Among the crammed houses, amidst an atmosphere of panic, restlessness, and terror, was a special building. An edifice that held strong, not just by its firm foundation （indeed, it would soon rest upon underground bunkers） but thanks to its inhabitants, their brains, their hearts, and their muscles. Here was a B?dzin headquarters of the local Jewish resistance. A resistance born out of the philosophy of the Labor Zionist movement that cherished Jewish agency, the work of the land, socialism, and equality. The “comrades” were raised on a unique diet of physical work and female empowerment. This was a center for the Freedom youth movement.
*
In February 1943 the ghetto was gripped by cold, the air heavy as lead. The bustling commune building was unusually quiet. The old buzz of Freedom’s cultural programs—language courses, musical performances, seminars on the connection between the heart and the land—had vanished. No voices, no songs.
Renia Kukielka, an eighteen-year-old Jewish woman and an emerging warrior of the underground resistance movement, came up from the laundry room. She made her way to the meeting being held around the large table on the ground floor of the headquarters where their most important planning took place. It was a familiar spot.
“We’ve obtained a few papers,” Hershel announced.
Everyone gasped. These were golden tickets—out of Poland, to survival.
Today was decision day.
Frumka P?otnicka with her dark eyes and furrowed brow, stood at one end of the table. From a poor, religious family in Pinsk, Frumka had joined the movement as an introverted teenager and, given her inborn seriousness and analytic thinking, rose in its ranks. With the onset of war, she quickly became a leader in the underground.
Hershel Springer, her coleader of the B?dzin “troop,” was at the other end of the table. Beloved by all, Hershel had “so much Jewish folk character in him” that he made frank conversation with anyone with shared roots, from a wagon driver to a butcher, dwelling in their most trivial matters. As always, his warm, goofy smile was a soothing force countering the destruction outside; the filthy ghetto that grew emptier each day, the echo of nothing.
Renia took her spot in between them at the table, along with the rest of the young Jews.
She often caught herself staggered in disbelief, jolted by her reality. In only a few years, she’d gone from being a fifteen-year-old girl with six siblings and loving parents, to an orphan, not even aware of how many of her brothers and sisters were still alive or where they might be. With her family, Renia had run though fields covered in corpses. Later, she’d fled through fields completely on her own. Just months earlier, she’d bolted from a moving train and disguised herself as a Polish peasant girl, taking up the post of housemaid for a part-German family. She’d insisted on going to church with them as a cover, but the first time, she shook with every movement, fearful she wouldn’t know when to stand, how to sit, what to cross. The teenager had become an actress, constantly performing. The head of the household liked her and commended her for being clean, industrious, even educated. “Of course,” Renia had semi-lied. “I’m from a cultured family. We were rich. Only when my parents died did I have to take on manual work.”
She was treated well, but as soon as she was able to secretly contact her sister Sarah, Renia knew she had to be with her, with what was left of her family. Sarah had arranged for Renia to be smuggled to B?dzin, to this center for the Freedom youth group to which she’d belonged.
Renia was now an educated girl who did laundry, hidden in the back. She was an illegal here, an interloper among the interlopers. The Nazis had divided conquered Poland into distinct territories. Renia had papers only for the General Government, the area that was to serve as a “racial dumping ground,” with an endless supply of slave labor—and ultimately, as a site for the mass extermination of European Jewry. She did not have papers to be in Zaglembie, an area annexed by the Third Reich.
Now, to Renia’s right, sat Frumka’s sister and polar opposite, Hantze, her exuberant spirit and relentless optimism lighting the dark room. Hantze loved to tell the comrades how she tricked the Nazis by dressing as a Catholic woman, parading right in front of them, fooling them time and again. Sarah, her face chiseled with sharp cheekbones and dark, penetrating eyes, was present, along with Hershel’s girlfriend, Aliza Zitenfeld, who with Sarah cared for the ghetto’s orphaned children. Fresh-faced Chajka Klinger, an outspoken, feisty leader of a sister group, may also have been at the table, ready to fight for her ideals: truth, action, dignity.