Many of them, she sensed on that warm Sunday afternoon, had lost the will to live, knowing they were nearing their end. Still, they hoped for death to catch them by surprise; they refused to surrender. Make them chase us down. Gusta also understood how “older folks lacked the fighting spirit”—how years of degradation and baiting affected their “bruised, despairing souls.” The youth, on the other hand, had such a lust for life that, ironically, they pushed themselves to resistance and certain death.
At the narrow gate, an opening in the ghetto walls, which were shaped purposefully to resemble tombstones, Gusta was met by several comrades who helped drag her along. Their voices and faces, their concern over her delayed return, all merged into one warm blur. One of the few Jewish communities left, Kraków was now a center of the resistance movement, despite being a city swarming in top-level Nazis. Gusta, who’d grown up in an extremely religious family, was a leading member of Akiva, a local Zionist group. A friend had introduced her to it, and she was taken by the idealism and self-sacrifice. She served on the central committee, as writer and editor for their publication, and as record keeper for the whole organization. Unlike the secular leftist Zionist groups, Akiva emphasized Jewish tradition, celebrating Oneg Shabbat, a Sabbath ceremony, each Friday.
Just that past summer, the group was based on a farm in the nearby village of Kopaliny, a peaceful oasis amid the brutality and violence. “The stillness exhaled by the deep woods floated down from the sky to be inhaled by the earth,” Gusta described. “Not so much as a single leaf quivered.” They lived communally among pear trees, orchards, ridges, and ravines, under a sun that “rolled slowly through the azure sky.” But Gusta’s husband, Shimshon, an Akiva leader, knew that the movement would die—that most of them would die. He called a meeting. The war was not a momentary tremor: the savagery would be worse than they’d imagined; the diabolical mass killings a success. Gusta and her comrades believed Shimshon, but they also felt committed to their Akiva ideals: “to move the youth into the vanguard . . . to counteract the spreading cynicism,” to maintain decency and humanity and “cling to life.”
At the outbreak of war, Shimshon had been arrested for anti-Fascist writings. The couple, who married in 1940, made a pact that if one of them was caught, the other would turn themselves in. So Gusta went to jail too. They got out by paying an enormous bribe, and kept working. “You can’t try to preserve fighters by shielding them in a shelter,” they believed. During the summer of 1942, however, like their comrades in Warsaw and B?dzin, they realized that the movement had to change.
“We want to survive as a generation of avengers,” Shimshon declared at a meeting. “If we survive, it has got to be as a group, and with weapons in our hands.” They debated: Would the Nazis’ retaliation be too great? Should they rescue only themselves? But no, they had to fight. Even Gusta—violence wholly alien to her bookish nature—felt the deep desire for revenge; to kill the enemy who had killed her father and sister. “Hands, now caked with fertile loam,” she wrote, “would soon be soaked in blood.” Akiva’s creation would be destruction. By August, they had merged with The Young Guard, Freedom, and other groups to form Kraków’s Fighting Pioneers.
Now, just inside the gates, she heard the comrades murmuring about Shimshon’s temper; how worried he’d been by her delayed arrival. She blushed, laughed loudly to conceal her embarrassment that she was the subject of gossip. Her husband even tore himself away from his work to greet her. She felt the pressure of his hard, narrow palm on her back and stared at his steely-blue eyes as they stood face-to-face. Gusta suddenly understood: he was now a full-time combatant, his fight was his “femme fatale.” She, alone, would take care of everything else. He no longer saw her—with those piercing, dark eyes, that movie-star bob—but the future.
“I only have a moment to spare,” he whispered, and she knew that was forever. He had to go to a meeting. Gusta had been to many of the weightiest leader sessions, but here she was not invited. She sensed it: they were planning their own action.
*
Kraków was a strategic city for the Nazis, and so they claimed it was a Saxon town, with Prussian roots. It was made the capital of the General Government in place of Warsaw and was thus heavily protected. The Jews who lived here, then, did so in close proximity to many high-ranking SS officers. The youth resistance worked in this particularly charged environment.