*
One day, Renia relayed, the comrades met up with a Polish train conductor who told them what he knew, adding firm details to the vague accounts they’d heard. He’d been on a train to the village of Treblinka, northeast of Warsaw, where trains arrived from all of Europe. A few stations before Treblinka, he was suddenly told to disembark and was replaced by a German conductor—all meant to keep the mass-murder site a secret. At Treblinka, Nazis beat the Jews and made them move quickly, so that they wouldn’t notice their surrounds. The Germans promptly took the sick to a tent and shot them.
The other new arrivals assumed they were going to be put to work. Men and women were separated. Children were given bread and milk. Everyone had to strip; their clothes added to a growing pile. The Germans gave out soap and towels, and told them to hurry so the water wouldn’t get cold. The Nazis followed them—wearing gas masks. Then people started wailing and praying. Gendarmes pressed the gas button. The Jews closed their eyes, their muscles tensed like taut strings, and they suffocated, sticking to each other in a giant, petrified lump. The lump was cut into smaller parts, the conductor said, then lifted with cranes into train cars and unloaded into pits.
“The ground takes everything in,” Renia later wrote, her inner resolve strengthening, “except for the secret of what had happened.” The stories, she knew, would find their way out.
*
More stories arrived with Frumka. Like her sister, she’d been sent from Warsaw to B?dzin, originally to look for a route to Palestine via Slovakia, on Poland’s south border; she was to escape there and serve as the messenger of the nation. Disguised as a Christian, Frumka had “gone through hell” in the preceding months, as she’d traveled among Bia?ystok, Vilna, Lvov, and Warsaw. She arrived in B?dzin tired and broken—though Renia recalled the day as one of the happiest in the two sisters’ lives: “I remember how they both sat for a full hour talking about everything that they’d been through.” Sisters meant everything.
Frumka spent her evenings telling the kibbutz about the atrocities being carried out across the country, of the extermination committees made up of hundreds of Ukrainians and Gestapo men—and assisted by the Jewish militia, who were later executed themselves. Pools of blood stained the streets of Vilna’s Jewish neighborhood. Murderers strutted around with a maniacal glee. Streets, alleys, and apartment buildings were carpeted by dead bodies. Everywhere, screaming and moaning like wild animals. “There’s no help coming from anywhere!” Frumka cried. “The world has forsaken us.” Her tales were so horrid and vivid, Renia couldn’t get them out of her head for days. She attended every one of the frequent assemblies, during which Frumka asked for one thing from each member: defense!
Renia, taken by Frumka’s dedication, watched “the mother” carry the weight of the kibbutz on her shoulders while also embarking on larger community missions. As in Warsaw, everyone in B?dzin knew and appreciated Frumka. She eased their suffering with words of consolation and heartfelt advice. She didn’t let the Judenrat rest. She had several decrees rescinded and saved more than one person from “the nail of death.” She said little about her activities, but everyone knew that Frumka aided the imprisoned and tried to contact Jews in other countries. Each time she achieved a goal, she was giddy; her passion touched them all.
*
Frumka’s tales, Hantze’s vigor, the train conductor’s story, and all they’d heard from Anilevitz spurred on the fledgling Zaglembie ZOB. Chajka watched proudly as members brought in watches, clothes, and food packages they’d received from outside the country—anything of value they could sell in order to buy supplies that would make them attractive to the partisans, even shoes. They dreamed of buying guns. They asked for contributions from rich Jews, although Chajka was firm that they never take one groshen more than necessary, even when the donor had millions. They ended up collecting roughly 2,500 reichsmarks, enough for more than ten people to “apply to” a partisan detachment. The comrades established their first workshop, where members fabricated knives and experimented with homemade explosives, hoping to master grenades and bombs.