Bela was put in another tiny room, and noted a German slogan on the wall: “Look only forward, you can never look back.” For three hours, she heard muffled shrieking and wailing. Then she was taken to the third floor. Another interrogation by an officer with shifty eyes; more fake answers. “If you do not tell us immediately where you got the weapons, we will make you tell.”
She was pushed back to the basement, beaten brutally the whole way. The Gestapo officer forced her to take off her clothes and lie on a wooden plank in the middle of the floor. He took out a club and beat Bela on one part of her body at a time. He gagged her mouth with his hands until she passed out. She woke up covered in blood. Unable to move, her body black and bloated, she lay there for three days. Then the officer came back, told her to get dressed, and they took her to Pawiak, the political prison that happened to be inside the ghetto, right across from Dzielna Street. A special car paraded prisoners between the two torture locations several times a day; outsiders watched with dread.
Pawiak was known as hell, but Bela was actually happy.
She’d found out: Lonka was there.
*
“Lonka threw a note from Pawiak when she was arrested,” Irena Adamowicz explained to Renia as they strode purposefully through Warsaw. “The comrades found it and learned of her whereabouts.”
Despite the dangers at every step, Irena and Renia had gone out into the city. Loyally bound to the women fighters, Irena took Renia in with open arms. Irena was tall, slender, with delicate features. Her fair hair, speckled with gray, was gathered around her neck. She wore a long, dark skirt, a white blouse, and heavy shoes. As they walked, Renia begged her for help answering all the desperate questions they’d had in B?dzin.
“Was it true that Zivia was murdered?”
Irena, self-assured and discreet, had spent years exchanging addresses, maintaining connections, and organizing youth actions across Aryan Warsaw, but times were particularly difficult. It had been several days since she’d had any contact with the ghetto. However, she explained, as far as she knew, B?dzin had indeed heard false news.
“Zivia is alive,” she said. “At this very moment, she’s fighting in the ghetto.”
Renia exhaled deeply. This, she decided, she needed to see for herself.
Chapter 15
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
Zivia
APRIL 1943
A few weeks earlier, the night before Passover, April 18, 1943, Zivia was sitting with her comrades, enjoying themselves at a kumsitz （Yiddish for “come, sit,” and a term for a movement get-together）。 It was already two in the morning, but they were debating their plans for the future. That’s when a comrade walked in, serious. “We received a phone call from the Aryan side,” he announced. They all froze. “The ghetto is surrounded. The Germans will begin their attack at six.” They had not known that April 20 was Hitler’s birthday, and Himmler wanted to offer him the ghetto’s destruction as a little gift.
Zivia felt a tremor of joy, then a shudder of terror. They’d been preparing for months, praying for this very hour, yet it was hard to face the beginning of the end. Then she suppressed her emotions and reached for her gun. It was time.
Ever since the January “mini uprising,” the Warsaw ghetto had been planning its grand revolt. Jews saw they could kill Germans, halt an Aktion, and live, and Zivia sensed that the ghetto psychology had shifted. There were no more illusions about the safety of work; everyone knew that deportation and death were imminent. Jews who had money bought Aryan papers and tried to flee. Others found building material in the rubble and constructed sophisticated, well-camouflaged hideouts, filled with stashes of food. They made first aid kits, connected to electricity grids, created ventilation systems, linked to the city sewers, and dug tunnels to the Aryan side. Vladka, too, noticed this swing in mood: during a spring visit to the ghetto, she saw ZOB posters hanging on walls telling Jews not to listen to German orders but to resist; Jews read them carefully. An acquaintance asked her where to buy a gun. Jews purchased their own weapons. The ZOB’s revolt was no longer perceived to be a bunch of kids with homemade bombs, but a respected national struggle.