*
Renia stayed at a hotel on the Aryan side. The next morning, “a friendly woman,” as Renia described her, likely a contact of Irena’s, took her to see the ghetto battle close up. Every street that led to the ghetto was filled with German soldiers and tanks, buses, and motorcycles. Nazis wore armored helmets and held weapons, ready to pounce. The clouds had turned red, reflecting the flames of burning houses. Even at a distance, the air was choked with screams. The closer Renia got to the Jewish quarter, the more shocking the shrieks. Nazi soldiers and gendarmes lay under barricades. Special SS troops, in full battle array, stood opposite the ghetto wall. Machine-gun muzzles protruded from the balconies, windows, and roofs of the adjacent Aryan homes. The ghetto was completely surrounded, with armored tanks firing shells from all sides.
But Renia saw it for herself: Nazi tanks were being destroyed—by Jews. By her people, resistance fighters who were scrawny, disheveled, and starving, lobbing hand grenades, pointing machine guns.
Up high, German planes, gleaming in the sun, swooped low and swirled above the ghetto, hurling blazing bombs, setting the streets on fire. Buildings crumbled into rubble, floors collapsed, pillars of rising dust. This clash was so tremendous, it resembled a civil war. “It seemed not merely that some Jews were fighting the Germans,” Renia wrote, “but that two entire countries were at battle.”
Renia was watching up close, planted near the ghetto wall. It was her mission, her responsibility, to witness and report. As she watched the ghetto burn, she snuck along its perimeter, trying to view the battle from as many vantage points as possible. She saw young Jewish mothers throw their children from the top storeys of burning buildings. Men threw their families, or threw themselves, jumping to their deaths, trying to soften the falls of their wives and elderly parents.
Not everyone was able to commit suicide. Renia saw ghetto residents trapped on the upper floors of an apartment as a fire rose higher and higher. Suddenly a burst of flame made one of the walls crack. Everyone fell, sliding into the rubble. From under the destruction emerged a horrid cry. A few mothers who had miraculously survived the flames with children in their arms wailed for help, begging for the lives of their babies.
A Nazi soldier ripped the children out of their mothers’ clutches. He proceeded to hurl them to the ground, stomping their tiny bodies with his feet and pummeling them with his bayonet. Renia watched, transfixed, as he threw the squirming, broken bodies into the fire. The soldier beat one of mothers with his stick. A tank approached and rolled over her dying body. Renia witnessed grown men with gouged-out eyes convulse in anguish, begging the Germans to shoot them. The Nazis simply laughed and let the flames do the work.
Even amid this depravity, this sickening chaos, Renia willed herself to view the battle for the hope it offered, the promise it could deliver to the fighters in B?dzin. Through the smoke, she could hazily make out young Jewish men with machine guns standing on the roofs of the houses that were not in flames. Jewish girls—Jewish girls!—shot pistols and hurled bottles of explosives. Small Jewish children, boys and girls, ambushed the Germans with stones and iron rods. Seeing the fight flare, Jews who were not part of any organization, who had no clue about a resistance movement, grabbed anything they could find and joined the fighters. Because otherwise, there was only one way out: death. The ghetto was full of the dead. Mostly Jews, but as Renia saw, Germans too.
Renia stood by the ghetto walls and witnessed the fighting unfold over the course of the day, surrounded by non-Jews who were also watching. A photograph shows a large group of Poles, adults and children, standing, chatting, wearing caps and coats, hands in their pockets, looking on, whorls of black smoke in front of them. Vladka, who was also on the Aryan side, saw thousands of Poles, from all over Warsaw, gather to watch. Renia noted how the bystanders of these horrific scenes reacted, often in tellingly different ways. Some Germans spat at the sight and stepped to the side, no longer able to witness the horror. In the window of a nearby apartment building, Renia saw a Polish woman tear the clothes from her breast. The woman wailed, “There is no God in the world if he could watch such scenes from above and stay silent.”