The women of The Young Guard knew they had to break into the locked buildings at any cost. They quickly convinced the Judenrat that they needed to set up an infirmary inside the orphanage. Jewish girls in white aprons entered and spread to all corners. These “nurses” comforted and bandaged the sick, but their main job was to help as many women as possible escape. Each girl took off her white uniform and handed it to one of the captives, instructing, “Get dressed quickly, take the certificate, and without showing any fear, walk straight out of here through the main entrance. No one will stop you. Then send the uniform back in.”
Each time a “nurse” left the building, she had to be careful about which gendarme was guarding the gate. One of them had been promised a gold watch by the girls. But if it was the lieutenant, she had to smile beautifully and put on an innocent face.
While this was going on, Irka Pejsachson discovered a pathway from the attic through a block of unguarded civilian houses, and to the outside. The girls stationed someone as a lookout at the attic door, and busted a hole in the wall. Though shaking with fear, they managed to send Jews out, one by one. According to one account, two thousand people were freed.
Suddenly German officials barged into the building, demanding documents. One helper was missing a uniform, another had no papers. They were taken away. As Chajka knew, “There were always sacrifices.”
*
B?dzin’s youth movements, including The Young Guard and Freedom, began working together, propelled by these brutal deportations; by stories of mass executions in Vilna and at Chelmno; by energizing visits from Tosia, who in particular urged the movement girls to go on missions and take action; as well as by inspiring tales of Warsaw’s resistance activity and partisan pursuits. They’d seen firsthand that with just a bit of organization, they could save lives.
In the summer of 1942, Chajka hosted Mordechai Anilevitz, one of The Young Guard leaders who had come from Warsaw. She held Anilevitz in the highest esteem, calling him the “pride of the movement” with his “unusual, rare abilities” of being both a man of theory and a practical leader. “Mordechai was brave,” she went on. “Not because he wanted to be brave, but because he truly was brave.”
In late summer, while the Warsaw ghetto was being liquidated, leaders from various Zionist groups assembled in the B?dzin youth farm kitchen to listen to a two-hour keynote given by Anilevitz, entitled “A Farewell to Life.” He stood tall, with his open-collar shirt, and told them what he knew. Chajka attended with her boyfriend David and the Pejsachson sisters; her hair stood on end as she heard about gas chambers and mass deaths by suffocation at Treblinka. But he also told them about resistance efforts that were underway in Vilna, Bia?ystok, and Warsaw. Anilevitz called for action, for honorable deaths, a romantic vision that appealed to Chajka.
The Zaglembie ZOB was then officially founded, a satellite of the resistance cell in Warsaw, comprising two hundred comrades from various movements. B?dzin had already established a strong connection to Warsaw, and couriers were dispatched to collect information, plans, and arms. B?dzin was also connected by post to Geneva, where The Pioneers coordinating committee was based. Secret coded postcards were sent from B?dzin to Switzerland telling of the activities of the ZOB in Warsaw as well.
Surviving postcards written by Frumka, Tosia, and Zivia to Jews outside Poland are filled with secret codes. They often turned events into people. For instance, to indicate that they were holding a seminar, Tosia wrote that “Seminarsky is visiting us at the moment . . . and will stay for a month.” Frumka wrote: “I am waiting for visits from guests: Machanot and Avodah should be coming here.” Machanot and Avodah are the Hebrew words for camps and work, respectively; she was referring to Nazi labor camps. “E.C. is in hospital in Lemberg,” meant that he’d been arrested. “Pruetnitsky and Schitah lived with me”—Hebrew words for pogroms and destruction. In heartbreaking letters, Zivia begged American Jews to send money “for doctors to help V.K.’s illness”—that is, for weapons to save the Jewish people.
Anilevitz’s call for self-defense transformed Chajka. She became more radical than him, and one of the ZOB’s fiercest proponents. “No revolutionary movement, let alone [one of] the young, had ever faced problems similar to ours—the single, naked fact of annihilation, of death. We stood face-to-face with it and found an answer. We found a path . . . hagana [defense].” The Young Guard could no longer propose a philosophy of radical optimism, she understood, but of violence. Armed defense—to fight as Jews, alongside Jews, leaving a Jewish legacy—was the only way forward. She rejected all plans for escape or rescue. “The avant-garde,” she later wrote, “must die where its people are dying.”