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The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos
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- [00:01]
Judy Batalion
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:05]
Alex Weiser
Welcome, everyone. My name is Alex Weiser. I'm the Director of Public Programs of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Welcome to yivo. Virtually in the absence of live public programs, we've been doing these digital public programs for the last year and change, and it's been a wonderful way to connect with an audience around the world. For those that don't know about yivo, we are an archive and a library that celebrates and explores Jewish history and Jewish culture. Our archive and Library have over 400,000 books and over 23 million documents. And researchers from around the world use our collections for their work, including for this book that you're going to hear about today. And we make the material that our collections explore available through classes, exhibitions, and public programs like this one. So we're really excited to have a talk today with Judy Batalhian about her new book, the Light of the Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler's Ghettos. We're thrilled to have Andrew Silo Carroll, the New York Jewish Week's Editor in Chief and the Senior Editor of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, here to lead this conversation with us. So without further ado, I'm going to hand it over to Andrew and thank you all for joining.
- [01:22]
Andrew Silow-Carroll
Thank you, Alex, and thank you to YIVO for this opportunity. It's a special one. Our guest, Judy Batalhon was doing research at the British Library on famed poet and resistance fighter Hannah senish back in 2007 when she came across an obscure Yiddish language anthology called Freud in the Ghettos. It told the stories of dozens of unknown young Jewish women who fought back against the Nazis. From distributing fake IDs to tossing Molotov cocktails at soldiers guarding Europe's Jewish ghettos, that book led her on a 13 year search odyssey, really into the often overlooked lives of young Jewish women who fought back in ways both small and large. The result is the Light of Days, the untold story of women resistance fighters in Hitler's ghettos. Her new book is gripping. It's monumental. It's a chronicle focusing on more than a dozen of these fighters, mostly in Nazi occupied Poland, and the courage they showed in the face of the unthinkable. Judy, it's an honor and pleasure to be talking with you. And I must say, just being able to read and share these stories feels like an act of Yizkor or remembering. So I thought we'd start by if you could explain how this story became your story and some of the resources and obstacles you encountered in researching it sure.
- [02:49]
Judy Batalion
Well, first of all, thank you for interviewing me. Thank you, Yivo, for hosting me. It's true, I've done. I feel particularly thankful because I did so much research through Yivo. It's been such an important resource for me. And thank you everyone for joining from around the world. It's so exciting. All right, now to your question that I already forgot. How did I.
- [03:13]
Andrew Silow-Carroll
No, it's a Yivo question. Tell me about. It's really about the research. You know, what did you tap and what were some of the obstacles in telling the story?
- [03:21]
Judy Batalion
So the research really, this is a history that I made out of memoirs. So I was taking personal first person accounts and sought for some people who were killed in the war. There were accounts that their friends had written about them after the war, but they were very personal. They were reminiscences, some obituaries, but mostly at some letters, some collections of letters as well. But mostly I was working with personal stories, memoirs and testimonies, oral testimonies, written testimonies. Some of these memoirs were written in the war. There is an incredible diary that I used of Gusta Davidson. She was imprisoned in Krakow in a Gestapo prison and wrote her the story, story of the Krakow resistance on toilet paper. And that was hidden in the cells. And part of it was found after the war. So some of my sources are immediate and, you know, written with such incredible intensity and intelligence and fury during the war. And some of them are testimonies that were written much later or recorded much later in these women's lives, in particular in the 1990s, the early 2000s, when they themselves started telling their story. So. Yeah. So what were the obstacles? There were many obstacles. The obstacles range from using memoir as testimony, using memoir and testimony as source material. They always say memoir is not cold data. You know, a person writes, of course, subjectively, which I wanted. I love the detail and the story, story and the personal and the psychological. That was very important to me as a writer and researcher. But often you will have, you know, on, on, on one page the event happened in November 1942, and on the next page it's December 1942. So there are a lot of inconsistencies. There are a lot of. So these factual inconsistencies. Even the same people leave testimonies at different times in their lives and tell the story completely differently. So, so there were inconsistencies in, in detail and in. And in dates often. So that's something I had to work around and then for. As I mentioned, some of these memoirs were written in the war, and they actually were written in codes, and names were left out. Sometimes names were just written as, um. You know, a last name was just a letter. People were referred to as a, b, c, Mr. X. Because this was. This was. It was underground stories being told during a war. People didn't want to give away any information. And then, on the other hand, you have testimonies left many, many years later that perhaps are colored by current concerns or the ways memories have changed over the years. So that's just some of the issues I was dealing with. I can go on, but it's.
- [06:41]
Andrew Silow-Carroll
No, no, no. That's enough obstacles for one day.
- [06:44]
Judy Batalion
Okay.
- [06:46]
Andrew Silow-Carroll
So, I mean, speaking of memoirs, a main figure in your book is Erenya Kukielka.
- [06:52]
Judy Batalion
Yes.
- [06:53]
Andrew Silow-Carroll
So she's a courier for Dror. We'll talk about the youth movements in a bit. But this is in Beijing with a remarkable story of imposture and escape. What drew you to Renia as kind of the. Almost the organizing principle for your book?
- [07:09]
Judy Batalion
Yeah, that's a great question. Rania was always the organizing principle. I doubted it later on. I was like, should I change it? But she always stayed there. And some of it was because, as you mentioned to the audience, this book my book came out of was really inspired by an accidental find, which was this Yiddish book, Freunden die Ghettos, which I found in the British Library in 2007, completely serendipitously, really. And the longest piece in that book, that book was a collection of excerpts of memoirs, obituaries, testimonies of some of these women ghetto fighters. And the longest excerpt was by this woman, actually in the book. She was just Renya Kuf. Renia K. She didn't even use a last name. And the writing was really. It was very dramatic. It was very narrative. She wrote with detail, even with wit. And it just drew me in. And when I went away from that Yiddish book to think about how I would organize a story, it was always her story that came back to me. And I think it was because it was written first of all. The story itself, which I can get into, is very dramatic and full of movement and life, and. And it was written in a very narrative, in a very narrative way. So that narrative stuck with me.
- [08:38]
Andrew Silow-Carroll
So you can, you know, whether using Renia's story as the example or any of the other figures in your book, what forms did the resistance take? And how many of your subjects actually engaged in, say, violence or sabotage, as opposed to carrying messages or forging documents?
- [08:55]
Judy Batalion
So what I tried to do is I tried to include a broad range of resistance activity that women participated in. So this ranged from organizing soup kitchens, underground schools, secret schools, running a secret printing press, secret libraries, even writing a diary all the way to shooting Nazis, blowing up German trains, flinging Molotov cocktails as guerrilla fighters in ghetto uprisings. And then many of the women that I write about took on a particular role in the war. They were called. They were known as courier girls, or in Hebrew, connectors. And these were women who left the ghettos, which at every step was at the risk of their lives. They pretended to be Christian, young Christian women. These were young Jewish women, I say. I mean in their late early 20s. They pretended to be Christian girls, Christian young women, and left the ghettos and worked as first connectors connecting the various ghettos in Poland, bringing the Jewish communities information. Jews and ghettos weren't allowed to have radios or newspapers. It was young Jewish women, many of whom were out there bringing information about, even about what was happening in the war, about the Nazi genocidal plan. They were. They were. They were bringing educational materials. They were bringing some of these underground bulletins in books. One of them talks about. She would. She would braid an underground bulletin in her hair. And that's how it was transported in and out. But then as the underground turned into more of a militia, then these women started arming the. The. The ghettos. They were often the ones out there going, like Renya, going to arms dealers, buying guns, taping them to their torsos, smuggling dynamite and ammunition and bringing that into ghettos to help. To help arm the undergrounds for their uprisings. And then they also, especially when the ghettos were raised and even earlier, many of them did rescue work as well. They helped take Jewish children and Jewish adults, too, out of ghettos and slave labor camps and find them hiding spots either in the forests or in the cities. And then they took care of them in hiding as well. Coming to check up on them, paying the hiders money, making sure. Bringing them medical help when needed, making sure their conditions were okay. So they. They. I really tried to. To include a broad range of organized resistance activity, right?
- [11:46]
Andrew Silow-Carroll
And Renia herself was imprisoned not as a Jew, but as a Christian imposter, I guess you would call it. But not to the Nazis. She was a. She was a Christian bull.
- [11:55]
Judy Batalion
Yeah. Renia and a couple of the women, Bella Chazad, also, they were caught. And they. It was this. They, of course, they were on the outside pretending to be Christian girls. And when they. Even when they were caught, the Nazis still thought they were Christian, that they worked for the Polish underground. And so they were imprisoned in political prisons. They, I mean, they were brutally tortured, but they, they were never taken to be Jewish throughout the whole war.
- [12:22]
Andrew Silow-Carroll
Yeah, amazing, amazing act of self discipline. Let's just talk a little bit about how gender. And I want to get into some. Like I said, I want to talk about the youth movements in a bit. But gender, I think, is so important both to the project and to their experience. You know, from the way the women are underestimated by or marginalized by the male resisters, by historians, in the ways it's a, it's a advantage in some ways. In other ways, of course, they faced a lot of sexual peril. So tell me how, in approaching this as, as a woman's story, what was important for you to convey and how did it shape their experience?
- [13:01]
Judy Batalion
Well, you said it very well. There was ambivalence. On the one hand, they were existing in, you know, many ways, like now, classically sexist culture. So they, and they weren't suspected. It was to their advantage. No one thought that that young, pretty girl would be carrying dynamite in her underwear. On the other hand, they were certainly exposed to sexual violence and blackmail all the time. All the time. And, and, and I mean, I think what's important to explain is that women, it was, I talked about these women as going on the outs, being on the outside, leaving the ghettos. They're pretending to be Christian girls. And the reason women did this work, it was primarily women, was because it was easier for women to do this. And partially it was easier for women to pass as was it. And partially it's because women were not circumcised, so they didn't have a physical marker of their Jewishness on their body, which for men was a real threat. If someone on the outside was suspected of being a Jew, he would be at gunpoint, told to drop his pants. So women didn't have that, but I think even more alongside that, women. In the 1930s in Poland, education was mandatory for boys and girls in many families. Jewish families, they sent their sons to Jewish schools, but they sent their daughters to Polish public school. And partially because of that, women were more acculturated. Women were slightly more assimilated in the 1930s than men. They were aware of Christianity, they had Christian friends. They were aware of their habits, their prayers, even their. I'm looking at myself on the zoom screen. Look at me like this. So this gesticulation that was considered very Jewish. So one woman writes about how she had to wear a muff when she went undercover to keep her hands together, so she would appear as a Christian Pole. And then most important, in these, in these schools, women, and they talk about this all the time in their memoirs and in their testimonies, women learned to speak Polish like a Pole, not with the creaky Yiddish accent. So even in, in, even in the underground, when, even when men went out on the outside, they often were accompanied by one of these courier girls who would do all the talking for them. She would buy the train tickets, she would, you know, show the passport, she would show the IDs, because she, her Polish could pass, whereas his might not. So again, yes. So these are all the ways in which women and, and as women, they're trained to be aware of others, aware of cues, even flirtatious. And so the. These are all the ways that their skills help them go undercover. Being a woman, they were underestimated. They were not suspected. And they have this kind of strange gender training to help them pass. And that's why they could do a lot of the work outside the ghettos. But as you say, at the same time, there were diary entries where women who were leaders of these movements were upset. They were left out of the meeting table. They weren't invited into the meeting, only the men were. And they were also at risk of. On a, on a more physical level, as you say, at risk of sexual violence all the time. There were blackmailers functioning in, in Poland who they. They often. The. The Nazis couldn't tell who was Jewish and who was a Catholic Pole, so. But some Christians could. The Polish could. They understood the nuance, as we've been saying. So they would blackmail Jews on the outside, say, no, I know you're Jewish. If you don't pay me off, I'm taking you to the Gestapo now for a reward, which they would get. And for women, this blackmail was also sexual. And I go through a few events that I'd read about where, you know, it was you. You know, if you don't come back to my apartment right now or to this hotel right now, I'm going to take you to the Gestapo.
- [17:08]
Andrew Silow-Carroll
So, so one episode. I mean, your telling of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising is really gripping. But I also think it's important that you put women in a way that I think other chroniclers of the, of the uprising have not. So how does remembering the role of women in the uprising change what we know about the event?
- [17:30]
Judy Batalion
Well, first of all, one of the leaders of the Warsaw Rising was a woman Zyvia Lubetkin, who, you know, attended every meeting. She was, she was a spiritual and military leader of the people. And she, I mean she's not been remembered, I don't think at all for her role. I'd never heard of her until I started doing research on this project. Women were. There were about 750 young Jews who fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It was a very organized uprising. I believe about 180 were women. And they were, I mean they were combat fighters alongside the men. They learned to use weapons. They tell stories of learning they had so few bullets they couldn't. They have to. When they learned to use guns, they practiced against a mud wall so they could take the bullet out and reuse it. They learned how to. Women often were using explosives, Molotov cocktails. And I think of one story this woman, Masha Futermilch, tells after the war where she was she, she was a, a fighter in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. And they, their tactic was to fight from above. And she went to the roof of the building and her hands were shaking. She was so excited and so nervous and so scared. She could barely light the match to blow up the, to light the explosive. And she does it and she flings it. And what she hears is German screaming. Ein Frau Krampft in Frau Kampf. A woman is fighting. They're shocked by this, by the, I mean the fighting, but that. It's a woman. What. So I, I mean women were, were involved in, in resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto from, from day one.
- [19:25]
Andrew Silow-Carroll
So I was. I've learned a lot about the youth movements and how integral they were. You focus on two drawer or freedom and hashome, which is the young guard. Explain for people who think of youth movements as kind of like boy scouts and girl scouts, how do they prepare members for a life of resistance? Which they did. And also, if you could talk a little bit. Someone asked, I saw in the Q and A about some of the right wing movements like Baytar and how ideology and it all comes together to create resistors when the time calls for it.
- [20:04]
Alex Weiser
Sure.
- [20:04]
Judy Batalion
So this is also for me, this was a huge part of my learning. I didn't know anything about this before starting this project. I always thought of hashem dressed summer camps not as what these people are who made the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. I did not know that. So Polish Jewry in the 1930s was largely organized by these youth movements. Jews were not allowed to join the scouts. So partially this was in response to that. But these youth movements, the 100,000 young Jews in their late teenage, early 20s were part of these youth movements. It was very widespread. And these youth movements were often affiliated with political parties or political values. So they ranged. There was religious youth movements, there was Zionist youth movements. There was religious Zionist and secular Zionists and socialist Zionists. And then there was also Bundist youth movements and Yiddishists who were believed in, in staying in Poland. They didn't believe in Eretz Israel and they also had, they were largest part. They had also a flourishing youth movement and there was a communist youth movement as well, who I also talk about a few of these characters in, in my book too. So each of these youth movements were. They were a bit like the scouts, but they were more, so they were much more intense. They were spiritual, emotional, social, intellectual training grounds. And they were value based. And the, the, so the movements that I write about are the secular socialist movements. Some Zionists, some not. But in these movements the, they were taught, I mean they were taught pride, pride in your heritage, Jewish pride. They were taught, they, they valued, they were socialists, they valued collectivism, collaboration, equality, egalitarianism. And they were also self sufficient. They were physical. They taught, you know, there was some self defense training. They taught agriculture, self sufficiency, physicality against. They did, they didn't want this myth of the kind of slothful Jew. These were physical movements as well. And they had sports camps and a lot of summer camps and pictures of them in the countryside and with hoes and rakes. So many, and many, especially in the socialist secular movements, these young Jews left their family home, and this is in the 1930s, before the war, to move into communes or kibbutzim with their youth movements. So they were kibbutzim across Poland. Again, I had not known about that in Poland. Yes. So they often, and this caused family friction because parents were like, what do you mean you're leaving to move into the woods? So these, these groups, they live together, they trusted each other. They were really, they were bought. They had very tight bonds. They also, many of them write about their interest in not just reading. They had reading groups. They're reading not just social theory and revolutionaries and their socialist and, and, and, but also psychoanalysis psychology. There was a strong focus on emotional awareness on, on discussions of what are my strengths, what are my weaknesses, how do I relate to other people. So they, these, they had these very intense bonds with each other and they knew how to collaborate, they knew how to work together, they knew they had lived together. And these were movements that were, that you Know, they had a lot of. They valued Jewish pride and they valued the pursuit of truth. And in all these factors, I think, are what led to them becoming. Really, they were primed to become underground units.
- [24:01]
Andrew Silow-Carroll
So I saw a question that's in the Q and A. I'm going back and forth for people who are listening. So one question was, and I was also surprised by it also kind of this fluidity between getting in and out of the ghettos, getting in and out of countries. So you think of kind of, I guess maybe, you know, you think of the Nazis of obviously having an iron, you know, grip on Europe, but they found their ways to get. So someone asked, how did they. How did you get in and out of a ghetto? And people should know. I don't want to be a spoiler for anybody who hasn't read the book. How many women who are able to escape went back to help. And that, that amazed me throughout the whole book. They went back into the ghetto so they could be of assistance.
- [24:45]
Judy Batalion
All right, that's like a 20 part question. So let me, let me start with the fact that when I.
- [24:51]
Andrew Silow-Carroll
How did they do it?
- [24:52]
Judy Batalion
And how did they do it? When I first came across that book, Freuden in the Ghettos, I think that's what stunned me. Called Freund in the Ghettos, Women in the Ghettos. I thought it was going to be stories of women's, you know, their difficult lives in the ghettos are horrible lives. But, but actually the whole book was about women leaving the ghettos. And I, I almost, I had to keep rereading it. I mean, at the time my Yiddish was rusty. I was like, working in the London art world. I wasn't using Yiddish. So I kept saying, maybe I didn't understand, maybe I didn't understand. But this kind of movement was so surprising to me. I too did not understand this. So I will explain a little bit about how they moved in and out of ghetto. So first of all, it's important to understand that there were over 400 ghettos in Poland. And each of these ghettos was a little bit different, having to do with local rule, with the Jewish leaders, with the local Nazi leaders and the Polish communities, and also having to do with its geography and its landscape. So some ghettos were bordered on one edge by a river, whereas some were in the middle of cities and bordered. Bordered by, you know, high thick walls. So this also made a difference in some ghettos, you know, it was easier to slip out through, you know, you know, a crack in a fence, a bit of Barbed wire was. Was open. They made holes. They would come. One story. They would come each night. One person from the movement would come and remove a. Like, one nail and then walk away. And then the next night, someone else would come and remove another nail. So that there was. Eventually they were able to just open a little part of a gate on the side of the ghetto. So one way was really through, you know, slipping in and out holes in gates that sometimes they found or had created. Sometimes they literally climbed over the walls. Sometimes there were basement or cellar connections. So they went underground. The buildings bordering the ghetto had a basement which might have had a window or something that they could go through. Sometimes they climbed over rooftops and made their way over rooftops. In some ghettos, like in the Warsaw Ghetto, the courthouse was actually bordering the Aryan side and the ghetto side. So you could. If you were performing well, you could walk into the courthouse on one side and actually walk out on the other side. There was also a market area in part of Warsaw that also bordered the inside and the outside of the ghetto. Sometimes they just paid off the guards. Some youth movements had double agents. So they had their. They had a guard on the inside working for the Jewish police who were guarding the gate. And so they would let their own comrades in and out. Very often, women got in and out of the ghettos by joining work groups. The only time Jews were allowed out of the ghettos was to do slave labor. And they would exit in a work group. So sometimes women, this was actually a pretty common way, was they would either bribe the leader of the group or just slip in with the group and exit with them and enter with them. This was obviously very difficult, too, because if you were going to enter the ghetto, you had to be there. Things. You couldn't just hang around and wait at the ghetto wall. You had to know exactly what time they were coming back and meld in with them and put your star back on. There's one story of a woman, Vitka Kempner, who couldn't find her star. She put a yellow leaf and walked in with the youth group. I mean. I mean, with the work group. So there were. There were different conditions depending on the time, the place, and the way that that ghetto works. Some ghettos had trains that went through them. People would jump off the train. So again, yes. And then, wait, this. There was another part to the question.
- [28:57]
Andrew Silow-Carroll
No, I mean, the women who went, well, I. You know, it. It answers itself. I mean. I mean, the word courage, the word commitment. But I know there are women who had an opportunity to leave. They were, you know, free of the ghetto, but they went back in because there was still work to be done in saving other Jews.
- [29:14]
Judy Batalion
They went back in and out. All the time they were out doing missions. They came back, they brought stuff back. They went back out, they brought stuff back. I mean, there were some women that had left Nazi occupied Poland from Ka Plutnicka. She was 25 when the war began. She'd already been a leader in the youth movements. Women had leadership roles in the 30s in these youth movements. I forgot to talk about that. She escaped east when war hit drawer or freedom. Told their members, go east, go east. That's actually how my grandparents survived. And she made it into what was then Belarusian territory. She would have been okay, at least for a few years, but a few weeks into it, she. She couldn't take fleeing. It wasn't. She felt so responsible for, for her people. She smuggled herself back into Nazi occupied Poland and then went on to become a leader in the Warsaw ghetto. She was known as Dimame, the mother in Yiddish.
- [30:10]
Andrew Silow-Carroll
Right. And did she survive the ghetto or no?
- [30:14]
Judy Batalion
Well, firmka. I mean, she. She ran soup kitchen, she ran cultural programs, she ran this printing press. She traveled through ghettos throughout the whole country giving lectures in ghettos to the youth movement. She would. Or they would organize seminar. I mean, all of this was illegal. She was then the first one of, the first to bring weapons into the Warsaw ghetto in a sack of potatoes. And she hid them under the potatoes. She was then stationed in this town of Beijing and she was. They actually, the movement got her fake papers and passports. They wanted her to leave. They felt she was so important. They wanted her to leave Poland and serve as a witness and, and be there to help from the outside. But she, she. She refused every time. She wouldn't leave her people. And she. I'll give it away. She was killed. She was killed shooting Nazis from a bunker in Beijing when the liquidation occurred. And in fact, after the war, she was given a medal from the Polish government. Complicated at the time for her military service, and yet I'd never heard of her.
- [31:29]
Andrew Silow-Carroll
You write early on that for all the valor and for all their acts of defiance, the Polish Jewish resistance achieved relatively, I think you call them minuscule victories. Tell me about what impact they really had. Or is that not a fair question to ask because of the obstacles and the odds against them?
- [31:52]
Judy Batalion
I think when I say that, I'm talking about in numbers, you know, I mean, they killed. I don't know. We don't know they killed a few hundred Germans, a few thousand, maybe most of them were killed. You know, it's always. Compared to 6 million Jewish lives lost is very small. The numbers are small, but I don't, I don't think it. That's what matters. In fact, they themselves thought they were going on suicide missions. Most of the time they fought about this. What is the point of resistance? Why should we starving Jews with two guns try to battle Hitler's army that the biggest armies in the world can't. Can't overcome? What are we going to do? And they, they, they, they thought about this a lot. What is the point? But for some of them, it was rescuing and whoever they could. And they did rescue people. They did rescue Jews. They did help. There were, there were. For underground organizations. I mean, 12,000 Jews in hiding in Warsaw alone were helped by these organizations, if not more. And they did help with some rescue, but also they fought for, they fought because they felt they had to fight for the future of the Jewish people, for Jewish pride, for freedom, for justice, for what they felt was right. They felt they couldn't. Not so. And, and I do think spiritually, they, They've. They've left. They've left us something very significant. Even if in num. Numbers of casualties, it. It doesn't seem large.
- [33:31]
Andrew Silow-Carroll
Do you worry that a focus on resistors somehow has almost the perverse effect of, of, you know, taking away from the, you know, the. So many millions that you said who died, that somehow the resistance story almost distorts what was really happening in the sheer helplessness of so many of the Jews in Eastern Europe who died?
- [33:53]
Judy Batalion
I mean, obviously that's not my intention. I think a lot of people get very worried about that when you write about resistance. It's like you end up blaming the victims in a way. And, you know, as I said, most of these resisters died, so they also died. They were also killed. I mean, I mean, for most of them who lived, it was luck for those who survived, just like for any, anyone. But I think what, what doing this work really opened my eyes to was how much resistance there was. I mean, most people were killed because they were up against a massive military force. But, you know, people were. Whether you call it resilience or resistance, people were engaged in defiant struggles all the time. And that's, that's a side of the story that I, I hadn't really focused on before. And I'm talking even like making jokes. You know, some people were. They told jokes during transports to relieve fear. They hug their barrack mates to keep them warm or to make them feel, feel intimacy or to feel like they existed. They, you know, wrote diaries, they wrote, they read, they wrote columns. There were so many forms of resilience.
- [35:15]
Andrew Silow-Carroll
I guess this is sort of the uncomfortable questions that I that and you address them actually in your book. So it's but like the heartbreaking story about the resisters and their relationship with the Judenrat which were set up by the Nazis to carry out their plans. Completely cynical. Making Jews do their dirty work. And then you have a number of stories where you know, the women are, are either confronting collaborators or just these, you know, these, these guards who are put in this untenable position. What was that like in some of the diaries? How did they describe their relationship ship with these, with the Judenrat?
- [35:57]
Judy Batalion
Sure. Yes. The Judenrat is always uncomfortable and it's something that I also tried to say in the book. There were 400, over 400 ghettos in Poland. There were over 400 Judenrats. Some of them had thousands of people work for their. I mean Warsaw Judenrat was a huge organization. So it's very hard to generalize. And this was a Nazi see institution purposefully to turn people against each other. And some people joined the Udenrat in order to help fellow Jews and some people had no choice. You know, everyone was making impossible choices in a, in a brutal and horrific situation. So I do try to have a level headed myself approach to this as much as I can. In these memoirs these were often, these women were not always because there were some times where they were really the Judenrat helped the resistance. I didn't In Bialystok there was a whole relationship for a while. They helped and they didn't help and they helped. So it wasn't always the case. But in most of the memoirs that I was working with they were very angry at the Utinrat, at the Jewish police. And there were instances, instances where the Jewish police were forcing the comrades to join them and they fought back against the, their Jewish police. And so we refused to do this. And there were, you know, physical brawls between them. So there, there was a lot of discord in the community which I, I also understand this was a. I mean people did not know how to deal with Nazi occupation with this completely unheard of barbaric, torturous force. So there, there was a lot of discord and discomfort around this.
- [37:48]
Andrew Silow-Carroll
And a similar question about relationships is with the Jewish resistance movements and the Polish partisans, the non Jewish partisans. It's a Very complicated story of mutual self interest, anti Semitism and a lot of distrust, I think, and some gender. Gender. Right.
- [38:08]
Judy Batalion
This is like a whole other hour. Zoom.
- [38:10]
Andrew Silow-Carroll
It's a, it's a fascinating part of your book because, because of, because of how complex it is.
- [38:16]
Judy Batalion
Well, there, there were different Polish resistances, and they fought with each other, too. And, you know, there were so many different undergrounds. Even, you know, even at Auschwitz, there were many different undergrounds. You had people coming from different countries. They each had their own undergrounds and they, they didn't always get along, even though they had the greater enemy. And a lot of the struggles that I write about, that I read about, were trying to get these different underground groups to collaborate with each other. And that was often very difficult.
- [38:52]
Andrew Silow-Carroll
The story you tell in the aftermath of the war is in some ways as, it absolutely is as fascinating as what happens during a war. Some of your subjects suffered from survivor's guilt. Some of them felt, I guess, almost insulted by the way they were treated both in Israel and maybe when they went to the United States. Give a couple examples of what happened after the war when the women were, in a sense, coming down from this intense experience they had just had over the previous four or five years.
- [39:26]
Judy Batalion
So just so, so the audience knows. The, the book is in four parts and the last part is entirely after the war. And I follow the women who did survive. And I myself was so interested and so curious to understand not just how they got out, but how did they keep on surviving, how did they live with what they had experienced, with what they had seen, with what they had done, and then continue the rest of their lives? So I was very interested in this. So, yes, because I follow different people. There are different stories, and for some of them, they, I mean, they, they did not get over the trauma of the experience and, you know, descended into really tragic. I don't want to give away the whole story, but, you know, really depressive and difficult lives. And for others, like my central character, Renia, she wrote her story of the war in 44. It was actually published in Hebrew in 45. And then she moved on, almost like writing was part of the therapy. And then she did not talk about the war for decades. For decades. She didn't talk about her experience. Experience. I, I, I sent her children information about, I mean, it really was, I, I think it was part of the coping mechanism was to, was to start fresh. And I heard that from a number of women and their families, too. They have to start fresh. These women were, because they're young in the war. They're like 22, 23 when the war is over and they, they have their, they're, I mean, they have their entire lives in front of them with no family, no home, no nationality. They're refugees, they're in new countries. They don't even speak the language. They, they really have to start over. So for some of them, it is repressing. That's part of why I think we don't, we didn't know this story for a long time.
- [41:35]
Andrew Silow-Carroll
The, and I should tell just, I don't think it gives anything away. The, the, the experiences are as diverse as the women themselves.
- [41:42]
Judy Batalion
Right.
- [41:43]
Andrew Silow-Carroll
I mean, these are individuals who take different paths and, and they have different, you know, where they land also matters and how they were, how they were. So I found that a very powerful part of the book, that there's no one story to be told. Can you talk about the help that came from the outside? And I'm thinking of the Joint Distribution Committee, and I'm thinking of some of the help they sought from the issue from which is the Jewish community at that time in Palestine. How did they make those connections and how significant was some of the outside support for resistance activities?
- [42:19]
Judy Batalion
So, you know, if you, if you go back to that Yiddish book from 1946, there's a whole reprint of letters. So, by the way, among all this brutality and chaos, a postal service service still functioned in large parts of Poland, which is.
- [42:37]
Andrew Silow-Carroll
Blew me away, Blew me away when I read that.
- [42:40]
Judy Batalion
Yeah, I know.
- [42:41]
Andrew Silow-Carroll
Crazy.
- [42:43]
Judy Batalion
So a lot of them and, and they also had telephones. They were phoning the Warsaw Ghetto. There were, there were elements I, I, I hadn't known about. So there, there is a selection of letters republished in this Yiddish book in 46 of these women pleading with the issue of the Jews in, in Palestine and with American Jews with Switzerland, and please send us help. And a great sense of disappointment that help was not really coming. Money did come from the jdc. This is a, Again, this is another zoom session because this, I, I tried to do a lot of research about money and because in the resistance there, they talk a lot about money. They have to buy guns, they're buying weapons, they're buying clothes to hide themselves or how did they get this money? They're, they're giving money to the people hiding Jews. And I was very interested in where this money came from. And one of my first questions when I went to do research in, in D.C. at the Museum in the library is like, where's the book on money and the ghettos. And. And they're like, there is no book on money in the ghetto. So I have to find my information through primary documents largely and through the jdc, which was very helpful because the joint distribution did give money. They gave. And I'm going to. It's in my book. I might get the figure on that. What was equivalent right now, I believe, to a billion dollars in aid to Jews in Europe. That's all of Europe during the war. And I understand that about 400,000 went to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. And there were different ways of money. So before 1941, money was able to cross borders, I believe. And then there was a break when money could no longer cross legally. And so it was often sent to London, where there was the Polish. One of the Polish resistances was based in London, the Home Army. They had a leadership there, and there were smugglers bringing in some money from London. But then in these memoirs, they're all fighting about the currency. And they took more off the exchange and they took off the exchange and they. And so money was smuggled in. There was also money. A lot of the money especially came from within the country. So Jews were not allowed to own money anymore. So some of them gave it to charities like the jdc, who then redistributed it within Poland.
- [45:20]
Andrew Silow-Carroll
Great, thank you. That was really. I read that figure. A billion dollars. And it was. I was. I don't know if I was surprised, but it's quite a figure to read a billion dollars. I'm going to turn to some of the questions in the Q and A. Here's when someone asked if you could tell us if any of the women were still alive when you conducted your research, and did you get a chance to meet any of them?
- [45:45]
Judy Batalion
So there were two women who were still alive. One is still alive, but she stopped meeting with people a number of years ago. And one of the women, she has since passed, but I Skyped with her about two years ago. She was 100, I believe. So it was difficult to have a nuanced conversation with her mentally. She, she. She had some difficulty, but. But I did speak with her and, you know, it was very moving for me. Her. Her last words, which are at the end of my book, are, she kept saying to me her name was Kyla Polewski. And she kept saying, you know, make sure we must live in harmony. We must. We must work together. We must build a world of peace. Pass on that message. Pass on that message. And I have to say that many of these women, I was very taken by their compassion, by. Even after all they'd been through. So many of them went into caring careers, humanitarian careers. They were even known in their families as the most compassionate, the most often liberal, the most giving. I think that's part of what helped them move on. It was actually giving to others.
- [47:13]
Andrew Silow-Carroll
Thank you. Someone else asks, did you research any of the female partisans who were part of the Bielski Group? The Bielski Group?
- [47:23]
Judy Batalion
I didn't research specifically the Bielski Group because research had been done on that group and we. I decided to focus elsewhere. But I do have a chapter on women in the Partisans in the Forests in the east, where I did research on women's experience in both Jewish partisan groups like the Bielski's, and women who joined non Jewish Russian partisan groups and themselves even in the Partisans, have to pretend not to be Jewish, even while they're fighting alongside these men in the forests for years. So I do address that.
- [47:58]
Andrew Silow-Carroll
Right. The name Emmanuel Ringle Bloom comes up a number of times in the book. And someone does ask, how does this story intersect, if at all, with the story of the Oneg Shabas archive keepers? And that was his great project to tell the story. Hide it in milk cans underneath the Warsaw Ghetto. And eventually it made its way to Yivo. I understand
- [48:22]
Judy Batalion
the. I think one of my first quotes in the whole book is from him. He writes about these women and he says, these women face death every single day. They risk their lives every single day, these young Jewish underground operatives. And you know, they will become the names that we know in our. In our people and in our nation. They are such heroes. He was writing about them in his diaries.
- [48:51]
Andrew Silow-Carroll
And they survived because of the hiding. Someone else asked famously, the Ong Chaves archive was in Milkhands. You tell amazing stories of how the diary you mentioned earlier, triangular pieces of toilet paper sewn together, copied four times or something. What are some of those stories of how word got out or sort of survive, people who did not survive the war?
- [49:19]
Judy Batalion
I mean, there's not much, you know, most things were destroyed. But if you're asking about objects, there was also a archive in Bialystok, the same as in Warsaw. They also archive their community, their experiences, even their. The Judenrat notes where you can see them, you know, actually disagreeing and shocked and not understanding how to deal with. With Nazi occupation. I'm trying to think of the. The objects. You know, there's some in Pauline Museum. I'm thinking of one that I. It's a. For these women that were rescuing Helping to rescue Jews and to take care of Jews who were in hiding. There were a lot of Jews and there were. Were. They were giving them money. So they, they mostly. There were no records of the underground. I mean, I mean, you'd be killed if anyone was found out. So most things are not recorded, but there was a lot of money. There were people moving to addresses. They had to have some kind of record keeping. So. And this is from the museum Pauline, in Warsaw. They have. They show they were on little bits of paper. They would have, you know, coded names for the hide or coded names for the Jew, coded names for the street. Even a coded amount of money. It was like not the. It was a percent of the money that they'd worked out some equation. And then this was written in these tiny strips and the women put it under their watch. So the things that survived or the artifacts are few, but the ones that exist are really fascinating.
- [50:56]
Andrew Silow-Carroll
In the Yivo archive itself, what's there that was helpful in your research? What did you find most useful?
- [51:04]
Judy Batalion
The evo archive. I mean, to be really. I mean, what was so useful for me were the librarians and the archivists, because so much of this work was me online or me in these. And here I would go somewhere that's near my apartment and have such knowledge available to me. And in the people you know, one you asked me, I'm going to swing back to your first question, which was what were some of the challenges? And some of the big challenge here was I'm doing a project in different languages. So these women have names in Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, Yiddish, nicknames, wartime aliases. They're changing their names for this marriage paper. Then they're married, then they move countries and they. And, you know, it was a. I often spent a full day trying to figure out if Astrid and Esther and Ester and A was the same person. Person I. I didn't even know. I would have to cross reference it. And one of the main areas that I write about is an area in Poland called. And I'm sure I'm going to get this wrong and someone's going to email me today and tell me. But it was, I believe it's Jia. So I would often have to find books that in their title was. Now how do you put that into a Latin, like an English search catalog? And it was only at Evo, at the center for Jewish History History that, you know, people would. They knew the tricks they were finding. People could help me find, you know, this level of detail and complication. I could Never have done it without people who were experienced in dealing with those with. With working across languages like that. It was like some combination of I's and Y's and J's and Z's.
- [52:46]
Andrew Silow-Carroll
Someone just points out that the oneg Milkhands are at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw.
- [52:52]
Judy Batalion
Yes, they're in Warsaw, but they've been scanned. So a lot of the. A lot. You can access the scans of a lot of the material in different places. The. You. The museum in D.C. and also parts of it have been translated into English and published. Parts of it published. And there's a volume in English and that. What. Which I have to buy it in Warsaw. But that was a very important resource for me, especially about money because they. In these memoirs, in these personal stories at the time, they talked a lot about money, about what things cost, about how they were going to make money, how they were going to get money. So. So yes, that. It was an amazing resource for me. The Ringlebloom Archive.
- [53:32]
Andrew Silow-Carroll
So we spoke a little bit about this before we went live, which was there. There's. You could talk about the movie option that, that I guess you're working on a screenplay about this, so ask you a little bit about that process, what that's like. But I'm really curious how you want their stories to be told in a way that they haven't been told before. What's important to say about these, you know, women resisters in popular culture and how would it change how we understand the Holocaust today?
- [54:04]
Judy Batalion
So small question, small question.
- [54:08]
Andrew Silow-Carroll
One example of a Holocaust movie that, you know, painted a very, you know, you know, superficial, you know, portrait of one of the resisters. And I'd imagine you'd want to deepen that.
- [54:20]
Judy Batalion
I mean, there are very few popular cultural representations of the Jewish resistance at all. But of the few that exist, you know, women are often the girlfriends of. And they're portrayed as, you know, the. They're there, but they're like this particular time, you know, more meek or shy. They get caught up in a resistance, but they're always, you know, very attractive and have the girlfriend and there's. They're part of the romantic, the B story, the C story. So I think what's important here is that they're the A story. They're not the girlfriends of these. You mean, these are women doing incredibly daring and courageous work against all odds, day in, day out, for months, even years at a time, until they either escape or are caught. And. And, you know, these, you know, if anything, it's. It's the message of people who had nothing. And as we said before, against every single odd went out to fight for their convictions, to fight for freedom and justice and what was right and what was fair.
- [55:32]
Andrew Silow-Carroll
And someone asks, how did you handle your own emotions during the write the research and writing of this? Living inside what could have been either a very depressing experience at the same time an inspiring experience.
- [55:47]
Judy Batalion
That's, I mean, these memoirs and testimonies are very hard to read. It's partially why it took me so long to do this book. I, I wasn't really when I first found this Yiddish source material that inspired the project. I was 30, I was single, I was living in London, I was working in the arts. I was like the last place I wanted to spend my days was, you know, Warsaw, 1943. I wasn't ready. And that's partly why this project took so long. I put it off, I worked on it in little bits. It, it, I mean, I can give you a longer answer, but I know we're wrapping up, but you know, it took me until I was really at a more stable place in my own life emotionally to be able to really sit with these memoirs day in and day out. And I actually had to do it in it. I ended up getting a workspace in a, in a, I ended up getting, I worked in a space with mostly people who worked in fashion and fitness. And it sounds silly, but I really needed that if I was going to sit there with these, you know, I had my Holocaust books and these, you know, piles and piles of horrific stories. I, I needed to spend my days in an environment with, around people who were, you know, arguing about the position of the cheese in the photo shoot and the things that were lighter and felt more, I don't know, around me just felt, felt happier. I, I, I needed to work that way.
- [57:20]
Andrew Silow-Carroll
Sure. And maybe this, this might be the last question, but what's your next project? And is it going to relate to Partisan Women or, you know, or something else?
- [57:31]
Judy Batalion
Well, that actually follows on. I mean, first of all, I'm working on the screenplay right now, so that is taking time. And I actually think that I'm going to take, I need a break from this intensity and I planning to write something a bit lighter next. But I have many ideas to come back to. As you can see there, you know, in my work there's so many books that are missing, so there's a lot of stories. I became very fascinated by the 1930s in Poland. I became very interested in many of the women I couldn't even include in this book. So. So when I'm ready, which might be a little bit of time, I, I will, I will come back. But for now, I think I'm going to work on something a bit lighter.
- [58:20]
Andrew Silow-Carroll
Okay. And last, last question, I promise. Someone asked. The red book behind you is your book. What are the blue books?
- [58:27]
Judy Batalion
Yes, the blue book is the children's version of the book. It's a young reader's edition, and it's geared at ages 10 to 14. And it is a shorter book. It has fewer characters, has fewer stories, and has less backstory and a little more explanation of Holocaust terms. But I always say it really has the same kishkes. It's the same guts of the story. So, yes, this is what you can get your children and grandchildren.
- [59:04]
Andrew Silow-Carroll
That's great. Well, Judy, I want to thank you so much for this opportunity. It was, again, it was, it was an honor in some ways to read your book. A pleasure to talk to you. I want to urge the audience to tune into other YIVO programs, which you can find on their website. And best of luck in your next project. And I look forward to the movie and hearing other people talking about these stories of really courageous women.
- [59:28]
Judy Batalion
Thank you so much for your thoughtful questions and to everyone for being here. And once again,