Like Zivia, Chajka felt compelled to share the truth, furious at leaders who tried to hide it. “We had to open [the nation’s] eyes, prevent it from sedating itself on opium, and show it the naked reality,” she insisted. “Because we wanted to trigger a reaction.” In her diary, she wrote, “Only we, the black ravens, say that if there is a campaign, they will no longer handle us with kid gloves. They will finish us off once and for all.”
But as in Warsaw, it was not easy to form a military corps. B?dzin also lacked weapons, training, contact with Polish underground groups, and support from the Judenrat and community. The youth had little money and felt deeply embittered toward foreign Jews who were not helping. When The Young Guard leaders were killed in Warsaw and the weapons lost, Anilevitz had to return there, leaving the B?dzin ZOB branch in limbo, without a leader who could engage in top-level affairs, waiting for cash and instructions. Comrades pined for any words from Warsaw or the Polish resistance and felt idle, restless. Many dreamed of joining the partisans, preferring to die in the forest than in camps. At last, at the end of September, Zvi Brandes, a leader whom Chajka knew well from hachshara, and respected for his “thick, sinewy, muscular arms,” rocklike build, and confident stride, arrived to help run the underground—and to harvest potatoes, when manpower was needed.
Zvi shifted focus from the failure to contact partisans to defense and propaganda. Action began right away. They formed groups of fives: as in their long-established education model, these were secret five-member fighting units, each with its own commander. The fighters planned for ways to defy and attack the Judenrat. They published underground bulletins, letters, and a daily newspaper. Comrades who worked in uniform factories printed German flyers imploring soldiers to throw down their weapons; they stuffed them in the new shoes being sent to the front.
This is when Chajka first went out on her missions, sprinting through streets and alleyways, distributing underground flyers, telling people the truth, telling them to rebel.
*
How quickly one gets used to a new normal. Despite forced labor and deportations to murder, life in B?dzin was “heaven” for Renia. The communal abode felt so calm. They made soup from vegetable scraps and baked bread. Thirty-seven comrades worked. Many had the Zonder permits that enabled them to move around, protected from forced labor and execution. Due to a shortage of workers, comrades went out for daily work, then labored in the kibbutz laundry or farmed in the evenings. As soon as Renia, the youngest of them, arrived, she was assigned to work in the laundry, which became property of the Judenrat; it appears the comrades were paid a small sum to clean Nazi uniforms. The torment that Renia had witnessed in the General Government section of Poland was not felt yet in Zaglembie.
“Sometimes I look at the comrades living here, and I can’t believe my eyes,” she wrote later. “Can there really be Jews here, living as humans, visionaries who can see a future?” She was amazed at their focus on Eretz Israel, talking and singing as if they were in a dream, as if they had no awareness of the unspeakable atrocities that were happening all around them.
And then Hantze P?otnicka arrived, bringing with her even more positive spirit. Hantze had been staying at Grochów outside Warsaw. The farm had become a center of the resistance and a way station for couriers: a place they could spend the night before entering the ghetto the following day and where they could hide underground materials. When the farm was closed down, Hantze was sent to B?dzin. Her journey was filled with danger, but once she arrived, Renia felt that the whole group began a new life. Renia was impressed by how Hantze upheld a good mood. She knew all the kibbutz members and noted their unique strengths. She refused to halt cultural work. After a hard day’s labor, she gathered the members for a philosophical siche, or conversation, and when she spoke of the kibbutzes in Palestine, her face lit up. She helped comrades in their preparations for resistance. She maintained connections with members in the surrounding areas and in Warsaw, especially with her sister Frumka.
Hantze liked to tell them about the terrible conditions at Grochów, the hunger and persecution, the meals of cooked fat, rotting cabbage leaves, and potato skins. Laughing, she recounted how she used to fool the Germans by walking the long way to Warsaw, disguised as a Gentile. When the B?dziners used to complain about the difficulties in their lives, Renia wrote, Hantze teased them. “In Grochów, the conditions were much worse,” she’d say with a smile, “and even they stayed alive . . .”