets, a Purim miracle. Then the space was quickly transformed, and a meeting of 120 Young Guard members began, everyone wearing a gray or white shirt. The comrades chanted their mantra in unison: “We shall not let ourselves be blindly led by fate. We shall go our own way.” Chajka couldn’t believe how many people had shown up, especially with the war raging around them.