One morning, as Ruzka was engrossed in a tome about socialist Zionism, she was approached by a bouncy girl with long eyelashes and perfect Polish.
“Why such a serious book?” the girl carped.
“The world is a serious place,” Ruzka told her. Ruzka’s hometown had few Jews, and when her public school teacher made an antisemitic remark, she moved her desk into the hall, permanently. She was a shy outsider who spent her free time in the library.
“I think the world is not so serious,” the young girl, Vitka, replied. Then she explained that even if it is, “all the more reason not to read a serious book.” Her favorite was The Count of Monte Cristo.
Vitka had come to Vilna after fleeing her own small town by climbing out the bathroom window of the synagogue where the Nazis had locked all the Jews. A top student at Jewish school, Vitka was the first woman to join Betar and receive its “semi-military” training. She considered herself a Polish patriot; she tried various youth groups before settling in at The Young Guard but was never one for dogma.
Ruzka and Vitka became fast friends. Ruzka had integrity and humility; Vitka had a determined silliness, despite all that had been lost. One day, they noticed an awkward Young Guard leader observing the youth. A hat was pulled all the way down to his eyes. Everyone thought he was attractive; Vitka thought he was strange. No one dared approach him. “I asked myself why no one was talking to him,” Vitka said later. “What, is he so scary?” She went to say hi. This was Abba Kovner.
When Vilna was occupied by the Russians, Vitka fled, but she returned when the Nazis took over. If Germans were everywhere, she figured, she may as well be with Ruzka. She hitched a ride with a Nazi, but when she told him she was a Jew, he panicked and ran. She took a freight train, and, once in Vilna, paraded boldly down the sidewalk, wearing no yellow star. Ruzka was shocked to see her. “Are you crazy? Are you trying to get killed?”
Together they moved to the ghetto, shared a bed, and managed to evade wildly violent actions, once pretending to be officers’ wives. The Young Guard sent Vitka to the Aryan side. Ruzka dyed her hair for her, but it came out red, so they paid a Jewish barber to do it with peroxide. According to Ruzka, “Even the color of her hair could not hide her slightly long Jewish nose, her eyes that held a particularly Jewish expression.” Regardless, with endless confidence, Vitka was ready to fool the Poles. Fooling Germans, she observed, was easy: “Germans believe what they are told.” Once, when she forgot her star, she stuck on a yellow leaf instead.
In December 1941 Vitka’s mission was to retrieve Abba, who was hiding in a convent and dressed in a nun’s habit. She brought him to the ghetto to meet with Sara, the girl who’d survived the Ponary massacre. He heard her story, understood that the only way out was armed revolt, called the famous New Year’s meeting, initiated the FPO, and moved in with the girls. He shared their bed. “I sleep in the middle,” he told a fighter. The three of them walked down the ghetto streets arm in arm in arm, stirring rumors about a ménage a trois. （Legend has it that when one student asked Vitka why she joined the resistance, she immediately replied, “For the sex!”）
With Vitka and Ruzka’s deep engagement, the FPO amassed guns, stones, and bottles of sulfuric acid. The group lined its headquarters with a thick wall of “bulletproof” volumes of Talmud, typed out notices calling for resistance, and planned a revolt.
Then Abba sent Vitka on a ground-breaking mission, his declaration of love. Her assignment: to blow up a German train carrying soldiers and supplies. For two weeks, she left the ghetto each night, exploring the tracks to find the best location for a bomb, somewhere far enough from any Jews so that they would not be hurt or blamed and punished, but also close to the forest, where the saboteurs could hide, and not too far from the ghetto, so that she could exit and enter at the right times. She studied the tracks up close, taking note of all the details, since the act would have to be carried out in the pitch black of night. The train lines were policed by Germans and closed to civilians. More than once, Vitka was stopped. “I’m just looking for my way home,” she lied. “I had no idea it was forbidden to walk here.” She strolled away from the gullible Nazi and got close to the line farther along the track.