Specialists in Warsaw, such as the Institut de Beauté salon, helped disguise Jews. They provided nose （and penile） surgeries, makeup consultations, and hair bleaching and styling. Bangs, curls, and frizz were all suspicious, so they ensured that hair was neatly swept up off the forehead in Aryan coifs. But they also offered manners classes, teaching Jewish women to cook pork and order moonshine, to gesticulate less, and say the Lord’s Prayer more. When Tosia visited B?dzin, she encouraged the female comrades to learn how to recite Catholic prayers in case they were stopped and tested.
Jews learned catechisms and to celebrate their and their friends’ patron saint days. Jewish expressions （for example, “What street are you from?”） had to be replaced with their Polish counterparts （“What district are you from?”）。 The nuances were endless.
Perhaps because they were more comfortable in the Polish milieu, or because women were taught to be empathetic, adaptable, and attuned to people’s nonverbal cues, these Jewish women tended to have strong intuition. Their feminine skills, along with good memories, helped them understand others’ motives. Is he a true contact or a Nazi collaborator? Will this Pole give me up? Is a search imminent? Will this guard need to be bribed? Is she staring at me a little too intensely?
Thanks to their youth movement training, women had the expertise for this work. They had absorbed messages about self-awareness, independence, collective consciousness, and transcending temptations. They knew how to stay straight and not give in to the normal impulses of someone in her late teens or early twenties. Once, on a train, when Tosia was disguised as a village girl, she noticed an attractive man and suddenly craved his attention. She flirted, and he invited her back to his home, a mansion. Tosia was so tempted to risk it all for one day of normalcy and pleasure; it took all her strength to turn away.
Kashariyot had fake IDs, fake backstories, fake purposes, fake hair, and fake names. Equally important, they had fake smiles. One could not walk around with sad eyes—an instant giveaway. Courier girls were trained to laugh, laugh loud, laugh a lot. They had to look up, drink in the world, pretend that they had no cares, that their parents and siblings hadn’t just been tortured and murdered, that they weren’t starving, and that they weren’t carrying a sachet of bullets in their jam jar. They even had to joyfully join antisemitic discussions with their fellow passengers on trains. It wasn’t easy, as Gusta Davidson articulated, “to feign lightheartedness while steeped in such sad thoughts . . . [it] tired her to the limits of her endurance.” Chasia Bielicka described the constant repression: “We couldn’t cry for real, ache for real, or connect with our feelings for real. We were actors in a play that had no intermission, even for a moment, a stage performance with no stages. Nonstop actresses.”
And because they went in and out of ghettos, the kashariyot were also prime targets for the schmaltzovniks. They carried cash intended specifically for the extortionists. In one instance, when Chaika Grossman was followed by a greaser as she left the Warsaw ghetto concealing documents and money, she yelled, cursed, and threatened to report him to the Gestapo. Vladka Meed also used an offensive strategy: she asked the blackmailers to follow her （to avoid a scene）， threatened to report them, and walked calmly toward a Nazi guard until they grew alarmed and ran off.
To Gusta, every moment outside the ghetto was one of terror, “every step outside the barbed wire was like passing through a hail of bullets . . . every street a dense jungle that had to be cleared with a machete.”
And yet, out went the courier girls before her.
Out went Renia.
Chapter 14
Inside the Gestapo
Bela
MAY 1943
Renia knew that one of the most successful and daring couriers was Freedom comrade Bela Hazan, who worked primarily in the East. Bela and her whip-smart, Aryan-pretty “colleagues” were legends, assigned the most dangerous missions.
Like her first name, Bela was a blonde beauty. Like her surname, Bela’s father was a hazzan （cantor） in a tiny and almost exclusively Jewish town in southeastern Poland; the family lived in a dark basement room under the synagogue. He died when Bela was six, and her mother single-handedly raised six children, teaching them not to accept handouts or pity but to be proud and self-reliant. A respected figure in the community, Bela’s mother was uneducated but had keen street smarts. She insisted on giving her children the schooling she’d never had and sent them to Hebrew school, refusing financial assistance and attending every school event even if it meant closing her shop. She washed their clothes each night so that they’d look as neat as the rich children. When Bela graduated, her mother sent her out to be a private Hebrew teacher and supported her with food packages and letters filled with “motherly warmth and love.”