The youth movements, the entire country, mourned. Zivia and Tosia had become mythical symbols of the Jewish fighting woman—the “Jeanne d’Arcs of the underground.” Comrades were referred to as “friends of Tosia.” Movement instructors were called “Zivia A” and “Zivia B.” The name Zivia was known to Jews in Poland, Palestine, the United Kingdom, and Iraq. “Zivia” was all of Poland, and a whole country collapsed with her killing. “Their names,” the obituaries read, “will shape a new generation. . . . Their fighting and camaraderie that rose in the flames of sacrifice, has the potential to crush rocks and uproot mountains.”
*
The obituaries, however, were dead wrong.
That night, after the nothingness, Zivia noticed several comrades in the yard nearby. She ran up to them in relief, assuming it was the regular nightly patrol. It wasn’t. She recoiled as she saw fighters drenched in blood and refuse, writhing in pain, shivering, fainting, gasping for air—the “human remains” of what had been a slaughter in the bunker. Tosia was there, head and leg badly wounded.
Sick with horror, Zivia heard the story. When the Nazis arrived at Mila 18, the fighters couldn’t decide whether to escape through a back exit and attack, or to stay put, assuming the Germans would be too fearful to enter. They knew the Germans used gas but had been told that holding wet cloths over their mouths and noses would be sufficient. It wasn’t. The Nazis infused the gas in slowly, suffocating them gradually. One fighter called for suicide, several followed. Others choked. In all, 120 fighters died, with only a handful escaping through a hidden exit.
Zivia was stunned, destroyed. “We raced about like madmen,” she recalled, “and tried to break into the rock-sealed bunker with our bare hands and nails to reach the bodies of our comrades and retrieve their weapons.”
But there was no time for madness, no time to mourn their closest friends, their everything. The remaining ZOB had to heal the wounded, find shelter, and decide what to do next. Zivia, Tosia, and Marek took command. Walking, “a convoy of lifeless bodies among the shadows, like ghosts,” they headed to a bunker where they believed there was still activity, and Zivia announced that the HQ address had changed. She was always doing, always moving forward, never falling into passivity, which would have meant giving in to despair. “Responsibility for others brings you back to your feet,” Zivia wrote, “despite everything.”
They arrived at the new HQ carrying the wounded fighters only to find out that Germans knew of that location, too. Despite the danger, Zivia decided to stay put—the wounded members were too injured to be moved. All the fighters, sick and exhausted, were ready to collapse and die together. But Zivia insisted that they go on. She sent another group off on a sewer escape mission. She kept others busy tending to the wounded to stop them from collapsing into hysterics—the same turmoil she felt all night but kept deeply hidden. I should have been there . . . Hidden in the burning ghetto, her own life hanging from an unspooling thread, she was already consumed by survivor’s guilt.
But again, she didn’t have long to worry. The group of fighters who’d set off through the canals to find a way out came back to report that they’d miraculously met Kazik, with a Polish guide, in the tunnels.
Kazik, who had been sent out through the ZZW tunnels, had made it to the Aryan side and tried to find help. The Home Army refused to provide the ZOB with a map of the sewage canals or a guide, but the group secured the help of the PPR, as well as a schmaltzovnik ringleader—naturally, for a steep fee—and several other allies. Kazik then went back into the tunnels with a guide, on the pretense that they were rescuing Poles and gold. But the guide kept stopping; Kazik had to cajole him, offer him alcohol, and, finally, threaten him at gunpoint. At last, creeping on their bellies through the narrowest holes, stinking like skunks, they reached the ghetto at two in the morning. But Kazik had been horrified to find nothing at Mila 18 except corpses and the cries of the dying. On the brink of insanity, he turned around to exit the ghetto empty-handed. In the sewers, he called out the ZOB code word—“Yan”—a desperate last plea.