Hanka Blas, an Akiva comrade and Shimshon’s courier, lived twenty minutes away. She and Gusta shared a “sisterly love,” according to Gusta, and though it would have been safer for them to cut all contact, they simply couldn’t stay apart, comforted in the company of friends who knew their true identities and understood their despair. The neighbors assumed that Hanka was Witek’s nanny. Hanka smuggled underground bulletins, and some mornings, loaded her basket with eggs, mushrooms, apples and the material from the night before, put on a kerchief, and got on the bus as if she were going to market. Sometimes Hanka sat right next to Shimshon, pretending she didn’t know him.
*
One beautiful day, Gusta relayed, Hela Schüpper arrived in the Kraków ghetto, having returned from Warsaw. A “voluptuous beauty,” with a fair complexion and full, rosy cheeks, Hela used her charm, eloquence, and deep savvy to become Akiva’s main courier. Hela grew up in a Chasidic family and attended a Polish public school. When organizers from a women’s nationalist organization came to recruit students and no one volunteered, Hela joined, ashamed by her Jewish peers’ lack of patriotism. Their meetings exposed the girl to culture, sports, and riflery and pistol practice, but she eventually quit, repulsed by what she perceived to be an antisemitic motion proposed by an affiliated leader. Shimshon convinced her to join Akiva, promising that it was not an atheist group. The Schüppers were more upset about this than about her participation in the Polish organization. Hela ran away from her family—the movement became her home.
Possessing confidence and impeccable self-control, as well as a commerce degree, she had represented Akiva that past summer at the Warsaw meeting when the youth groups decided to form a fighting force; she’d been carrying information and documents between the cities. But this morning in the fall of 1942, Hela arrived with something new: a stash of weapons. Two Browning rifles hung inside her loose sports coat, and she had three hand weapons and several clips of cartridges in her fashionable bag.
“No one had ever been greeted with the outpouring of affection that was showered on Hela,” Gusta later wrote. “It is impossible to describe the ecstasy inspired by those weapons.” People stopped into the room where she was resting just to glimpse the bag hanging on the wall, and Shimshon, she recalled, was “happy as a child.” The leaders began to fantasize: with these weapons they could garner exponentially more. This was the start of a new era.
However, they didn’t have any military training, or even the faintest military ethos. They felt uncomfortable leading their members to their deaths, to say the least. They knew they needed to collaborate with the PPR, the underground Polish Communist Party. Their main link was Gola Mire, a feisty Jewish poet who had been thrown out of The Young Guard years earlier because of her radical left-wing views. An active Communist, she’d been sentenced to twelve years in prison for organizing strikes. （Her trial defense was so moving, the prosecutor bought her roses.） In the chaos of the Nazi invasion, Gola led an escape from the women’s jail and searched the country for her boyfriend. They married in Soviet territory, and he joined the Red Army. Eventually, to avoid a Nazi manhunt, she went into hiding and delivered her first baby alone, cutting the umbilical cord herself.
After several months, though, Gola needed help and made it to the ghetto, where her infant died in her arms. She worked in a German factory, secretly puncturing holes in the food tins until the sabotage became too dangerous. Gola maintained connections with the PPR, and though the party was reluctant to collaborate with Jews, she convinced its members to help find them forest guides and hiding places. Akiva saw her as “a fierce fighter with a genuinely female heart.” The PPR, however, could not always be counted on. One time, party members were supposed to guide a Jewish five to a rebel group in the forest; instead, they misled and betrayed them. In other instances, they promised weapons and money that never arrived.
The Jewish party decided to become an independent force. The youth ate dry crusts, wore boots with holes, and slept in cellars, but they were proud. They raised money for weapons. The technical bureau sold false documents, and other monies were received, likely through robbery. One group of fighters scoured for z?otys, another scouted the forests for potential bases. Hela and two other women sleuthed for safe houses around the forest. Other women were dispatched to nearby towns to warn of impending Aktions. Gusta found hiding places, accompanied groups to the forest, consulted with leaders, and connected communities. She maintained contact with Kielce, where the comrades debated whether to focus on rescuing young Jewish artists or their own families. The group had developed various proposals and sought money, but Gusta felt that they were deluding themselves. She wasn’t the right person to sell their ideas to the leadership.