Little Renia, a teenager from J?drzejów.
She didn’t think about the girls who’d gone missing, the disappearances, the endless deaths. By this time, she was a woman of action, with clear goals, decisive. She felt her anger, her rage, her need for justice.
“Of course,” Renia said. “I’ll go.”
Chapter 13
The Courier Girls
Renia
MAY 1943
Renia’s new world, the world of the couriers, was a world of disguises, where human worth was calculated by physical appearance. To live as a Jew on the Aryan side was a constant performance; a life-or-death acting job that required incessant high-level calculation and reassessment, alongside an animal instinct for danger, a basal sense for knowing whom to trust. As Renia knew, it was hard to scale a ghetto wall; but it was much harder to be on the other side, to work and commune, not to mention plot and smuggle, en plein air.
*
That very same day, the B?dzin ZOB leaders contacted the smuggler from Czestochowa, who’d by now figured out the best way to sneak out of the ghetto. Hours later, he arrived at the kibbutz and came straight to Renia, ready to take her out on her first formal mission.
Renia set off, no different from a usual day of ghetto occupation—except for the money. She had sewn several hundred z?otys into her garter belt; the group thought that the cash might be useful to the Warsaw fighters. She got all the way to Strzebin by train using the same ID that she’d miraculously found in the street months earlier. They disembarked one station before the border of the General Government.
Before them: a seven-and-a-half-mile trek through fields and forests until they’d reach a small border crossing where the smuggler knew the guard. They would have to cross by foot, and quickly, trying to avoid any police. Renia’s heart stopped when they immediately were confronted by a soldier. The smuggler handed him a flask of whiskey. “He let us go through without saying a word,” Renia later wrote. “He even showed us the way.”
She recalled, “Quietly and carefully, we stole our way between trees and bumps.” Any sound scared her: the leaves, the light swaying of branches.
Suddenly, a rustling noise. Something, somebody, a silhouette—and it was close by. Renia and the smuggler dropped to the ground and crawled under the small trees nearby, squeezing themselves under a bush. Careful steps approached them. Heart throbbing, sweating, she looked out from her hiding spot.
A person, shaking with fear, approached them. He’d been traveling from the other side of the border and was sure that Renia and her smuggler were gendarmes lying in wait, ready to pounce on him.
An alternate world existed in the Polish forests.
“From here, it’s quiet,” the stranger reassured Renia, as he too began breathing freely again.
Minutes later, she was out of the woods, in what was now another country.
*
Warsaw. Renia strode with purpose—but not too much purpose. Her train had deposited her right in the center of the city, and she paused a moment to take in the novel surrounds, the gray and cream-colored buildings, the slouching cupolas, the slanted roofs. It was not how she’d imagined her first trip to the big city, for Warsaw was as disguised as she was—even more so. The early-spring sunshine, the stretching miles of low-rise buildings, the grand squares and buzzing street vendors were now obscured by a miasma of smoke and ash. Daily traffic was barely audible among the explosions and cries that, she wrote, sounded “like the wails of jackals.” The avenues were full of death, thick with the smell of burning buildings and burning hair. Drunken Germans drove riotously through town. There were police checkpoints at almost every intersection, inspecting each package.
Renia could barely take a step forward without a guard searching through her purse. She’d memorized every detail of the new ID she’d obtained the day before from her smuggler, mentally rehearsing yet another identity, trying, as always, to become the person on the card; to inhabit the hazy portrait. This ID was not one of those custom-designed cards with a Polish version of her Yiddish name and a birthplace that accorded with her accent. This identity was by happenstance—it belonged to the smuggler’s sister. The papers were more suitable than the ID Renia had found on the street, but still, they had no photo, no fingerprints.