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Elizabeth R. Hyman, "The Girl Bandits of the Warsaw Ghetto: The True Story of Five Courageous Young Women Who Sparked an Uprising" (Harper, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:08]
B
Hello. Welcome to the New Books in History channel of the New Books Network podcast. I am your host, Ari Barbalat. Today, I'm grateful, blessed, honored, and delighted to engage in a dialogue with author Elizabeth Hyman. We will discuss her newly published book, the Choral Bandits of the Warsaw the True Story of Five Courageous Young Women who Sparked an Uprising, published in New York by Harper Collins, 2025. Elizabeth, I'm so lucky to have your time and attention today.
- [01:42]
C
Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to talk about the book.
- [01:47]
B
To begin, please tell us about yourself. Where did you grow up? What formative events in your life inspired the writer he would later become?
- [01:56]
C
Right. I grew up in the Hudson Valley region of New York, about an hour and a half north of Manhattan. My mother is a writer, so she was always looking at my school assignments, checking my essays, quietly showing me how writing should work, how it all should fit together. For a while, I wanted to be a journalist as opposed to a historian, as opposed to someone who writes books about history, who wrote. I just love the process. But how as to how I became a writer and a historian of this particular topic is that my grandmother and her parents fled from Poland in 1939. Her family had lived in Krakow for probably a millennium at least. But then September 1939 happened. Hitler invaded Poland, and her father was like, we're just gonna get in the car and drive east and get as far away from the bombing as possible. They were smuggled into Lithuania, got out, and I just sort of grew up hearing my grandmother's stories in the background. And for a very long time, I avoided anything to do with Holocaust history because I knew I wasn't really ready to go there and really look at it. So, you know, I wrote about other things and flirted with other fields of history until I started grad school. And I was just like, okay, it's time.
- [03:24]
B
What inspired you to write this book? What message do you hope to convey to readers?
- [03:29]
C
So when I was in graduate school, I took a course about Jewish women and autobiography. Basically, it's about how to apply historical methodology to Jewish women's memoirs, diaries, autobiographies, testimonies, et cetera. One of the readings we had in that class was an excerpt from the diary, right, the memoir of a woman named Vladika Mead. It's one of the main women I focus on in my book. And in this memoir, she wrote about a situation in which a group of Polish blackmailers who sort of made their income by spotting Jews in hiding or trying to pass and heading over to the Gestapo. They were spotted by a group of these people, and she and her colleague, a man named Michal, ran away. He managed to jump onto his streetcar and get away, but they caught her. However, she had nothing. So actually, let me. Let me retread. They didn't catch her. So we did this reading, and the professor asked, okay, why is it important that she's a woman? Why does it matter here? And I was stumped. I was trying to figure it out. And she said, because if the Gestapo did search her, there would be nothing on her body to demonstrate that she was Jewish. And for me, that was a big sort of brain explode moment, because if you think about it, of course, Jewish men into war, Poland would be circumcised. But I never actually put the two and two together and thought about how that might impact resistance work during the Holocaust. So I was, you know, doing brain explodes. And at that point, I. I have. I still do have a history blog where I often write about historical women, what they did. So I was like, I have got to write a blog post about this Vladika Mead. And that blog post took about five years because I kept finding more and more layers of her story. And it wasn't just her story. There were so many women who were doing the exact same work as she was smuggling weapons, trying to figure out how to import buns, climbing over the ghetto walls to check on food supplies. Now she was one of many. So, you know, finally I finished writing this 11 part blog series in time for the 75th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. I know, it was a fun blog series. I mean fun in a historian sense, not fun in a this is such a fun topic sense. So after finishing it and posting all 11 parts, I was talking to my mom and I said to her, no, I loved writing those blog posts, but I feel like I've not done. I feel like there's so much more to say that I've barely scratched the surface. And she said, maybe that's your book. And I was like, oh, damn, I think it is. And here we are.
- [06:10]
B
What was your aim in writing this book?
- [06:13]
C
So my aim was not to write for other academics. Holocaust scholars know about these women, this cohort of women who in the literature are generally known as the Kashariot. I'm just opening my own advanced copy of the book so I can read off these names. Dr. Lenora Weitzman, Judith Baumel, Atina Grossman, Sonja Hedgepath, Paula Hyman, Marian Kaplan, Vera Laska, Sybil Milton, Dahlia o', Farre, Joan Ringelheim, Carol Rittner, Rochelle Seidel, Nehima Tech, Zoe Waksman. These are all scholars of gender and the Holocaust who spent over different generations, but some of who spent their entire careers simply fighting to have the subfield of gender and the Holocaust be taken seriously. So as a public historian and independent scholar, I seek not to intervene in their work or build on their work, but to use their work and the words of these women and that knowledge to speak to the outside world beyond academia and say, hey, there were more women in the Holocaust than just Anne Frank. There are more experiences of the Holocaust than just Anne Frank. She was not the only woman who experienced the Holocaust. And I mentioned Anne Frank. Not to sort of cast her aside or roll my eyes on her at her, but she's our really only in terms of memory and Western memory. She's our real, only canonical female viewpoint into those events. Whereas we have many male canonical viewpoints of the Holocaust, the experience in hid resistance. So really with this book, I just want to communicate to world beyond Holocaust scholars that these women were actively resisting and doing things that might seem incomprehensible to an average person not living under these conditions. So if I can paraphrase all of what I just said as a Scholar, my intervention is not in the literature or historiography. It's in collective memory.
- [08:24]
B
How does your research shed new light on Jewish Polish relations in modern history?
- [08:32]
C
Similar answer. I don't think I'm necessarily saying anything new, but I am saying things that are important. Ever since the war, in contemporary Polish politics, there's this sort of ongoing back and forth tug of war about the topic of Polish complicity and Polish victimhood. And there are many, you know, Polish individuals who get very, very upset when you say that Poles were complicit in the Holocaust. They say that's not true, that Poles were equally victimized, that Jews had nothing to do with it. And I mean, I understand that sort of knee jerk reaction because the Germans did treat the Poles in a distinctively genocidal manner. However, nothing is binary. It's not as black and white as you are the good guys and you helped and you were the bad guys and you didn't. There were many Poles who cared very deeply for the Jews and did as much as they could to aid them. And there were many other Poles who had determined that the presence of Jews in Poland was antithetical to its development as a Polish nation state and wanted them out. The resistance group, the Armia Krajava. I think I pronounced that right. Polish pronunciation is still. It's a work in progress. Um, you know, they hated Hitler, they wanted Hitler out, but they also wanted the Jews out. And sometimes they would actively go after fellow Jewish resistance fighters instead of members of the Gestapo. So while I'm not sure I'm saying anything new, I hope I'm injecting nuance into how those historical issues are understood outside of the academy.
- [10:15]
B
What misconceptions about Polish Jewish relations does your study challenge? Why do these misconceptions exist and persist?
- [10:25]
C
So, just jumping off of that last answer, the misconceptions are that Polish Jewish relations were strictly binary. They were either all working together to be anti Nazis or they hated each other, when really it was both. There was cooperation, there was allyhood, there was rescue, and there was hatred and outright revictimization and murder on the part of some Polish nationalists. Many Polish nationalists, to be frank. But it's much more complex than all the Poles were heroes and didn't do anything wrong and all the Poles hated Jews and helped. You know, neither extreme is correct and we need nuance and complexity.
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B
What findings and discoveries surprised you most in your research process?
- [11:18]
C
The sheer humanity of it all. The Warsaw Ghetto and the Warsaw Ghetto uprising with at least within the Jewish Community are heavily mythologized sometimes to what I would even call hagiographic proportions. So reading these memoirs and diaries of life inside the Warsaw Ghetto, what I was, I'm gonna say no. Struck. What I was struck by was the sheer humanity of these experiences. These people had no idea that they were going through a massively dramatic historical moment. They were just living day to day and dealing with stuff like how will I go to school? How will I go to university if there's no education? I have no money to feed my kids. Should I sleep with those wealthy smugglers who have lots of money? How do I. How do I use the bathroom? Should I tell the authorities I have typhus? You know, this very human day to day minutiae that we don't necessarily associate with dramatic historical events. So for me it was just the humanity of the people and the situations they were trying to navigate.
- [12:23]
B
What does your book's title mean? Can you explain it?
- [12:26]
C
Yes. So the Guerrill Bandits of the Warsaw Ghetto. For a long time I had trouble trying to figure out a title for this book. I write for trade audiences. I don't write for other academics, but I love academic style titles. So in my head this was titled something like Banditan A Gendered History or Gendered Military History of Women's Action in the Holocaust. Something along those lines, but with more jargon about gender. But that doesn't, that's not how you reach audiences outside of academia. These audiences want to learn, but they also want to be entertained and they want to read a good, good gripping narrative. So I had to sort of push my academic proclivities to the side and think, okay, what is this book about? And this was a months long process of me just like digging around. And finally it came to me. The Girl Bandits of the Warsaw Ghetto. So within the Jewish resistance movements in Warsaw Ghetto and the ghettos of Poland, the basis of those movements were a wide variety of Jewish youth groups which had formed in the interwar period and had sort of given youth a place outside of their family, outside of the traditional authorities with which to learn and develop as political actors. So by the time they were like 16, a lot of these interwar Jewish kids were already passionately engaged in a wide variety, what I'm going to call modern Jewish politics. However, in those groups there was not, there wasn't misogyny as we would typically understand it today. There were unquestioned gender roles, but not necessarily ill treatment to go along with those gender roles. So within that context, a lot of the men in These movements would refer to their female comrades or colleagues as the girls. And yes, that's demeaning, but it wasn't done with an active misogynistic intent. But it still struck me like, the girls, the girls are doing this, the girls are doing that. When really by the point we by 1942, you're talking about female insurgents who are smuggling bombs daily. Those are the girls. And in the Nazi mind, anyone who pushed any subhuman person in their category of subhumanity, who pushed back or resisted was simply abandoned. So I was kind of thinking about girls, colleagues, bandits, criminals. And then I was like, oh, girl bandits. You know, take these two terms that were used to demean and dehumanize them and turn them into something powerful and meaningful.
- [15:08]
B
What does this book offer to intermediates? How can readers with modest background knowledge benefit from study?
- [15:17]
C
Right. So as a public historian, as a history blogger, before this book was even a thought, one of my, I don't want to say one of my passions, but one of my major concerns was taking sort of very academic, quote unquote, ivory tower concerns and language and sort of translating them for intellectually curious people who just weren't involved in academia. You know, take concepts like, oh, can the subaltern speak? And gendered spheres and stuff that's so important to historians trade and discourse and discuss them in a way that any intellectually curious person could understand and enjoy understanding. So in this book, as with all of my public writing about history, I work very hard to provide all the context anyone might need for understanding these events. Now, because I'm coming from inside the building, so to speak, I sometimes lack a full understanding of exactly how much people know. But that's where the editorial team at Harper Perennial really came in. They would say things like, what does this mean? What does this refer to? Don't assume that anyone knows this history. So in between my own sort of, I guess, quasi journalistic instincts, my public historical approaches to writing, and editorial comments, I think I did a very good job of introducing the historical context needed for each anyone to open this book and understand the what's and the whys and the who's and the where's.
- [16:56]
B
What were the most difficult aspects of your research and writing process? How did you overcome and circumvent such challenges?
- [17:05]
C
So, you know, the answer I feel like I should give is just simply that the Holocaust is incredibly harrowing and traumatic to study and learn about. But that's honestly something I overcame in graduate school. I'm past that. I say I Have an emotional callus so I can read this stuff without freaking out. Which the sort of bad part of that is that sometimes I'll be talking about my work with quote unquote, normal people and I'll drop a factoid I think is totally normal and chill, but it's actually quite traumatic and I won't realize it till after the fact. And I'm like, oh my God, that's so awkward. I feel awful. So for writing this book, the biggest challenge wasn't coping emotionally with the material, but crafting the narrative and figuring out how to make it all work and putting it together on the book scale. You always think that writing a book length piece about history might be kind of dry, but figuring out how to structure it, how to intersperse context with narrative, how to, you know, give these women their personalities and show who they are within the context of writing about history. Figuring out all of that was the most challenging but also the most fun and rewarding aspect of this book.
- [18:22]
B
Can you tell us about the Importance of Passover? 1943?
- [18:26]
C
Right. So the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began on the first night of Passover. Actually, the first night of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was also the first night of Passover in 1943. Now it's possible that was intentional. The Nazis had people who studied Jewish calendars and knew when the holidays were and intentionally planned some of their more heinous acts to take place on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year or Yom Kippur Day of Atonement. They even planned some bombings and roundups for the more obscure Jewish holidays that maybe are not even observed outside of more orthodox Jewish surroundings. So it's possible, it's very possible that was a choice, a very intentional choice on the part of the Germans. But Passover is the holiday at which Jews celebrate the Exodus, the freedom of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, their deliverance at the hands of God and Moses and Aaron and later Joshua, their journey through the sea of reeds to freedom and eventually to the southern Levant. I've also flirted with biblical history, so that's why I'd be using kind of weird terminology. So just the parallels of that sort of historical, religious memory of survival and delivery from oppression, and the experience of living and existing in the Warsaw Ghetto on the night the Jews rose up is extremely powerful. It's. This is a good question, which is why I'm sort of mulling it over like this. It's both sort of symbolic of Nazis desire to use Jewish traditions against the Jews and Jewish strength drawn from how religious practice intersects with historical memory. So when I was reading the memoirs and came upon this passage about stumbling through the attics and coming upon a secret Seder, I was like, a secret Seder taking place on the first night of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. That's just very dramatic and impactful, which is a very long way to answer that question.
- [20:44]
B
What does this book offer to specialists with advanced background knowledge? How can experts grow from engaging with your work?
- [20:52]
C
Right. You know, as I said earlier, I'm not one of those people who writes about history and then acts like I discovered the entire field that exists. I'm not intentionally trying to throw shade at people who write about history, but that attitude, that style of writing about history certainly exists. I'm not here to pretend that I invented this field or that I'm making a new dramatic finding or observation about this field, writing to increase the general public's awareness of the field and to see what I can do to put these women back and give them their rightful place in Holocaust memory. So when it comes to, you know, tenured academics who have worked exclusively on the Holocaust for most of their lives, I don't expect them to engage with this book as they might a monograph written by a colleague about, you know, gendered expression in opera in Theresienstadt. What I hope academics get from this book and communicate and how do I put this? I'm hoping academics use this book as a way to introduce college students, I'm gonna say, to the complexities of the Holocaust. One of my hopes for this book is that a professor or a graduate student or an adjunct who teaches first or second year Holocaust history or will go into their classroom, hold up my book and say, it's not a scholarly text, but it's an excellent, accessible treatment of the. One of the issues surrounding gender in the Holocaust.
- [22:33]
B
Can you say something about the books that were read during the Holocaust in the Warsaw Ghetto?
- [22:40]
C
They had underground libraries and secretly circulating books. I mean, these people read a lot among adults. There was lots of reading on the history of Napoleon's failed invasion of Russia, lots of reading about Germany's loss of World War I. But what fascinated me the most is that there is this book called the 40 Days of Musa Dagh by Franz Werfel, or Werfel, I'm not quite sure how to pronounce his last name. This is a book about Armenian resistance against the genocide in 1914 and 15. So the idea of Polish Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto reading about Armenian resistance to that genocide was just Incredibly powerful.
- [23:23]
B
That's personally my favorite novel. I love that book.
- [23:27]
C
I actually. I don't have my camera on, but I have a copy of it right here with me because I knew we were going to talk about some of the books. And I'm so excited to have the time to sit down and read it and just really think about what it must have meant to be sitting in the Warsaw Ghetto and reading this book.
- [23:42]
A
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- [24:44]
B
What kinds of choiceless choices did individuals you examine in this book face? How did they resolve these problems? Can you explain the dilemmas of situational ethics they encountered?
- [24:55]
C
So for this question, I'm going to talk about the individual known to her colleagues as Inka. Her True name was Dr. Adina Blady Schweiger, but her codename was Inka. She was a doctor, a trained pediatrician. She had almost finished medical school when the Jews were ghettoized. And she worked for hospitals in the ghetto. And she did the very best with what little equipment the doctors had to treat everyone who came in. But by the time we hit the summer of 1942, we have the Nazis marching into the Warsaw Ghetto to round up the vast majority of the population and put them on deportation trains to the Triplette death camp. So during this summer of deportations and roundups, there were starving, very sick children in the children's ward and quite a few very ill elderly people. So on the day the Nazis entered her hospital to round, to begin roundups of the patients, another doctor came up to her and said, my mother is here. She's very old, she's very sick. She does not want to deal with being put on these trains, but I do not have the wherewithal to help her. Basically, she was asking Dr. Schweiger to mercy kill her mother or euthanize her mother. And Adina said, okay. And the lady was very grateful and thanked her. And across the room was another elderly person just kind of looking at her imploringly. So she did the same for that woman. Then she went upstairs back to the children's ward, and she ran into another doctor, Dr. Ala Margolis, who was in the same cohort of women as the other women and girl bandits. And she found a very large vessel of morphine. And Dr. Margulis understood, and she went there and gave those kids lethal doses of morphine to save them from deportation and Treblinka. And that's not a conventional act of heroism. That's not what we think about when we think about heroism. But it is a choiceless choice. Do I condemn these children and elderly to a traumatic death in these overstuffed trains, in these barely functioning gas chambers, or do I put them out of their pain? Now there's another couple of moments. In 1943 and 1944, the ghetto is no more. The Kashariot, the Courier women and their colleagues are living in hiding, underground in Gentile Warsaw. As she points out, a lot of the people in their underground were young people, late teens, early 20s, and they're gonna still behave like young people regardless of the circumstances. And some women became pregnant. And in Adina's word, she felt very strongly at the Holocaust. This period of genocide and death was not a place for children. She didn't pressure anyone to get abortions, but she did say to these young women and girls who had become pregnant, like, this is not a time for having kids. This is not a time we should be bringing children into the world. And there were other complications as well. You know, lack of medical care. Being pregnant can have a really negative impact on your ability to escape notice and pass. So she. She, through the underground, found a doctor who could perform abortions and sat with him and the girls while he did the operation without any anesthesia. She was even in a position where she had to euthanize a woman who had had a psychotic break and was putting her hiding place in danger by screaming in Yiddish. So Dr. Schwieger had so many impossible choices she had to make on the spot that maybe we think about, oh, she had no choice, she had to be a prostitute, or she had no choice, she had to abandon her mother. But this is on the level where it's like she had to choose between letting these people die horrible deaths or killing them first. She had to weigh the importance of the life of one person against the lives of everyone in that hideout. So these were fairly impossible choices that she made on the regular as one of these resistors. And I found her story to be incredibly moving.
- [29:22]
B
How does your research advance our understanding of trauma?
- [29:27]
C
I find that when we're talking about the Holocaust and trauma, the best source is looking at survivors from a psychological standpoint, analyzing their behavior and their lives after the Holocaust. I don't really delve much into life after the Holocaust in this book. Not because I don't want to, just because I wanted to stay very strictly within the time period of 1939 to 1945. However, of the five women in this book, three survived. One of them never talked about her experiences really until. Until the 80s, when a colleague was like, you really should write this stuff down. One sort of became a, I'm going to say a reluctant celebrity in Israel, especially in its earlier years. She was kind of made into a symbol of Jewish resistance and valor when she sort of found it all a bit annoying and oppressive and wanted to be left alone on a kibbutz where she could just be a socialist and have chickens and live communally. And the third one dedicated her life to Holocaust education. Now, the types of survivors who dedicate their lives to education and go on speaking towards are the types of survivors that I think most people have seen or interacted with, but they were actually the exceptions to the rule. A lot of survivors felt very strongly that these things should not be talked about, especially in a way that centers the individual as far as they were concerned. The things that happened were holy, but not in a good way, and they were things that we don't talk about with the outside world. So while I can't evaluate how this book contributes to our understanding of trauma, the experiences of the three women who survive in this book allude to some of the trauma related issues survivors faced as they saw their own lived experiences become the stuff of history.
- [31:35]
B
Your book devotes a lot of attention to the Dror movement. What was it? Who comprised it? How was it organized? What kinds of activities did it engage in?
- [31:46]
C
So Dror was One of those interwar Jewish political youth groups I discussed earlier. It was a group which was founded around the ideals of Zionist socialism. So what that meant in practical terms is that the were generally working or lower middle class Polish Jewish adolescents who understood their existence as in Poland, as requiring engagement in both Zionism and communal socialist politics for them to achieve liberation. So it wasn't just go to Palestine, found a state, live there, be happy. It was live as a commune, a genuine commune run by the people, for the people, cooperatively within the state of Israel as a form of liberation from Polish anti Semitism. That's how I would characterize Dror. And there were many Polish Zionist movements, I'm sorry, Polish Zionist socialist movements like Dror. However, so many differences existed. Because if you're a socialist, what does that mean? Does that mean that you follow in the footsteps of the Soviet state? That you adhere purely to their understanding of what communism or socialism is? Do you follow a different path? What does socialism mean in the context of Judaism? So every single Zionist socialist, Polish. So many issues, so many of the groups of the Zionist socialist persuasion held to those basic tenets of living communally in Palestine, but didn't necessarily agree on how socialism should be defined and implemented.
- [33:37]
B
How does your research advance our understanding of torture?
- [33:44]
C
Torture is really one issue I made a concerted choice not to touch on, partially because even without torture, this book is traumatic enough even for people who have an understanding of the Holocaust. Also, you know, with torture, this is a really good question, which is why I'm sort of, how do I put this in the context of genocide and mass dehumanization, Torture should be assumed. So I'm not sure if I contribute to it. And I might actually contribute to it by deciding not to address it. Because torture during the Holocaust wasn't just, you know, infliction of pain to create psychological trauma. It was also gendered, and it was both gendered and instructed by Nazis. How Nazis viewed the Jews as subhuman. So another layer is that a big sort of cornerstone of Nazi propaganda is that we do not do race mixing. We do not look at Jewish women as sexual objects or beings. But that's completely false. There were brothels in almost all the death camps. And a lot of the torture women underwent was highly sexual and sexualized in nature. And those are conversations that should and do take up their own books entirely. So while there was certainly beatings and torture in prison that some of these women underwent, I decided to shy away from that entire chunk of Holocaust historiography because that's not something you can just bring up and then let it go. You know, that is a very serious, heavy topic that you need to devote huge portions of your book to if you're going to do it correctly. I think.
- [35:44]
B
What could someone who is non Jewish, far from Holocaust studies, benefit from this book? Who might open it out of curiosity, as a complete stranger?
- [36:01]
C
Without getting overly political, the current world we live in is, in a lot of ways, kind of a scary, unstable place. We have ongoing wars, we have ongoing genocide, we have mistreatment of refugees, we have ethnic cleansing, we have authoritarian quasi fascist regimes. I'm not just talking about the United States of America. I'm talking on a global level. This isn't just a story of, you know, Jews and the Holocaust, and it's just a Jewish thing. This is a story of women doing whatever they could to resist the horrible situation they were living in. And in today's world, a lot of people, half of them women, are living in horrible situations in which they have to make impossible choices and have to deal with extreme dehumanization. And I. I think this book can be a source of strength for any woman who's dealing with that.
- [37:02]
B
If you don't mind me asking.
- [37:04]
C
Yeah.
- [37:05]
B
In what ways did you grow, change, and evolve on a personal and private level through your journey through this project? In what ways were you perhaps a different person before you started it than after? How did this subject matter change the way you personally relate to the world, relate to life, relate to relationships?
- [37:33]
C
I learned that resistance, true, effective resistance, cannot be loud and showy. You can't throw yourself around. You can't get in people's faces. You can't post about how revolutionary you are on your social media. You have to be as quiet and invisible as possible. So it made me think a lot about public performances of our politics and how to behave ethically. When a human right abuse is being done right in front of your face, do you jump in the fray? Do you place your body in between the conflicting parties? Or do you make a note, observe, bear witness, and quietly pass the information along? I don't know which is the right answer, but what I've learned from this book is that the right answer is to bear witness and make sure that knowledge still lives in you so you can spread it and make sure people know what's going on. I don't know if that's the right answer. Some people would say that it's not the right answer and I should have my phone up and be recording that interaction and screaming they might be right, I'm not sure. But it did change how I think about ideas of resistance as we end.
- [38:52]
B
Our dialogue today, can you kindly tell us about where your time and attention have gone since completing this book?
- [38:59]
C
So I completed the final round of edits early 2025 early this year. It comes out in October. Since then, I've been looking for jobs. I've also been working on putting together a proposal for what I hope to be my second book.
- [39:16]
B
As we end our dialogue today, I'd like to thank you wholeheartedly for your care, erudition and eloquence throughout the course of today's conversation. I can hardly be more thankful.
- [39:28]
C
Thank you so much.
- [39:30]
B
As we end our dialogue today, I'm signing off as Ari Barbalat, your host on the new Books in History channel of the New Books Network podcast. Today I have been in dialogue with author Elizabeth Hyman. We have discussed her newly published book, the Girl Bandits of the Warsaw the True Story of Five Courageous Young Women who Sparked an Uprising, coming out on October 14th. Published in New York by Harper Collins 2025. Thank you, thank.
- [40:16]
C
You.