Niuta Teitelbaum, from the Communist group Spartacus, had been notorious in the Warsaw ghetto. In her midtwenties, she wore her flaxen hair in braids, appearing like a na?ve sixteen-year-old—an innocent disguise that hid her role as an assassin. She walked straight into the office of a high-ranking Gestapo officer, found him at his desk, and shot him in cold blood. She pulled the trigger on another officer in his own home, while he was in bed. In yet another operation, she killed two Gestapo agents and wounded a third who was taken to the hospital. Niuta, disguising herself as a doctor, entered his room, and mowed down both him and his guard.
Another time, she walked into a German command post dressed like a Polish farm girl with a kerchief in her hair. An SS soldier was taken by her bright blue eyes and blonde hair, asking if there were other Loreleis among the Jews? Little Niuta smiled, then whipped out her pistol. In another instance, she strolled up to the guards outside Szucha, feigned shame, and whispered that she needed to speak to a certain officer about a “personal matter.” Assuming that this “peasant girl” was pregnant, the guards showed her the way. In her “boyfriend’s office,” she pulled out a concealed pistol with a silencer and shot him in the head. On the way out, she smiled meekly at the guards who’d let her in.
This “self-appointed executioner,” as described by a fellow fighter, had studied history at Warsaw University, and now worked for the ZOB and the People’s Army, smuggling explosives and people. Niuta organized a woman’s unit in the Warsaw ghetto, teaching them how to use weapons. During the uprising, she helped raid a Nazi machine-gun position located on top of the ghetto wall.
“Little Wanda with the Braids,” her Gestapo nickname, was on all of its most-wanted lists. She survived the uprising, but was eventually hunted down, tortured, and executed a few months later, aged twenty-five.
*
The Nazis’ grand finale was blowing up the Great Synagogue on Tlomackie Street, the edifice constructed at the high point of Warsaw Jewish enlightenment; a symbol of Polish Jewish prominence and belonging. The entire gigantic structure roared in flames, as if calling out the end of the Jewish people.
Burn marks from the fire still scorch the floors of the neighboring building, which hosted the Jewish self-help organization where Vladka and Zivia had spent her time. This smaller white brick building became the first Holocaust museum and is now home to the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute. One of the world’s most historic Jewish buildings, it is still thriving and growing, despite its scars.
*
The truck ride out of Warsaw was not easy. Zivia lay on the cramped floor, silent, shocked, exhausted, filthy, and horrified about having left comrades behind. Everyone on board stank. Their weapons were wet and useless. And she had no idea where she was being taken. For an hour, no one uttered a sound. Then they were outside the city and in the Lomianki Forest, a sparsely wooded area with low, thick pine saplings, near many villages and German military units, good only for temporary shelter. Comrades who’d escaped the ghetto earlier met them, shocked that they were alive, shocked by the new group’s “pale and starving faces. Their hair had been stuck to the sewage canals, their clothes soiled. . . . [T]he battles they had fought, followed finally by two torturous days in the sewage canals had changed their appearance irrevocably.”
The settled comrades offered the new group hot milk, and Zivia drank it, head spinning, “heart overflowing.” It was a pleasant May day, the leafy surrounds fragrant and floral, a pastoral scene. It had been so long since Zivia had smelled the spring. Suddenly, for the first time in years, she began to weep. Before it had been forbidden, disgraceful to cry. But now she let go.
The fighters, still in shock from it all, sat down under the trees. They peeled off their rotting clothes and scratched the dirt from their faces until they bled. They ate and drank and, after many hours of silence, gathered around a bonfire, sure they were the last Jews on earth. Zivia could not sleep, her head spinning, pondering. “Was there anything left to do that we had not done?”
In the forest, where eighty fighters reunited, a temporary command was established. Zivia, Tosia, and fellow leaders set up a “sukkah,” a hut made of branches, and deliberated what to do next. They created a register of all their weapons, money, and jewelry that one fighter had taken from the ghetto. They split into groups and collected sticks to construct shelters. As hours passed, they realized that no more ghetto survivors would be joining them. After two days, Antek arrived, having heard that Zivia had survived and was there.