Some Jewish women, however, were exceptions, serving as intelligence agents, reconnaissance scouts, supply capturers, weapons transporters, saboteurs, locators of escaped POWs, and full-fledged forest combatants. Local peasants would be shocked when they showed up armed, their backs strapped with guns and sometimes children.
Faye Schulman was a modern-orthodox photographer from the eastern border town of Lenin. She had been spared from a mass shooting in which 1,850 Jews, including her family, were killed, because of her “useful skill”—she was forced to develop pictures of Nazis tormenting Jews. Sensing her end was near, Faye fled to the woods and, shaking wildly, begged a partisan commander to let her join. He’d known she was related to a doctor and ordered her to become a nurse. She knew nothing of medicine, but quickly got over her squeamishness and managed her psychological distress. The blood of the patient became the blood of her mother, leading her to imagine the murder scenes of every person in her family. Trained by a veterinarian, she performed open-air surgeries on an operating table made of branches, used vodka to numb a partisan before snipping off his finger bone with her teeth, and once lanced her own infected flesh before anyone noticed her fever and killed her for being a burden. Faye was her own whole world, constantly having to make life-or-death decisions at the age of nineteen.
Faye insisted on participating in combat and on raiding her own town for vengeance. “The Nazis had covered the graves with dirt and sand, but days later, the grounds still continued to shift as the bodies settled; the top layer cracked and blood continued to seep out . . . like a giant bleeding wound,” she later wrote. “It became impossible for me to remain behind while my own family’s blood still flowed from the trenches.” She retrieved her camera, which she then kept buried in the forest during her more frequent guerilla missions. Along with her lens, her gun became her best friend, and she embraced it at night instead of a lover, conscious of how the war had thwarted her sexual development. “I had lost my youth in a painful way,” she reflected. She had loved dancing, but dancing was over. “My family was killed, having been tortured and brutalized. I could not allow myself to have fun or be happy.” True, she once woke from sleep to find a gun pointed at her head by a man whose advances she’d refused （a friend had unloaded the weapon）， but generally she felt like “one of the boys,” eating with them from a communal pot （each pulled a spoon from his or her boot）， sharing their dessert of tobacco rolled in newspaper, trekking through landmine-filled forests, and, honored as a top warrior, being invited to stab a group of captured spies. （Faye arrived late on purpose in order to avoid committing these murders; she was iron brave but never hardened.）
All the while, she kept her Jewishness secret from most, making up stories when she ate by herself during Passover. Only forty years later did she discover that a man she’d wanted to befriend ignored her because he was a secret Jew and feared it would be suspicious to be seen with her. Even among rebels, the hiding was constant.
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Unless, that is, you were enrolled in a partisan unit made up entirely of Jews. These unique detachments were usually established by Jewish leaders in the dense forests of the East. They were primarily family camps that sheltered Jewish refugees （the famed Bielskis, a 1200-strong Jewish unit, welcomed all Jews）; they also committed acts of sabotage. Many more women were included, with some going out on missions and others serving as armed guards. One group of Jews arrived in the Rudniki Forest en masse, ready for partisan action. These were the Vilna comrades.
After Abba Kovner’s initial underground meeting during which he coined “We shall not go like sheep to the slaughter,” Vilna’s various Jewish groups came together quickly and eagerly. They formed the FPO—the Yiddish acronym for the United Partisan Organization. A large number of women were involved as couriers, organizers, and saboteurs, including Young Guard comrades Ruzka Korczak and Vitka Kempner.
Back when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, tiny Ruzka Korczak traveled three hundred miles along an underground railroad set up by fleeing Jews and made it to Vilna. There she moved into a former poorhouse that suddenly housed a thousand teenagers, Zionist refugees awaiting aliyah, which was still possible from there （the city was suddenly ruled by Lithuania）。 Family, school, struggles, dreams—nothing from Ruzka’s old life was relevant. Her excellent listening and conflict resolution skills quickly made her a leader.