Was this the end? Zivia felt so dejected, she secretly wished it was.
At ten in the morning, the manhole was raised. Sun poured in, and people recoiled and panicked with the light—had they been discovered? “Hurry! Hurry!” No, it was Kazik, who urged them to get out immediately. They had to clamber up the metal shaft, and were pulled from above and pushed up from below. With stiff limbs and damp, filthy clothes, they were not quick. The exit lasted forever—one account says over thirty minutes—during which time forty people emerged from the ground and got into a truck. There was almost no security, perhaps two armed helpers. Polish people watched from nearby sidewalks.
On the truck, Zivia finally saw what they looked like: “We were filthy, covered in dirty, bloodstained rags, our faces emaciated and despairing, our knees caving in from weakness. . . . We had almost lost all semblance of humanity. Our burning eyes were the only evidence that we were alive.” They stretched out, clutching their guns. The trucker had been told he was transporting shoes, not Jews. He was directed, at gunpoint, to listen to instructions.
Suddenly word came that there were Germans nearby. The twenty fighters who had gone to the secondary location and the one who went to fetch them had not yet returned to the manhole. Here there was a “famous fight” between Zivia and Kazik, though Zivia never wrote about it. According to Kazik, Zivia insisted that the truck wait for the fighters to arrive. Kazik insisted he’d instructed everyone to stay near the manhole and that now it was too risky and they had to leave immediately. Kazik promised to send another truck and ordered the driver to drive. Zivia, furious, threatened to shoot him. （Many years later, the translator of Kazik’s memoir questioned him: “I understand that you fought with Nazis . . . but with Zivia?!”）
Then, they were moving through morning traffic. As Zivia put it, “The truck, loaded with forty armed Jewish fighters, set off on its way in the heart of Nazi-occupied Warsaw.”
It was a new day.
*
The second rescue attempt—of the twenty remaining fighters—failed. The Germans had found out about the morning’s very public operation in the middle of the street and waited for the fighters to emerge. The ZOB simply could not wait anymore in the excrement. Unaware that the area was filled with Germans, they climbed out—and were ambushed. They fought the Nazis hand to hand, shocking the Polish bystanders. When Kazik returned to the manhole, he saw the street strewn with their bodies, shot to death.
Several Jews ran back to the ghetto. Later, Zivia learned that they fought for another full week.
Both Zivia and Kazik were haunted by the knowledge they had deserted friends. She had promised that she would wait for them, and hadn’t. This guilt plagued Zivia constantly until her death.
*
Overall, more than a hundred Jewish women fought with their movement units in the Warsaw ghetto uprising. In a Nazi inner circle meeting, it was reported that the battle was surprisingly tough and that devilish, armed Jewish girls, in particular, fought up to the bitter end. Several women committed suicide at Mila 18 and other locations; many died “with weapons in their hands.” Lea Koren of the Gordonia youth movement escaped through the canals but was killed after she returned to the ghetto to nurse the wounded ZOB fighters. Regina （Lilith） Fuden, who connected the units during the revolt, returned through the sewers to save fighters several times. “Up to her throat in water,” read her obituary, “she did not give up and dragged members through the canals.” She was killed on one attempt, age twenty-one. Courier Frania Beatus held her post in the uprising, then committed suicide on the Aryan side at age seventeen. Dvora Baran, a girl who “dreamed of forests and the fragrance of flowers,” fought in the central ghetto area. When her bunker was discovered, her commander ordered her to emerge first, and she successfully distracted the Nazis with her incredible beauty, stopping them in their tracks. Then she hurled hand grenades, “scattering them to the wind,” while her colleagues took up new positions. She was murdered the next day, age twenty-three. Rivka Passamonic, of Akiva, shot one of her friends in the forehead and then killed herself. Rachel Kirshnboym fought with a Freedom group and joined the partisans; she was killed, age twenty-two. Bundist Masha Futermilch, who had lobbed explosives with trembling fingers, escaped via the canals.