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Episode 72: The women fighters behind the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, with Elizabeth R. Hyman
01:02:05
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- [00:00]
Elizabeth R. Hyman
You know, they would have conversations like, oh, you know what? I think it is great that Hitler's taking the Jews with them. I hope they burn in hell. They would have those conversations on board the trains, jump off the train, sneak into the nearest ghetto, take guns out of their underwear and their Jewish patches out of their bra, and bring news to their comrades in the Vilna Ghetto, the Bialystok ghetto, et cetera.
- [00:26]
Host (possibly Khalif or Haviv)
Hi everybody. Welcome to a new episode of ask khalif anything1 I'm really excited about. My guest today is Elizabeth R. Hyman. She holds a dual master's degree in History and Library Information Science from the University of Maryland, College park. And we're here to talk about her new book, the Girl Bandits of the Warsaw Ghetto. It was published earlier this year and it tells through the memoirs and diaries, the incredible story of five Jewish couriers, young women, Kashariyot, as they call themselves in Hebrew, who led a lot of the Jewish community's efforts at survival. I thought I knew the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. I did not. So we're going to get into it. But first I want to tell you that we have a sponsor this episode. This episode is sponsored by the Persian American Civic Action Network. That's a non profit organization that wants to dedicate the episode to Israel's Generation Z as they are the embodiment of Zionism in action and spirit, as well as the incredible renaissance led by Generation Z in Iran, standing tall against the radical Islamist tyranny that has invaded Iran and the Middle east since 1979. Pakan, or P A C A N in its endeavor to rebuild bridges of peace, brotherhood and goodwill, was the first Iranian based organization in the Diaspora, the Iranian Diaspora, to lead a mission to Israel to meet with Israeli leaders and media and NGOs in 2019. They asked me to read. As much as the Islamic regime tries to erase Iran's history or propagate a diabolical prophecy to wipe out the Jewish state, we remember the inalienable biblical alliance of the Jews and the Iranians, known to the Western audience as the Persians, who from the days of Cyrus the Great have facilitated the return of Jews to their homeland and the rebuilding of Zion. May we soon begin a new season of brotherhood, partnership and goodwill between Iranians and Israelis. Thank you again for that sponsorship. I should just say as an aside, Cyrus is remembered in Jewish memory and Jewish history as one of the good ones as allowing a Jewish return. I want to also invite everybody to join our Patreon. If you're interested in asking the questions that guide the topics we talk about here. That's the place to do it. There's great discussion forum. Our last episode was about judicial reform. It sparked a lot of debates. But the fact that I get pushback on the Patreon community is wonderful, is amazing. It's part of what we do here. So it really is a community in that sense. You also get to join our monthly live streams where I answer your questions live and sometimes for two and a half hours. So we have a great time. Come join us. Patreon.com askhaviv anything the link is in the show Notes. Elizabeth, how are you?
- [03:25]
Elizabeth R. Hyman
I'm very well. How are you?
- [03:27]
Host (possibly Khalif or Haviv)
Good, good. It's really exciting to have you because this is a story that as soon as you told it, I just, I had to tell. I mean, we have to share this story. I want to start with, first of all, who are you? Where do you come from? And how did you, how did you stumble onto this? And this is in fact, your first book and it is, it's already almost an instant New York Times bestseller. Right. So I'll stop the question at this moment. And where do you come from?
- [03:59]
Elizabeth R. Hyman
Well, I come from New Paltz, New York. That's about an hour and a half north of Manhattan. My grandmother and her parents fled Poland in 1939. The family had lived in Krakow for hundreds and hundreds of years before they fled. They settled in New York State in 1941. So growing up, I just knew about the Holocaust. It was just part of my knowledge. I have no memory of learning about it. And I always liked history. My mom bought me lots of children's history books. I was very into the Dear America and Royal Diaries, historical fiction books. So I was compromised from a very early age. After I graduated from University of Maryland, I worked as an archivist for close to seven years at the American Jewish Historical Society at the center for Jewish History in New York City. That building also houses the Yivo Institute and Leo Beck Institute. So lots of very important Jewish archives there. And then I took some time off to write this book. I'm part of a cohort of many women in the 20s and 30s who do public intellectual work regarding Holocaust history on social media. And since October 7, 2023, it seems that no matter what we say, our words and our abilities, our scholarship, our expertise, come under attack from both Jewish and non Jewish users.
- [05:26]
Host (possibly Khalif or Haviv)
And we're going to dive into this book in just a second. But this is, it's part of, you know, what's happening now. How do they come at you.
- [05:34]
Elizabeth R. Hyman
So depending on what you say, how you respond. And this is a complex of responses I've gotten over the course of many years, again from Jews and non Jews. Now you're murdering babies in Palestine, now you're doing it in Gaza. You're a disgrace to your people and your field. How's your fake Holocaust history degree going? You have no right to write the history you do. I hope your book fails. You're baby killer. You're a capo. So it's really across the spectrum, both Jews and non Jews, just reacting to what his Holocaust historians have to say. If we're pushed to speak on it, which I would argue is inappropriate. Holocaust historians are not specialists in conflict studies or international relations. So a lot of the time we're being called on to answer questions and speak on moral and ethical events in ways that we're not trained to do. And we do it anyway because we care. And we do find ourselves under attack regardless of what we say, from one of the variety of camps who feels strongly about these events. So it's a sort of depressing landscape. Certain group people want me to say A, B and C about the Israeli government. I'm not going to say A, B and C because it's nuanced. And I think if ever straightforward, another camp wants me to say X, Y and Z, which I'm also not going to say because there's nuance. And by taking to inject nuance and complexity into my responses, I managed to piss everyone off. Either I'm a evil right wing Zionist fascist baby killer or I'm a self hating Jew who is ashamed of my people and my grandmother and I should myself. I'm like, that's the caliber of responses. A lot of the women I've met online through this work, you know, we don't like abuse. We are kind of delicate souls. We do this for the love of it. But no one can make us stop injecting nuance and complexity into how we engage with these topics. It's just not gonna happen.
- [07:39]
Host (possibly Khalif or Haviv)
What a moment. What a moment. And the moment is dragging on for a great long time.
- [07:43]
Elizabeth R. Hyman
It's a very long moment.
- [07:45]
Host (possibly Khalif or Haviv)
It's a very long moment. So let's get into this book. Your book begins by talking about the generation of Jews who we meet when we come to read about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. And this was already eye opening for me. So who is the generation that led the Warsaw Ghetto uprising? You know, even before the war they talked about them as the lost generation. Can you tell us a little bit about what that means, why, what their experience, historical experience is. And then we can get into sort of the meat of the book.
- [08:14]
Elizabeth R. Hyman
Right. So the young people who would become the center of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising all came of age in the interwar period. They were born shortly after World War I and came of age in the 1920s and the 1930s. This was a very unique generation of young people because their experiences in Poland were so unlike those that came before or after. Their parents grew up in a Poland that was partitioned between empires. Empires. There was no singular Poland for their parents Entire lives until 1921, when suddenly Polish Pol the Poland is independent. And when Poland became independent, built into their constitution was the National Minorities Treaty. This treaty in the Polish constitution recognized Jews, Ukrainians, Germans and one other group as national minorities who had inalienable rights within the Second Republic of Poland. However, well, and for a chunk of time, for some of the 20s and 30s, the government honored the rights allocated to Jews and National Minorities Treaty. But as Europe moved right and Poland moved right along with it, Polish nationalists became very resentful of the things their constitution said were owed to the Jews. In the eyes of Polish nationalists, the existence of Jews within Poland was antithetical to their dream of the independent Polish dream. In the Polish nationalist perspective, an independent Poland would be a nation state of white, ethnically Catholic Poles, no Jews, no Ukrainians, no other ethnicities. So you had this sort of pluralistic Treaty of Versaillesque hopeful dream in this original 1921 constitution, with a population that had no interest in assimilating Jews into the Polish nation. So in generations prior, how more traditional Jewish communities in Poland would do it is that they'd have a figure called Eshtadlan, which is a sort of respected elder within a Jewish community, whose job it was to intercede on the behalf of the Jewish community with the gentile authorities. And Ebtadlan would go to the local magistrate, whoever, and quite literally beg and scrape on the behalf of the Jews for certain rights and protections. However, when these young people were coming of age, they rejected the idea of the Stadlan and the idea of begging for their rights, because as far as they were concerned, they were Polish citizens with inalienable constitutionally promised rights. So their thinking was, why should I beg for rights? Why should I ask the polls for anything? I am a Pole. The polls, the ethnic Catholic ones did not like that. It made them angry. And as for the Jews who were pushing like that, it made their parents frightened and angry. Now the young people saw Their parents, or at least what they perceived as their parents, passivity, their elders, passivity in the face of growing Polish antagonism. They also saw that their parents were completely out of touch with the circumstances in which they were coming of age in this Poland in which they were guaranteed rights, but also were being systematically excluded from the economy and civil society. So the elders wanted these young Jews to just stay quiet, stay in the community, don't make a big deal. But the young people were like, no, that's out of touch. We have to demand our rights, okay? This is the Second Republic of Poland. It's not the 1800s anymore. We are Poles and we will demand our rights as Poles now. However, they also understood that despite the rights accorded to them, they understood they were still a minority, they were still the Jews. So they formed their own state within a state esque political systems. You had general Zionists, right wing Zionists, a wide variety of socialist Zionists, the Bundists, Communists, et cetera. And they all sort of retreated into themselves and formed their own ideological islands. And these and their attendant youth groups, these political youth groups that were attached to parties were really where these young Jewish people saw themselves as making the most sense. They would describe these youth groups attached to these political parties as their true home. They'd say, you know, home with my parents and brothers and sisters, that's where I slept. But I lived at parties headquarters. So they lived their social and political and intellectual lives in these youth spaces. And when I say that these youth groups were attached to political parties, sometimes they were like official parts of the party. Sometimes they were just young people who held those politics and didn't want older adults being involved with them at all. So you already had this generation of angry, highly organized young people.
- [13:35]
Host (possibly Khalif or Haviv)
Did they learn from Zionists that demand to be respected as polls? In other words, the Zionists are coming in and saying to these people for 40, 50 years now, don't beg. That's dehumanizing. Don't, you know, apologize for existing, Right?
- [13:50]
Elizabeth R. Hyman
That was not.
- [13:51]
Host (possibly Khalif or Haviv)
Is that kind of pressure part of this discourse?
- [13:53]
Elizabeth R. Hyman
That was not a purely Zionist impulse. The Bundists were actively anti Zionist. They rejected Zionism in all of its forms. And they still enshrined those thoughts of do not beg and scrape, do not beg them for anything. The Bunz youth group, the Tsukuns, actually had their own armed defense groups to protect university students from hostile Poles in the late 30s. And even in late 1942, the Bundists were still very, very hesitant to work alongside The Zionists, they made it work because they understood that they had to. But no, that impulse, we're not going to beg and scrape. That's not, Was not a purely Zionist phenomenon.
- [14:40]
Host (possibly Khalif or Haviv)
Okay? So we have this new generation, deeply politicized, deeply identified with those politics, the youth groups, the, you know, the political movements. But Poland would go on in the 30s to start actually stripping away citizenship, you know, for Jews who don't live in the country, for example, and really turn on Jews. And the government officially would talk openly about how there's a difference between Poles and Jews. Jews are strangers to Poland, and so they're living as strangers in a country they had lived in, as you said, for centuries and centuries and centuries. When we get to the story that you're starting to tell, you focus in on the organizational abilities and the way of particular girls. Some of them girls, teenagers, minors, and some of them are young women. But young women, I don't, you know, we're talking about, you know, 18 to young, 20s, 18 to 25. Tell us about these girls, about what happens to them, what's going on in their, in their lives.
- [15:41]
Elizabeth R. Hyman
Right? So the story of how I begin to learn about them begins in 2013, actually. I was in my second year of graduate school. I had my vlog, and I was taking a class called Women in Autobiography. This class is all about how to read Jewish women's diaries, testimonies, autobiographies, et cetera, as primary sources. How to apply historical methodology to them. One of the excerpts we read was from the memoir of a woman named Vlad Kamid. And in this excerpt, she described smuggling a dynamite into the Warsaw Ghetto in preparation for the uprising. And in that moment, I was just like, I had a head explode moment. I had no idea there weren't any women involved in arming the Warsaw Ghetto in preparation for the uprising. I had no idea. I was very righteously indignant. So during that period, I had an ongoing post series on my blog where I would write a profile of underappreciated, under known, interesting, exciting, etc. Historical woman. So I thought, okay, you know, when I finish and defend my thesis and get a job, I'll write a blog post about this Vladkamid. That blog post went up in 2018. It was an 11 part post series posted in April of 2018 to align with the 75th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. While doing that research, I learned very quickly that Vladka was not acting alone. She was part of a large cohort of very young women who were all doing very intensive Very dangerous resistance work to prepare the Warsaw Ghetto and other ghettos for uprisings and to keep the ghetto wise Jewish population hopeful and informed. So by the time I wrote this blog post, I was aware of this massive network of women. So when all 11 parts were posted, I was talking to my mother and I said to her, you know, I'm so proud of those blog posts. Researching and writing them was such an incredible experience, but I feel like I've only just begun. Should I write them all? Blog post, all of these women who formed this cohort of Kashariots, couriers, et cetera. And my mother said, well, maybe that's your book. And I was like, oh, huh, how do I write a book? Anyway, here we are. I chose the four other women. The book followed as a sort of just natural result of my research. I think anyone looking at the topic of women in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising will come across Sivia Lubetkin very, very early if they're doing their research right. Because Sivya Lubetkin was the only female commander of the Jewish fighting organization in the Warsaw Ghetto and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. She was tapped by her Zionist Socialist Youth Group's leadership as a burgeoning leader very early. And so she was already a leader long before the Nazi period, when the Nazis began to ghettoize Polish jewelry. She got on a train and traveled from the Lithuanian zone to back to Warsaw because one of her colleagues wrote to her and said, our people need your help. So she went back into Warsaw and immediately began taking charge of all kinds of aid work, making sure all of the people in her group were fed, had places to sleep, had access to as much medical attention as they could within the ghetto. So she was automatically a leader and automatically a resistance leader before they had even conceptualized what resistance would look like.
- [19:36]
Host (possibly Khalif or Haviv)
Can we take a step back and just describe the ghetto? People are living in this ghetto, they don't have access to these things. When you say she's making sure they have it, what does that involve? What is actually meant? So what is their experience in the ghetto? And what do you have to do to get people medicine, a place to stay, food?
- [19:55]
Elizabeth R. Hyman
So for listeners and viewers unfamiliar with what the Warsaw Ghetto was really like, it was sort of a space of passive murder. That's what I call it. The Warsaw Ghetto was not a concentration camp. It was not a death camp. It was an incredibly densely populated collection of city blocks set up so that the people living within those walls would die of starvation. There was not enough food officially bought in to fulfill anyone's caloric needs. There was not any medicine allowed in. Sanitary conditions were not good. So the Nazis sort of assumed slash hope that most of the Jews in there would die of starvation, typhus and the so called diseases of poverty, cholera, tuberculosis, etc. So in the Warsaw ghetto we had two distinct centers of Jewish government. There was the Judenrat, which is the Council of Jewish Elders the Nazis put in charge of the ghettos. Over time the Judenrat have gotten a pretty bad rap. People mention them in sort of the same sentence as Kapos. But the Judenrat are actually, you know, very distinguished older members of the Jewish community who the Germans had said, you're now in charge of the Jews and you know, putting forth all of our orders. So the Judenrat were in an impossible situation where they had to both implement German orders towards the Jews in their hair and somehow still do their best to look after their people. So there was a Judenrat, then there was the Alleynehilfe, which was the alternative community. This Alleynhilfe was a congregation of pre war aid political and support groups which maintained a semi legal existence in the Warsaw Ghetto. And with the type of context Sevilla would have gone to when it came to keeping her people fed, keeping her people moderately healthy, keeping them with a roof over their heads. So she interceded a lot with the unofficial and official Jewish community. So she was always, whether it be in the Judenrat building or the online Hilfit headquarters, she was every day just running around talking to officials and bureaucrats and trying to get what she needed. And sometimes getting what she needed meant working with smugglers and black marketeers and engaging with the more quote unquote criminal elements of the Warsaw ghetto.
- [22:33]
Host (possibly Khalif or Haviv)
So in October 1940, I think the Nazis gave the order to establish the Warsaw Ghetto. And then they have very little time to actually move and they have to now live in these densely packed city blocks. Yes, and the city blocks, the ghetto is then surrounded by guards, by walls. People could be killed trying to move back and forth. It's all very, very carefully regulated. How do you have smuggling? Where do you smuggle through or from? How do you. At some point in your book I came across the fact that 90% of the food they are eating is smuggled at one point, which a tells you the scarcity, the lengths the Germans are going to to try and starve people, but also the extent of this smuggling. So tell us about that smuggling.
- [23:20]
Elizabeth R. Hyman
So even though the ghetto was technically sealed off and heavily guarded, each gate had three guards There was the German guard, Polish guard and Jewish police guard. Now, every single Pole outside the ghetto understood that inside were Jews who needed necessities and who wanted luxuries, and some of whom had the capital to be able to afford those things. So there was an entire very quick black market organization. And within weeks, Polish guards, Jewish guards, had developed a system of taking bribes and whistles, wherein they would let smugglers in and out, let Jews in and out. Everyone knew where there were holes in the wal. Everyone knew where you could sneak in and out of the ghetto through a basement. Everyone knew where the wall could be moved. So it was a very complex system of black marketeering carried out under German noses by Polish and Jewish guards. So say I'm an 8 year old girl and me and the Jewish policeman and the Polish guard all know that the German guard takes a walk every morning at 11am so then the Polish guard would whistle, I would know which part of the wall I could sneak under my little tiny child's body. I would give one of the guards a carton of cigarettes because that was sort of an underground currency. I'd scamper off, get the food I needed, hopefully would not be spotted or shot by a German, and sneak back in when the coast was clear. And that took place on a very, very large scale. For the wealthier smugglers in and out of the ghetto, you would have entire supermarkets worth of food smuggled in inside coffins through the Jewish cemetery, through the basements of buildings. So although it was sealed, it was also just an opportunity for people willing to work in a black market, underground way.
- [25:20]
Host (possibly Khalif or Haviv)
So your book focuses on girls?
- [25:23]
Elizabeth R. Hyman
Yes.
- [25:24]
Host (possibly Khalif or Haviv)
That's fascinating for a couple reasons. One, I know so many of the stories of Anielewicz and all these, all these great heroes and we never.
- [25:32]
Elizabeth R. Hyman
What's the story about Ani Yellow for you?
- [25:34]
Host (possibly Khalif or Haviv)
Yeah.
- [25:34]
Elizabeth R. Hyman
On the very eve of the uprising, in that famous bunker, Mila 18, he had a complete emotional breakdown. He lost it. He was sobbing, he was panicking about the potentially suicidal nature of their plans. And do you know who sat with him and comforted him in that moment? I'm starting to guess it was Sivia Lubetkin. She was running around, preparing the fighters, being a fighter, taking care of everyone, cooking, cleaning, washing. And she sat down and did that emotional labor for Mordechai Anielovich until he was ready to go again. In many ways, Sivia was his pillar of strength. But outside of more specialized works, we don't know her name.
- [26:22]
Host (possibly Khalif or Haviv)
We don't know her name. This was the Point for me, I hadn't heard of them. You also explain why these young women actually had an advantage when they began to seriously take part and organize a lot of the smuggling that would actually enable the uprising. And the advantages were that the young men often were religiously educated and were much more Jewish, inflected culturally. They spoke with a Polish that was inflected with Yiddish, and they talked with their hands. Right, Because Jews are secretly Italians, we know this, we don't tell it any, but. Yes, but the girls sounded more Polish, looked more Polish, went to Polish schools, and so their Polish was better, frankly, or more accurate to what ordinary. And so they could pass. What did the, the, the women bring that the men didn't have?
- [27:21]
Elizabeth R. Hyman
So as underground couriers, as Kashariot, these women began their work, that kind of work, in the very earliest days of World War II. Initially, the youth groups were worried about their members in far flung Jewish communities. Were they alive? Were they starving? Did they need help? Did they need money? What were their parents doing? So these first female messengers were sent out stock of the movement, to look in on the people, to keep track of everyone. Now, even at this point, Germans would shoot a Jew they encountered and they would potentially arrest any young man they encountered for forced labor. Now, if any of these young women were caught on their messenger duties, if they were ordered to drop their pants, there was nothing on their body which would denote their Jewishness. I'm talking about circumcision. With a man, a Nazi would say, drop your pants, see a circumcised penis, and boom, you're dead. The woman, there was no way to tell. It was not inscribed on your body. Second of all, there were all of these intangible skills these women had acquired through their education in the Polish public school system. They also gained these skills through what I'm going to call a quirk of traditional Eastern European gender roles. Traditional Eastern European mothers would raise their daughters to be strong, savvy businesswomen who knew how to engage with the outside world, because the men were supposed to stay home and study scriptures and be religious scholars. So not only did these women have public education, I mean, that wasn't all of them. There was a lot of public education for this generation of Polish Jewish women. Not only did they have their education on their side, but they had this socialization to be able to exist in the world outside the Jewish community. So as a result, their spoken Polish, as you said, was not easily immediately identifiable as Jewish. In pre war Britain, you could tell someone's education and social class very, very easily based on their accent, based on how they spoke, it was the same in Poland. So these women also knew how to speak a certain register of Polish that wasn't distinctly posh or incredibly working class. So they knew how to speak a sort of middle class social register of Polish. So it wasn't just lack of a Yiddish accent, it was their diction and their word choice. They also understood Catholic prayers. The ones who attended public school kind of got a Catholic education regardless of what they wanted. So they knew the prayers, they knew how Polish Catholicism operated. As time went on, some of them wore crosses on their missions. So for these very earliest women, just knowing how to perform Polishness was a major, major asset that Jewish men, by virtue of their socialization and education not have.
- [30:17]
Host (possibly Khalif or Haviv)
Okay, so they are, they have business savvy that, that by the way, cultural expectations still exists, for example, in the Haridi community in Israel. Right. We see that as a, a kind of deeply embedded social. The women work. The women work at the same rates as the general population and men. And this is of course the debate over military service and non work. But they, this is a, this is an old tradition, very old. And then we get to the summer of 1942. Let's get into it. The Nazis in the gross action, the great, the big deportation of Jews from July to September 1942. They ship off to Treblinka a quarter million Jews, something like that. Is that right?
- [31:05]
Elizabeth R. Hyman
I would say more than that. But a lot had already perished in the ghetto. But the numbers were extraordinarily high. The numbers extraordinarily high camp.
- [31:15]
Host (possibly Khalif or Haviv)
And then a small fraction, maybe 50,000 are left in the Warsaw ghetto. And those 50,000 because the Nazis shipped off with those who couldn't work, because they figured that the Jews who remained would be. They, they wanted to hold on to the Jews who could be used as a labor force, as a forced labor.
- [31:32]
Elizabeth R. Hyman
Force, which was very smart. The Nazis were actively invading the USSR at this moment. And this impulse to complete their genocide super quick meant they were killing off a huge source of highly skilled forced labor. So if you think about it in. How do I put this? If you think about it in organizational, military planning terms, it was extraordinarily stupid. And the Wehrmacht and the Gestapo would actually have a lot, or the SS would actually have a lot of bureaucratic infighting about this. But yes, the some 50,000 who remained following the summer of 1942 remained because they were fit to. Fit to work, basically.
- [32:16]
Host (possibly Khalif or Haviv)
So they are disproportionately young, disproportionately healthy, disproportionately organized and capable. Yes, the Nazis kind of set the conditions for what was to come. So tell us about the beginning of this. Of this. Of this uprising and the role of Tsivia and her cohorts.
- [32:37]
Elizabeth R. Hyman
Well, you know, the roots of the uprising began in the earliest days of the ghettos, when the youth groups were still operating apart from each other, because each youth group became its own center of cultural, educational, et cetera, resistance. They would have underground schools, underground aid networks, underground high schools, cultural nights where bands would play music that Jews were no longer allowed to play. So resistance began. Began not as an armed, organized set of institutions, but as separate islands of resistance. It was only in late 1941, when they started getting intel from the couriers that the Nazis were massacring Jews along the eastern frontier, that they began to realize this was a systematic attack on European Jews and realized that their resistance had to switch from education and culture to armed fighting.
- [33:42]
Host (possibly Khalif or Haviv)
I just. I want to focus in on this point.
- [33:44]
Elizabeth R. Hyman
Yeah.
- [33:44]
Host (possibly Khalif or Haviv)
The women who are the couriers and therefore getting the news and seeing outside the ghetto walls in a way the men can't, are the ones who bring the news of the genocide into the ghetto.
- [33:56]
Elizabeth R. Hyman
Two of the women this book follows, Tema Schneiderman and Tulsi Altman, who were both unfortunately murdered in 1943, were extraordinarily legendary careers. Even in the early 40s, everyone knew Tema and Tosia. And based on their looks and their false papers and their knowledge of how to behave in the Polish world, they would travel between ghettos smuggling news, underground literature, money, stories of hope. They would get on trains full of Nazi officers. You know, they would have conversations like, oh, you know what? I think it is great that Hitler's taking the Jews with them. I hope they burn in hell. They would have those conversations on board the trains, jump off the train, sneak into the nearest ghetto, take guns out of their underwear and their Jewish patches out of their bra, and bring news to their comrades in the Vilna ghetto, the Bialystok ghetto, et cetera. So it was those women who bought back to Warsaw, bought back to the youth groups. Eyewitness accounts of these organized massacres of Jews on the Eastern Front. The great deportation summer of 1942 really demolished these resistance infrastructures they had begun to build in late 1942. And so they had to completely regroup and rebuild because even they had not been able to fully grasp Nazis intentions towards them. They actually kind of, like logical people assumed they'd be allowed to live in light of their skilled labor abilities. So we see a big reorganization in the months between the girls action, the great deportation to Treblinka, and the actual outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. In this time, the. The nascent resistance groups begin to work together, begin to form real committees, get charters, make themselves official, orient themselves toward acquiring weapons. And by the time we reach early spring 1943, most of the Jews in the ghetto looked to the Jewish fighting organization, this unified group as the true leadership of the ghetto. And Siviyev was one of those people, one of those leaders that everyone accepted as a leader. In the months leading up to the.
- [36:11]
Host (possibly Khalif or Haviv)
Uprising, there is, in that moment when the news of the genocide comes into the ghetto, people begin to understand they're not meant to survive this. And that reshapes how people. The change in leadership you just described essentially is a change in what people are expecting. It's no longer about getting through this. It's about being heard. There's a consciousness of wanting to be remembered in the history books. There's a consciousness that the people shipped off to Treblinka are dead. We will be dead. How do we go out? Tell us about that. How much can you.
- [36:45]
Elizabeth R. Hyman
Exactly.
- [36:46]
Host (possibly Khalif or Haviv)
Yeah.
- [36:47]
Elizabeth R. Hyman
So the Warsaw Ghana uprising itself, it was never fought with the intent to win in any traditional sense. There was no sort of we're going to beat the Nazis and liberate the ghetto and liberate wars, none of that. The purpose of the uprising was to secure the long term dignity of the Jewish people. To demonstrate to the world that the Jews would not go, quote, unquote, like sheep to the slaughter, that Jews had dignity as human beings and that they would fight. And in that respect, they succeeded. The uprising succeeded because we see high level German officials having to acknowledge the Jews as equal combatants. We see Joseph Goebbels being like, how did the Jews get these good guns? We have to send in auxiliary troops if we have to send in backups. So in sending backups and sending in extra troops, very intense weaponry. The Germans were recognizing the Jews as equals, as combatants, therefore, not as subhumans. And that was actually one of the goals of the uprising. So in that sense, the uprising succeeded.
- [37:52]
Host (possibly Khalif or Haviv)
One of your major sources are these diaries that these women kept. In these diaries, they, they express this consciousness. They talk about their dignity. They talk about essentially defining what a Jew is by standing our ground, by fighting back. Tell us about that. These diaries, these memoirs, they write about each other. They tell us a lot about what's happening in the ghetto. How many of these diaries are there? How important are they? What do they actually talk about in these diaries?
- [38:24]
Elizabeth R. Hyman
Okay, so my very inexact answer is there are a lot of these, far more than I was able to use for this book. I'd say this cohort of women at least 300 strong, probably more if you add in women who fought in partisan units in the Polish forests. Not all of them were survived, obviously. So the memoirs we have obviously are from survivors. We have pieces of letters, maybe a few diary entries from women who perished. Tulsi Altman and Tama Schneiderman didn't leave very much in the way of their own writings. So I had to sort of reconstruct them through the writings of others. I think the most important aspect of these memoirs, for non historians understand, is that a lot of them were written 20, 30, 40 years after the events they describe. And the ability of survivors to recall these events is inherently scrambled by the nature of untreated trauma. Which is why you'll see if you read the memoirs of, of the command leaders, you'll still find different details, different numbers of people. You'll find descriptions of the same events which vary considerably. I've noticed that Holocaust deniers like to take those and use them as evidence for the Holocaust didn't happen. But if you understand how memory works, how time and trauma impact recall, those discrepancies make perfect sense. So you sort of going into these memoirs, you have to understand how and why Holocaust survivors wrote, which is sort of another reason these women's stories are under known. When Jewish men sat down to write about their experiences in the Holocaust, they saw themselves as writing history, as speaking to history. However, Jewish women didn't, Jewish survivors, female survivors, didn't necessarily see themselves as agents of history. A lot of them felt very strongly that the Holocaust happened. And it's not something we talk about and it's not something we center on ourselves. So Dr. Adina Blady Schweiger, who in my book goes by Inka, she only sat down to write her memoir because Zivia's husband, Yitzhak Zuckerman called her and said, what you went through was important, you have to write it down. So in even reading these memoirs, you have to understand why women wrote versus men and therefore why women's accounts can be much harder to fully grasp if you're not a historian. Because they're not writing for history, they're writing for their families and their friends and their children and maybe out of obligation, so they make far less of A they put far less energy towards contextualizing their experiences. They mainly write. So part of the reason, I think we see men's experiences, not just in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, but in the Holocaust, sort of take precedence in public consciousness over women's is because women didn't believe that they were writing for history. They didn't. They were writing. They were writing within the domestic sphere, whereas men were writing within the public sphere.
- [41:43]
Host (possibly Khalif or Haviv)
All right, let's get into the fighting itself. January 1943, the fighting begins. There are 750 fighters, something like that, the civilians. I don't know what that means in this context. In the ghetto, the non fighters organize around the fighters. They get the rabbi's blessing. Everything is now. This is the direction everything is headed in. Everyone understands that. Tell us about that dangerous moment, that moment where they embark on this and then how the fighting goes.
- [42:12]
Elizabeth R. Hyman
So January 1943, that was the Little Uprising. The Nazis entered the Warsaw Ghetto with the intent to do a full liquidation and found to their shock, an armed fighting force. Now they were not. Even at this moment, the zob, the Jewish fighting organization, was still quite loosely organized, organized. It will become much stricter in the months between January and March. But in this first abortive, final liquidation attempt, the Nazis realize the Jews have organized, the Jews have weapons, the Jews know how to fight. So that abortive liquidation attempt put the Nazis on notice. So when they tried again In March of 1943, they already had extra units and extra weapons waiting. Because they knew they were dealing with an organized group of people.
- [43:02]
Host (possibly Khalif or Haviv)
They built out a network of backways through the ghetto. It was this extraordinary planning. How did they build out those capabilities? It's literally just the extraordinary, just gumption of these young people.
- [43:19]
Elizabeth R. Hyman
So part of it was gumption they the streets. Because even in these later days of the ghetto, there were still Nazi patrols along the streets. They were still expected to be only in the factories or asleep. So by they had this. So by staying off the streets and staying out of the Nazis eye line, they just stayed alive and maintained their safety and their security. So it was a natural, natural outcropping of their needs. However, they did have allies outside. There were portions of the Polish underground who were very sympathetic to the Jews and who assisted them and sent them materials about urban warfare. Making explosives, safeguarding yourself within urban warfare environment. So some expertise came from the outside, from sympathetic Poles as well. But a lot of it was simply built off of the fact that they couldn't be seen in the streets at most points of the Day and had to work around that.
- [44:19]
Host (possibly Khalif or Haviv)
So the Ghetto conditions themselves were a huge advantage that they utilized.
- [44:25]
Elizabeth R. Hyman
Yep. So they could travel from a basement at one end to an attic at the other end of what remained of the Ghetto without being seen on the streets.
- [44:33]
Host (possibly Khalif or Haviv)
Some of the couriers were aware that, as you said, this is for the history books. This is a last stand. This is about making a statement rather than really changing their fate. And then there is this dilemma. Do I survive? Do I do everything it takes to survive to tell the story? Or do I go back in now that I've smuggled out and help the last stand. And tell us about that.
- [45:02]
Elizabeth R. Hyman
There was a very young woman named Franya who is Yitzhak Zuckerman's personal courier on the Aryan side of Warsaw. And as the uprising was transpiring inside the Ghetto, the couriers stationed on the Aryan side were watching the ghetto burn and hearing the gunshots and seeing the flames. Franja, who's very young, she was probably 17 at this point. She thought that her boyfriend was in. She knew her boyfriend was in there. Her parents were dead. And she went to Yitzhak Sukerman and she said, my life is over. I want to go die with them. And he said, you're here because you have a job to do for them. Focus on that. Do your job. She did. And then when it was over, she killed herself. S.L. camin and Inka, Dr. Adina Blady Schweiger were also those couriers stationed outside the get out. And in their memoirs, they both just wrote about the horrific experience of watching what had been their home and their family homes just be burnt in front of them while the Poles walked by, not reacting. And when kids made comments like, oh, that's just for the Jews. And they had to maintain their cover as Aryans while watching all of this. So they couldn't stand there and look sad. That. Because then someone would notice the sadness in their eyes and be like, oh, that's a Jew. Let's turn them into the Gestapo and make some money off of it. So they had to stay undercover while watching their homes burn and not knowing if their friends and comrades and loved ones were safe. It wasn't easy. Once the uprising was fully going to get in or out of the ghetto. Ghetto, because there were a lot of eyes on it. Tulsi Altman was actually supposed to not be in the ghetto when it happened. She was supposed to be on the Aryan side organizing. She was caught inside the Ghetto when it began, and she ended up using the only Working telephone in the ghetto to send battlefield reports to command on the Aryan side. So most of the ones stationed outside the ghetto dealt with it stoically, I'm gonna say. But the idea of escaping and saving themselves, most of the fighter Jewish fighters went into under the assumption that they would die. So they didn't make any escape plans. So when a month had gone by, two months had gone by and they weren't dead, but they were dying, they were like, okay, we need to get a plan together and get the survivors out of here. So the idea of escape was only really became a reality in late April, early May.
- [47:46]
Host (possibly Khalif or Haviv)
At one point the couriers began going in twos so that they could chat happily with each other and not look like sad young women. Because sad young women are suspect of possibly being Jewish. Because who else would be sad in that moment? Is that. Tell us about that.
- [48:03]
Elizabeth R. Hyman
Yeah. If you're going to be an underground Jew living your day to day life in Aryan Warsaw, your ability to perform Polishness had to be flawless. If you're walking around scared and hopeless looking, you're, you're a Jew. But you also had to understand Polish Catholicism in an incredibly intimate way. Kavka Fohman wrote a bit about this, and I have her quoted in my memoir. You had to understand not only prayer, not only holidays, not only saints days, but you had to memorize the, the very detailed nature of Polish Catholic naming. So say your name was Emma. You had to be able to explain what saint you're named for and why and how that intersects with your baptismal day. And that's very esoteric knowledge that Jews wouldn't necessarily have even encountered in Polish public schools. So they had to learn those in order to fully hold their identities as Poles. So they had to be constantly holding all of these in their head as they acted as underground operatives and underground Jews.
- [49:16]
Host (possibly Khalif or Haviv)
Tell us about the tragic end of this story.
- [49:20]
Elizabeth R. Hyman
What's interesting about the end is that even after the Jewish Venue organization has escaped from the ghetto, and there are only, I'm gonna say, desert islands of resistance left after maybe mid May 1943, fighters remained through October. So we have German accounts of shooting from Jews in bunkers, Jews emerging from bunkers and throwing grenades at them. We have these accounts from German soldiers all the way through to October of 1943, by which time I think even those last holdouts either starved to death or were found by Germans because they had life seeking dogs they were using to find locations of bunkers. However, in terms of the Jewish fighting organization, the last Stand really came as they were realizing we're still alive. Our point has been made. We need to get our people out, if they are still alive. So there was sort of this mad dash to find an escape route out of the ghetto for these unexpected survivors. And there were a lot of missions that the ZOB ran through the sewers because the sewers were navigable and could be an escape route. However, without a Polish guide, you would probably get lost in the sewers, drown or be eaten by rats, something fun like that. So there are multiple abortive attempts to find an escape route through the sewers. One final attempt worked with help from elements of the Polish underground. So with maps of the sewers and Polish guides, members of the ZOB were able to do one or two successful escapes through the ghettos. However, even when those escapes were happening, people like Tsivia were having total crises because they knew there were other bunkers filled with Jews that they couldn't bring with them because they could all be shot in the time it could take to alert those other bunkers. So groups of Jews escaped, with the final group escaping in mid May 1943. But for people like Sivia who were in charge, I think the guilt of not having been able to contact those groups and other bunkers never left her. And this escape happened after the main command bunker at Mila 18, which had over 120 people inside, was discovered by the Germans. And they threw poison grenades in there, and almost everyone inside was killed. So this was after the last stand, kind of after the end that they were able to escape. But then you still had these stragglers groups, these groups who hadn't been able to follow, who kept the fight going for months. So while there is this romantic idea of a grand last stand, it was more like a series of last stands and then spur of the moment planning that happened around them.
- [52:30]
Host (possibly Khalif or Haviv)
Your story follows, you know, five women. What happens to them after the war? Three survived, two were killed. Where do they. Yeah, what, what is their. What happens to them? And then. And then we'll finish with some, some, some of the fascinating takeaways, Right?
- [52:47]
Elizabeth R. Hyman
So Vladka Mead survived. She married her husband Ben. They tried to make a life for themselves in Poland. After the war, Poles perceived Jews who had survived and wanted to return home with extreme violence. And Vladka and Ben felt that they had no future left in Poland. So they emigrated to the United States. A lot of Bundist survivors actually immigrated to like a distinct block of apartments in the Bronx in the post war years. Some have actually spoke with some of their kids, so that ethos is still there. And Vladika dedicated her life to Holocaust education and commemorization. Adina, Dr. Dina Bledy Schweiger stayed in Poland. She met a Polish officer in the last days of the war. They worked together during the Warsaw uprising of 1944. She married him. She stayed in Poland. She finished medical school and became a very well known pediatric surgeon. Sivya Lubetkin. You know, all she really wanted was to move to Palestine and live in an agricultural communist commune. And that's what she did. She emigrated to Palestine in 1946 and she and her husband, Jitzhak Zuckerman founded the Ghetto Fighters Kibbutz. I don't have the exact date because I don't focus too much on post war stuff, but they founded the Ghetto Fighters kibbutz in the 1950s or late 40s and she lived there the rest of her life. Zivia, early iterations of the Israeli government, wanted to make Yitzhak and Zviya Islia into political sentiment symbols. Neither of them was really into that. Yitzhak actually had some feuds with David Ben Gurion, which is fun if you're into gossipy history, but yeah, those were their lives.
- [54:36]
Host (possibly Khalif or Haviv)
The kibbutz was founded. I, I just looked this up on the sixth anniversary of, of the, of the uprising in April 1949.
- [54:44]
Elizabeth R. Hyman
49, that makes sense. Thank you.
- [54:45]
Host (possibly Khalif or Haviv)
And, and yeah, and literally is named and to this day, Kibbutzlo Chamea gets the kibbutz of the Ghetto Fighters. I guess my question is, why don't I know this stuff? How did these women disappear from the story?
- [55:00]
Elizabeth R. Hyman
What happened there after the war in Israel, Mandatory Palestine, then in Israel, in Western Europe, in the United States and probably many other regions I didn't study. During the wartime years, women were empowered in ways they hadn't before the war. In the United States, women went to work in factories in big ways. They made their own money, they lived, they led their own independent lives because the needs of the wartime economy needed them. In factories, they became mechanics, they learned skilled trades, they became independent. In Western Europe you had the Churchill's groups of under group of underground workers. You had women working enigma, you had female pilots. And in occupied countries you had women doing this kind of underground work. Because if you look at the histories of occupied Europe, you find groups of women using their gender roles to fight back. There's a very famous story about some Dutch women resisters who actually act as quote unquote honeypots, you know, seduce German Men bring them into the woods and then shoot them. And so the war almost ironically gave allied women in allied esque countries liberation. It helped them defy gender roles which would see them forced to remain in the house. But then after the war, we see this return to what I'm going to call hardcore patriarchy. The men came home, the soldiers came home, the war was over. And therefore it was like women, you know, you worked hard, you smuggled guns, you blew up trains, you built trains. That's great. Go home, go back to the kitchen, get married, look after your husband and make babies. And this was in Israel, this was in the United States, this is in Western Europe. And not all women wanted to do that, but they did. One of the women who was almost featured in this book, Rochel Auerbach. She's fairly famous within circles that are aware of the Warsaw Ghetto and its underground movements. She was part of Dr. Emanuel Ringgold Blum's underground archival project, made famous in, in Dr. Samuel Kasav's who Will Write Our History? There's also a documentary. And she was one of the two survivors of the underground Warsaw Ghetto Archives project, and she was instrumental in having it excavated. In 1946. She moved to Israel and worked for Yad Vashem for the rest of her life, where she was instrumental in creating methodology for handling testimony. And she was treated horrifically by her male colleagues at Yad Vashem. They hated her, they resented her, they did not want her voice among them. They rejected a lot of what she had to say about proper testimony management. She did research for the persecution against Adolf Eichmann, which I touch on in the epilogue of this book. She left everything she had to Yad Vashem when she died, but this institution treated her like forgive my French shit. They were awful to her. And that is really demonstrative of these post war attitude towards Jews, especially in Israel. In the years before the Eichmann trial, Holocaust survivors were not treated well in Israel. They were looked at as weak. And it was not really popular to discuss their trauma. I would argue that the Holocaust only became such a massive part of Israeli nation building after the Eichmann trials. So these women were accorded very little dignity or respect in the post war years. And some of them were okay with that. Some of them said, the war is over, it's not our place to discuss it, let's get back to life. And getting back to life in the real world meant getting back to domesticity, getting back to marriage and getting back to motherhood. And it's not a really nice, pretty answer, but it's the answer. I think.
- [59:07]
Host (possibly Khalif or Haviv)
It makes sense. It's certainly part of the answer. Maybe it's all the answer I'm just reeling from. Some of the greatest heroes in the history of the Jews are not known in an ordinary run of the mill way to the Jews. Between those two questions of gender and. And whatever the heck was happening with Israelis and Holocaust survivors, which is to say in those early years, which is somewhere between suppressed trauma and deep shame and an attempt to build a new Jew. And then Israeli society over the next 20 years goes through this enormous awakening and awakening and a processing of what happened and understanding and all of that. So between those two, it's sufficient explanation.
- [59:54]
Elizabeth R. Hyman
And yet there's actually two more things I want to tack onto that as well. Just to sort of bring this home. There's a very famous sculpture by Nathaniel Rapoport at the space of the Warsaw Ghetto. I believe there's a reproduction in Jerusalem and it depicts the ghetto fighters as biblical heroes. There's only one woman in that sculpture. She's a breastfeeding mother and her eyes are downcast. She's not making eye contact with the viewer. She's being acted upon. She's the only woman in that commemorative sculpture, which is again in the former space of the Warsaw Ghetto. And that's fine. There were terrified nursing mothers in the Warsaw ghetto in Mila 18. But they weren't the only women. And I'm sure you've read Maus by Art Spiegelman. He briefly mentions that his mother was a courier woman in Poland. But when his father Vladek speaks about his mother, he speaks about her as a very meek, shy individual. And in fact, Vladek burned all of her diaries after her suicide in the early 60s, 60s. And that sculpture by Nathaniel Rapoport, Lejon Uris Mila 18 Maus. These are some of our canonical Holocaust texts. These are some of the texts that are incredibly persuasive, informing public memory of the Holocaust. And where are the women they're portrayed as meek and frightened. Art Spiegelman had no way of knowing that if you're gonna be a courier woman in wartime Poland, you couldn't be meek and scared. You had to be strong and smart and be able to think on your feet. So, you know, this erasure, this misogynistic erasure is someone is baked into our memory. It's baked into the foundations of Holocaust commemoration.
- [61:45]
Host (possibly Khalif or Haviv)
Elizabeth Hyman, thank you so much for writing this book. Thank you for bringing back into the life light I meant it. Some of the great heroes that the Jews have ever known.
- [61:56]
Elizabeth R. Hyman
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.
- [61:58]
Host (possibly Khalif or Haviv)
Thank you for joining me.
- [61:59]
Elizabeth R. Hyman
Thank you so much for having me.