Zivia, certain that the Warsaw ghetto fighters would not survive, focused on finding people who could tell the world how the Jews fought back. She entertained no thoughts of leaving Poland herself but had selected Frumka and Hantze to be emissaries and had written to them in B?dzin, insisting that they leave. No one engaged in rescue plans, no one prepared escape routes or bunkers. The ZOB prepared only a “medical bunker” to treat casualties of the fight—which they knew was imminent.
*
Still, it was always a surprise when their fantasies materialized.
Weapon in hand, Zivia knew this “morning marked the beginning of the end.” The ZOB messengers ran through the ghetto spreading the news; people took up arms or went into hiding. Panic. From her top-floor position, Zivia watched a mother who was holding a screaming baby and dragging a bag of belongings run from bunker to bunker, trying to find room. Knowing they would not see the light of day for some time, others tried to quickly dry out bread—a true Passover story. Inside the bunkers, people crushed together on makeshift wooden shelves, quieting children whose sobs were too loud. Then, Zivia saw the ghetto become ghostly empty, silent, except for the distant shadow of a woman who’d dangerously run to get something she’d forgotten and stopped to glance lovingly at the fighters, stationed in position.
Zivia was one of thirty fighters posted on the highest floors of a building at the intersection of Nalewski and Gensia Streets—the first unit to encounter the Germans. The anxiety, the excitement, was nearly overwhelming. While they were no army, they were so much more organized than they’d been in January, hundreds of them in strategic locations armed with pistols, rifles, automatic weapons, grenades, bombs, and thousands of Molotov cocktails, or, as the Germans came to call them, “the Jews’ secret weapon.” Many women clutched bombs and explosives. Each fighter had his or her personal kit （assembled by female comrades） containing a change of underwear, food, a bandage, and a weapon.
As the sun rose, Zivia saw the German forces advancing toward the ghetto, as if it were a real battlefront. Two thousand Nazis, panzer tanks, machine guns. Polished, lighthearted soldiers marched in, singing tunes, ready for an easy final coup.
The ZOB fighters let the Germans pass the main entrance. Then they pressed the switch.
A thundering blast. The mines they had planted under the main street went off. Severed arms and legs went flying into the air.
A new group of Nazis marched in. Now Zivia and her comrades threw hand grenades and bombs, a rain of explosives. The Germans scattered; the Jewish fighters chased them down with guns. Pools of German blood covered the streets along with a “pulverized, bloody hulk of dismembered bodies.” One fighter, Tamar, was so moved, she joined the chorus of joy and yelled, “This time they shall pay!” in a voice she didn’t recognize.
Zivia’s unit fought the Germans for hours, their commander running, fortifying, urging. Suddenly a weak spot, and the Nazis entered the building. More Molotov cocktails. Germans “rolling in their own blood.”
No Jewish fighter was injured.
The intoxicating joy of revenge. The Jews were stunned, breathless, shocked to be alive. The fighters embraced, kissed.
They headed to find bread and a place to rest, but they heard a whistle, then the sound of motors. They ran back to their positions, threw cocktails and grenades at the Nazi tanks. A direct hit! They’d blocked the advance. “This time we were bewildered,” Zivia later reflected. “We ourselves couldn’t understand how it had happened.”
That night, makeshift Passover seders were held in the bunkers of the German-free ghetto. The Jews sang about liberation and salvation, asked why this night was different from all other nights, and belted out “Dayenu.” Even just this would have been enough. The Judenrat food stores were opened, and people stocked up.
The following days of fighting, however, were difficult. Most bunkers were cut off from the electricity grid, water, and gas—almost all militia units were cut off from one another. German artillery stationed on the Aryan side bombarded the ghetto nonstop. It was hard to move. Zivia maintained her authority and, as always, acted on her own initiative, conducting recon missions and night tours of the fighters’ posts and bunkers, reassuring them, calculating plans, trying to determine the Germans’ position. These nocturnal explorations were wildly dangerous. Once, she was spotted by a German soldier and opened fire. Several times, she climbed on top of a ruined building to bask in the nighttime calm. “For hours,” she recalled, “I would lounge there, in a preoccupied silence, the skies galloping over in their early springtime, and it was sometimes so good to lie like that, to feel in my hand the pleasant stroke of my gun.”