Renia felt like her feet were breaking under her. The things she’d seen, the graphic images, all felt as if they were pulling her to the ground. But at the same time, she sensed a lightness in her heart, “something of a happiness that there were still Jews here, living people who were fighting against the Germans.”
Shaken, still actively posing as a Polish girl, Renia eventually returned to her hotel as the battle raged on. She tried to rest but was tortured by the visions, by the very information she’d come to obtain. “I couldn’t believe that I’d seen this with my own eyes. Could my senses have been fooling me?” she kept asking herself. Were those tormented Jews, broken and decimated by hunger, really able to conduct such a heroic battle? But yes, yes, she had seen it: “The Jews picked themselves up, wanting to die like people.”
For the rest of the day, news from the ghetto spread throughout the city: the number of Germans killed, the number of weapons that the Jews took from them, the number of tanks destroyed. The Jews would fight until their last breaths, was the rumor. All night, as she tried to sleep, Renia’s bed shook from the bomb blasts.
She left for the train station in the early morning, walking through the city more calmly than she had the day before. Renia, a young Jewish woman from a tiny town on the outskirts of Kielce, was becoming an expert at navigating the death traps of Warsaw’s wild, war-ravaged streets. She spent the entire day traveling in train wagons with Gentiles who could not stop talking about their awe over the heroism and courage of the Jews.
Like the long line of female couriers before her, Renia benefited from being underestimated and misjudged, and she was able to slip through Warsaw without anyone guessing that she was a resistance operative. Appearing to be an innocuous, young Polish girl who happened to be taking a stroll through town or a train ride to the country, Renia was afforded a front-row seat to the war’s greatest rebellion and even the candid discussion of its aftermath. “Poles must be fighting alongside the Jews,” she heard many of them guess. “There’s simply no way that the Jews are capable of conducting such a heroic battle.” This was the grandest compliment, really.
The train whizzed on, approaching the border. Renia could barely contain her good news. It was time for uprisings everywhere. Next, B?dzin!
Chapter 16
Bandits in Braids
Zivia
MAY 1943
Zivia was blinded by the glare. The middle of the night resembled the middle of the day. Roaring flames, every direction.
After the initial fighting, the Nazis restrategized. Instead of marching into courtyards—from which Jews no longer emerged—they slipped quietly into the ghetto in small groups, aiming for addresses where they suspected Jews were hiding. The ZOB attacked them inside. Then, faced with the prospect of drawn-out skirmishes, the Germans changed tactics again. In early May the commander ordered for the systematic destruction of the ghetto’s mainly wood-framed buildings—by fire.
Within hours, Zivia wrote, the whole ghetto was ablaze. The Nazis destroyed one building at a time, shooting any Jews who ran from their smoking hideouts. Even in metal bunkers, people died of heat and smoke inhalation. Families, groups, children ran frantically through the crumbling streets, searching for shelter that wasn’t flammable. Zivia watched in horror. “The Warsaw ghetto was burnt at the stake,” she described. “Pillars of flames rose, and sparks crackled in the air. The sky glowed with a terrifying red light. . . . The pitiful remains of the largest Jewish community of Europe fluttered in the last throes of death.” This terror, she wrote, took place while, just outside the ghetto walls, Poles visited a carousel, enjoying the spring day.
The ZOB fighters were no longer able to fight from inside buildings, nor could they cross over the rooftops. All attics and passages had been destroyed. They put wet cloths over their faces and rags on their feet to deflect the heat and reverted to bunker warfare, using civilians’ bunkers, having not prepared any of their own. Most Jews were happy to share their space, and listened to the ZOB’s orders not to go outside and thus end up alerting the Germans. But in the end, the burning beat the steadfast rebellion. Smoke, heat, whole streets were engulfed in fire. Zivia continued to tour the ghetto each night, into the “rampage of flames, the tumult of collapsing debris, the crash of broken glass, pillars of smoke reaching the sky.” She wrote: “We were burning alive.”