In Bia?ystok, courier Chasia Bielicka did not work alone. Eighteen Jewish girls collaborated to arm the local resistance, while leasing rooms from Polish peasants, and holding day jobs in Nazi homes, hotels, and restaurants. Chasia was a maid for an SS man who had an armoire filled with handguns to shoot birds. Chasia periodically grabbed a few bullets and dropped them into her coat pocket. Once, he called her over to the cupboard in a rage; she was sure she’d been caught, but he was upset only because the weaponry wasn’t adequately organized. The courier girls stashed ammo under their rooms’ floorboards, and passed machine-gun bullets to the ghetto through the window of a latrine that bordered the ghetto wall.
After the Bia?ystok ghetto’s liquidation and the youth’s revolt, the courier ring continued to supply intelligence and arms to all sorts of partisans, enabling them to break into a Gestapo arsenal. To get a large gun to the forest, the girls transported each steel piece on a separate journey. Chasia carried a long rifle in broad daylight in a metal tube that resembled a chimney. Suddenly two gendarmes appeared in front of her. Chasia knew if she didn’t speak first, they would. So she asked them for the time.
“What, it’s already so late?” she exclaimed. “Thank you, they’ll be worried about us at home.” As Chasia put it, “feigning extreme confidence,” was her undercover style. In offices, she’d complain to the Gestapo if she had to wait long for her （fake） ID. On one occasion, a Nazi saw her trying to enter the ghetto, and, without thinking, she pulled down her pants and urinated, throwing him off. Similarly, if a Polish woman was suspicious of a Jewish man, he was wise to immediately offer to drop his pants and prove his lack of circumcision—this was usually enough to startle and repel her.
Chasia got a new day job; her new boss was a German civilian who worked for the German army as a building director. She knew he’d helped feed his Jewish workers, and one night she told him she was a Jew herself. Her roommate, Chaika Grossman, who’d led the Bia?ystok uprising and fled the deportation, also worked for an anti-Nazi German. The five courier girls who were still alive initiated a cell of rebellious Germans. When the Soviets arrived in the area, they introduced them too and chaired the Bia?ystok Anti-Fascist Committee, composed of all local resistance organizations. The girls passed guns from the friendly Germans to the Soviets, provided all the intelligence for the Red Army’s occupation of Bia?ystok, and collected weapons for them from fleeing Axis soldiers.
In Warsaw, too, after the ghetto uprising, fighters needed weapons for defense, as well as for revolts in other camps and ghettos, like Renia’s. Leah Hammerstein worked on the Aryan side as a kitchen helper in a rehab hospital. Her Young Guard comrade once stunned her by asking if she might be willing to steal a gun. He never mentioned it again, but Leah became obsessed with the idea. One day, she passed an empty German soldiers’ room. Without thinking, she approached the closet, and a pistol was right there, waiting for her. She slipped it under her dress, then walked to the bathroom and locked the door. What now? She stood on the toilet and noticed a small window that opened onto the roof. She wrapped the gun in her underwear and slipped it out. Later, when it was her turn to throw out potato peelings, she went up to the roof, retrieved it, and threw it into the hospital garden. A hospitalwide search ensued, but she wasn’t worried—no one would suspect her. At the end of her shift, she picked the wrapped gun out of the weeds, put it in her purse, and went home.
*
In the Warsaw cemetery, Renia pulled out cash that she’d stashed in her shoe. She and Ina purchased the weapons, and she strapped the guns to her tiny body with belts made of sturdy fabric. The rest of the contraband—grenades, Molotov cocktails—she placed in a bag that had a double bottom, a secret compartment.
The trip back from Warsaw to B?dzin, however, was more difficult than the way there. On the train ride south, as they whizzed past tree after tree, they were faced with surprise searches, more frequent and more thorough. Renia tried desperately not to tremble as one officer pawed through every single small valise. Another officer grabbed all the food parcels. A third looked for weapons. “It cost an ocean of money, strength, and nerves—for both couriers and those who awaited them,” Renia recalled. “If a messenger did not come back at the designated time, the comrades went crazy. Who knew what had happened during the delay?”