Julius Margolin's Memoir of the Gulag

 

I had planned to travel to the Soviet Union long before the start of World War II.
 
At the time, I was living in Łódź, Poland, and interest in the Soviet Union was considerable in that country. Indeed, interest in the communist country was different in Paris and New York from that in Poland, where people remembered 150 years of tsarist occupation and the war of 1920; moreover, the two countries had a common border and Russia had always been both a real threat and a nearby temptation. The Communist Party was illegal in Poland. There were no grounds for it in an agrarian, Catholic country with weakly developed industry and a negligible proletariat.
 
But about ten to fifteen percent of Jewish youth were under the sway of communism. God knows what communism meant to the miserable dreamers of the Polish ghetto. In the 1930s, the Pamphlets of Karl Radek and Historical Materialism of Bukharin were sold from carts on the streets of Łódź. On the day of Lenin’s death in January, the anniversary of the three “Ls,” (the three communist leaders, Lenin, Liebknecht, and Luxemburg) a red flag appeared on the telegraph wires, and Jewish youth broke the glass windows in Jewish-owned shops on Piotrkowska Street. The radical intelligentsia read aloud Broniewski’s poems about “the furnaces of Magnitogorsk.” In Warsaw theaters, Kirsanov’s Granada was recited to loud applause.
 
Tourists traveled the routes of the Soviet travel bureau Intourist to become familiar with the great country of the Revolution. Many returned after a week’s stay in Moscow with a box of Soviet chocolate and pleasant memories. A two-week tour enabled one to visit Ukraine. The resorts of the Caucasus and Central Asia were open to those who could afford a three-to four-week tour. Thus, André Gide visited Gori, Stalin’s birthplace, and Sieburg, a German journalist who traveled frequently to the Soviet Union and published his impressions from there, visited the Red Arctic. Everyone who could write conveyed his own impressions about the Soviet Union.
 
In the years of my Soviet imprisonment, I recalled that literature. It included some well-crafted reportage, full of subtle observations, wit, and brilliance. As a whole, however, all this literature was childish prattle. Neither the skeptics nor the enthusiasts had any understanding of the Soviet Union; they did not have the right to write on a subject about which they knew so little. Now the absurd and tragic disparity between this “tourist” literature and Soviet reality is evident to hundreds of thousands of people like me who wound up deep in the Soviet hinterland during the war years.
 
In addition to institutionalized tourist visits, during the years of Polish independence, there was another sort of travel about which the newspapers were silent. At all times, illegal renegades were crossing the border, people who did not want to remain in capitalist Poland and sought the promised land, “the homeland of all workers,” in search of justice and freedom. We do not know the fate of these people. Why didn’t we hear from any of them? They were not famous writers or delegates from America. When they disappeared like a stone in water, no one took an interest in them. They were insignificant people, anonymous, sawdust, attracted to the lodestone of a dream about a better world. It would have been, however, most worthwhile to question them. Their truthful and nonliterary report would have said much more than volumes of official propaganda. Many of them are living in the Soviet Union, and it is a shame that they are unable to tell us about themselves.
 
In the city of Biała-Podlaska, a Jew had a stall where he sold soda water. His children became rebels: they did not pray to God and did not want to hear about Polish kindness or distant Palestine. When the younger son grew up and became convinced that there was little hope of a revolution in Biała-Podlaska, he arranged with the peasants on the border to take him to the Soviet side. That was in 1931. I met him eleven years later in a Soviet camp, in the great and populous country of the zek [Russian abbreviation z/k for the word “convict,” zakliuchennyi], and I heard his story, which was similar to thousands of others.
 
The country of the zek does not appear on a Soviet map nor is it in any atlas. It is the sole country in the world where there are no disputes about the Soviet Union, no delusions, and no illusions.
 
Melman, the owner of his own engineering firm, lived in the city of Lublin. If his relatives are still alive, here is a report on one who disappeared without a trace. Engineer Melman was an independent and stubborn person. He could not stand the Polish regime, and he crossed the border with a group of “dissatisfied” people. They were sent directly from the border post to prison and from there to a labor camp, where I met him. At that time, after several years of incarceration, he was an unusually taciturn person, broad-shouldered, with a darkened face and gloomy mien. I think by that time he no longer had any convictions. His goal was not to die in a camp, but he did not succeed. He died of an intestinal obstruction in the spring of 1944 in the Kruglitsa corrective labor camp in the Arkhangelsk region. Someone gave him two extra meal tickets and his body, which was unaccustomed to normal food, did not hold up.
 
The year 1937 was fatal for “illegal” tourists. That was the year of the great purge in the Soviet Union. Among the millions dispatched to camps were those who had arrived from abroad to reside in the Soviet Union. It made no difference whether they had arrived legally or illegally.
 
I remember a young nurse in a camp infirmary.
 
“Why were you arrested, nurse?” “My papa came from Latvia.” “How old were you when you arrived?” “Eight.” This is not a conversation of two crazy people. In the Soviet Union, everyone understood this exchange without explanations.
 
I did not arrive in Russia via Intourist and did not cross the Polish border in the dark of night; I was a tourist of a third, special sort. I did not need to travel to Russia—it came to me. The route was a special one that we did not hear about from Intourist. I did not observe Russia from the window of the Metropol Hotel or from the window of a restaurant car on a train. I saw it through the barred window of a prison car, from inside the barbed wire of camps, and I covered hundreds of kilometers on foot when the cursing guards goaded the crowd of prisoners in stages through the forests and the impoverished kolkhozes (Soviet collective farms) of the north; I crossed the Urals twice—in a cattle car and on the third bunk of a rough train car, where the presence of foreign correspondents is not permitted; I lived in the Siberian backwoods, like everyone else went to work, and carried in my pocket the document of which Mayakovsky was so proud: a Soviet passport good for five years. [Margolin was in error: The poet Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote about a Soviet passport for travel abroad, to which ordinary Soviet citizens were not entitled. Margolin, who was not a citizen of the USSR, had only a residence permit.] I do not have this document any longer, which is why I am able to write things about the Soviet Union that our wise men did not dream of and about which people with Soviet passports do not write.

 
People who sympathize with the Soviet system assume that my itinerary was infelicitously chosen and diverted me from famous Soviet routes. I was not in the battle for Stalingrad; I did not take Berlin. Had I been there, perhaps I would have written differently? Perhaps. I did not choose my route; the Soviet regime decreed it.
 
The world knows everything about Stalingrad but nothing about the camps. Where is the truth of Russia, at the Victory Parade on Red Square or in the country of the zek, which does not exist in the atlas? Evidently, we must take these things together in their entirety and interconnection. I have no illusions; I saw underground Russia. I saw it. Let those who pin their hopes on the country of the Soviets take this “material,” too, into consideration and harmonize it with their conscience as best they can.
 
Excerpt from Journey Into the Land of the Zeks and Back by Julius Margolin. Oxford University Press. 2020.
 
Doing Time in the Dark Underbelly of Soviet Russia. By Juliius Margolin. LitHub, October 13, 2020.

We speak of memory, but memory is empty without witness. It is too much to expect that all who suffer speak. Yet without witness, memory devolves into propaganda that serves the moment. Julius Margolin asks whether the real Russia is the one that celebrates victory over Nazi Germany on Red Square, or the one that exists in the uncharted universe of concentration camps that he calls “the land of the zek.” He wrote in 1946 and 1947, right after five years of Soviet penal servitude; the question is still pertinent in the Russia of the 21st century. Margolin was himself a “zek,” a convict, who survived incarceration in the largest concentration camp system during its most murderous period.
 
We call the Soviet camps the Gulag, after the title of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s much later book, published in 1973. Had Margolin’s book been published when he wrote it, “zek” and “land of the zek” would be the terms we use now. This first complete collection of Margolin’s texts about the camps, published as a whole in English translation, arrives at a time when we know a great deal about them. When documents became available after the end of the USSR in 1991, historians sought to balance the experiences of the prisoners with those of the guards, the camp directors, the politburo, Stalin himself. We know certain things that Margolin did not: the locations of most of the camps, the numbers of registered prisoners and deaths, the names of those who persecuted them. Yet without the voices of the witnesses, even such knowledge is not enough. If memory is challenged by witness, history is enriched by it.
 
Only a very few memoirs of concentration camps, and only a scarce handful of memoirs of the Gulag, give a sense of what it was like on the inside. Margolin gives a reason: to become a zek was to lose the points of reference that would make the experience intelligible to others: “No one retains his original form. Observation is difficult because the observer himself is deformed. He, too, is abnormal.” In this sense the title of this book is perfectly chosen. Margolin recounts the five years between his deportation from Soviet-occupied Poland in 1940 and his return to postwar Poland in 1946 and then his subsequent departure for Palestine via France. It is a mark of his honesty that he records his own decline; it is a mark of his recovery that he was able to write this book. This literary and philosophical memoir is not simply an unmatched historical record; it is also a deep moral judgement. Tens of millions of people passed through the Gulag; only a few were able to write searching and reliable books about it. This one is perhaps the best.
 
Margolin was a philosopher, which made him a special witness. Born the son of a doctor in the predominantly Jewish town of Pinsk in what was then the western Russian Empire, he studied for a while in revolutionary Russia and then completed a doctorate in philosophy in Berlin. He called himself a Polish Jew and spent most of the 1930s in Poland, mainly in Łódź. In 1936 he and his family moved from Poland to Palestine. He was in Poland settling some necessary business when Germany invaded on 1 September 1939. Like about a quarter million Jews in western Poland, he fled eastward before the Germans. The Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east on 17 September. Like many of those Jews, Margolin tried to find a way out. When he failed, he returned to his parents in Pinsk, where he lived through the annexation of eastern Poland and the imposition of the Soviet system.
 
Margolin defines himself as a European and as a “man of the West.” He was forty years old when he entered his first concentration camp, old enough to have seen something of the world and to start a family, but young enough to react with flexibility. He had a strong sense of decency and normality: human rights and truth were basic concepts. He had the vocabulary and concepts of a philosopher with a strong interest in literature: he never lacked for words or concepts in an environment that beggared description. He was a native speaker of Russian, the language of the camps, but also a native speaker of Polish and Yiddish, the languages of the prisoners with whom he was sentenced.
 
As Margolin saw matters from Łódź or Pinsk in late 1939 and early 1940, the Nazis and the Soviets had together destroyed Europe. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of August 1939,and the joint German-Soviet invasion of Poland that followed, was the end of the life he thought he was leading. Poland, from which he had emigrated but for which he had sympathy, was destroyed by its powerful neighbors. In Pinsk Margolin watched as local resources, grain and meat, were directed by Soviet power to the Nazi ally, even as Germany invaded western Europe. Both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union declared that the Polish state did not exist; this created a basic problem of access to law and protection for tens of millions of people who were subject not to a conventional occupation but to annexation and colonization. In Margolin’s case, he was sentenced to five years of hard labor in a camp for having the wrong papers.
 
His choices were constrained by the joint action of Nazi and Soviet power. Jews could flee Germans, but would find themselves in territory that would become Soviet. Margolin is a keen observer of what happened in eastern Poland under Soviet rule: the deportation of elites, the subjugation of the economy, the closing of all independent organizations. Many Jews wanted to go back: “as late as spring 1940, Jews preferred the ghetto to the Soviet equality of rights.” Many Jews did in fact return. Those like Margolin who stayed were expected to take Soviet citizenship. Jews who did not were deported to special settlements in Soviet Kazakhstan and Siberia in June 1940. A few weeks after that, Margolin was sent to a camp in the Russian far north to fell trees.
 
During Margolin’s first year as a zek, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were allies. His forced labor served an economy that supplied the Wehrmacht. We might be tempted to think of this as ironic; for Margolin it was simply the end of his world: “Both sides were inhuman reflections of everything we held dear and sacred.” There was nothing surprising, for him, in “Russia’s alliance with Nazi Germany.” A Jew in Soviet confinement, he had to endure pro-Nazi propaganda: “The rare Soviet newspapers that landed in the camp were full of pro-German publicity.” The Soviet press was reprinting the speeches of Nazi dignitaries. “In line with Hitler’s successes,” Margolin recalls, “antisemitism increased in the camp.” Although he was a Polish Jew, and well aware of Polish antisemitism, no one called him a kike until he was in a Soviet camp.
 
Margolin knew Germany well but never saw a Nazi camp; he left the country in 1929, four years before Hitler came to power. The comparisons were, however, unavoidable. A young German Jew who feared Nazi terror found his nightmares realized in a Soviet camp. Jews who had been in Dachau said that Soviet servitude was worse. Margolin also noticed that young fascists with whom he was imprisoned admired the camp structure. They agreed with its basic organizing principle: the strong should survive, the weak perish.
 
Margolin and his fellow inmates were evacuated eastwards from the camp on Lake Onega when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. Some four million people were in Soviet camps when Hitler betrayed Stalin and Nazi Germany invaded its ally. In the next two years some 2.5 million more Soviet citizens were sentenced to the camps. Between 1941 and 1943, chaotic transports and drastic shortages made a camp sentence even more dangerous than before. About half a million deaths were officially registered in the camps in those years; the true figure is likely far higher.
 
Margolin survived these conditions, observed them, chronicled them, and analyzed them with unparalleled clarity and insight. In extraordinary descriptions, we learn about what he called “the fatal year 1942” when around him “zeks were falling like grass.” He and his fellow prisoners talked about which kinds of grass and which kinds of bark could be eaten. With great precision and without pathos he describes, for example, digging in a canal downstream from an outhouse looking for edible material left over from swill for pigs.
 
Margolin’s great subject was dehumanization: the reduction of zeks in their own minds to hungry beasts, and in the minds of their bosses to laboring machines. Everyone was hungry all the time. Food was rationed so that the more productive got more than the less: “The means of coercion was hunger.” A prisoner can be brought “to a bestial condition where the moment of satiety becomes the culminating point of every day, the sole stimulus of his actions.”

 
To be treated only as an instrument of labor destroyed a sense of self-worth. “Only a free person,” Margolin wrote, “knows the joy of free labor, and for him this labor is meaningful because it serves a goal that he chooses and in which he believes.” It is physically difficult to fell trees all day in a north Russian forest, as Margolin did in his first labor assignment. Yet he notices the spiritual costs as well: “The surest way to make a person ludicrous and contemptible is to force him systematically to do work that he is incapable of doing, in the company of people who are superior to him in strength and skill.” People are reduced to the quantity of labor they perform: “I myself was not worth anything. My right to life was measured by the percentage of the work norms that I fulfilled.”
 
The sheer pointlessness was an element of the suffering. Margolin labored poorly, punished for actions that he could not regard as a crime, sentenced by a state of which he was not a citizen, serving a regime he abhorred. After the war, Margolin read Jean-Paul Sartre and laughed at Sartre’s idea that alienation was something experienced by bourgeois French people. He saw Sartre’s complaint about the absence of absolute meaning in existence as a temptation to seek it in politics, in a system such as communism. As a prediction of Sartre’s politics, this was correct. Margolin actually experienced something very much like a pure alienation and wrote about it with a skill that should have been humbling to those who wrote about what they did not know.
 
Margolin is a chronicler not only of the cruelty and suffering of others but also of the disappearance of the self. In his prose the physical and institutional structure of the camp figures as a threat not just to life but to any sense of what living might mean. Throughout the book, for example, he returns to his constant difficulty in keeping clothed. These passages concern the extreme cold—and basic dignity: “The moment arrives when we no longer have anything of our own. The state dresses and undresses us as it pleases.” Poland is destroyed and Palestine is far away; he has no contact with the people who mattered to him before his sentence; “family ties are liquidated.” It pains him that his wife and son in Palestine do not know what has happened to him. The continuity of life itself is broken, the accumulation of moments, days, and memories that is the oxygen of our consciousness. Prisoners “gradually forgot about our past,” as the present became a matter of mechanical repetition and animal survival.
 
Margolin survived physically, thanks to his languages, his friendships with camp doctors, his canniness, and a good deal of luck. He almost died several times, and his gifts as a writer are perhaps most apparent in his recollections of those moments. Yet perhaps the central experience was not malady but dehumanization. He is saddest about the day when he first robbed from a fellow prisoner, the day when he first struck another man in the face. Even as Margolin gave way physically and spiritually to the system, he never lost his sense of human value. In circumstances where such behavior was understandable and even necessary for survival, he still remembers it as wrong, and as damaging to himself. The Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski said that when we choose the lesser evil we must remember that it is evil. This is a challenge in daily life; that Margolin could retain this level of ethical reflection in the camp is miraculous.

Margolin never lost his capacity to see his fellow zeks as human. He takes care to describe the particular conditions of his fellow Jews, who were the majority of his campmates at the beginning. He explains that Poles, with whom he shared a language and a country, were the group closest to Jews in the camp. Margolin befriends Ukrainians, with whom, as he recalls, Jews had an uneasy history. Ukrainians were sent to the Gulag in disproportionate numbers before, during, and after the war; in Margolin’s book they have a voice.
 
Margolin knew that he was an unusual witness. Concluding his book in 1947, at a time when the world did not know about the Gulag and did not want to learn, he writes, rather formally, that on “the basis of my five-year experience, I affirm that the Soviet government, utilizing specific territories and political conditions in its country, has created a subterranean hell, a kingdom of slaves behind barbed wire, inaccessible to world public opinion.” Margolin correctly anticipated that the very moral emptiness that he experienced would become an argument of the defenders of the Soviet regime. What he opposed was the total abandonment of ethics, the open nihilism and its attendant sadism: “Might is right; everyone lies; everyone is a scoundrel; fools must be taught a lesson.”
 
The defense of the Soviet system, before the war, during the war, after the war, and even today, was that the abandonment of humanity served some goal. What Margolin experienced as an emptiness could be seen from a distance as a stage in history. Hunger, dehumanization, and mass death in wastelands were necessary to reach a greater good. This is what Sartre, for example, believed, and similar defenses of the Gulag are mounted even now, in Russia and beyond. Margolin’s experience directly contradicts this wishful thinking: “What I saw in five years of my stay in the Soviet subterranean kingdom was an apparatus of murder and oppression acting blindly.” He turns the argument from determinism around: “The Soviet regime’s crime is not justified but, on the contrary, aggravated and accentuated if it turns out that there is no other way of reinforcing the power of those in the Kremlin than the monstrous camp system of contemporary slavery and millions of anonymous deaths.”
 
Margolin had no patience with relativism, or what we today call what-aboutism. It is no defense of Soviet mass killing to point out that the Nazis committed worse crimes. The Soviet camp system, he noted, was older, larger, and more durable than the Nazi one. It was wrong to “justify the Soviet camps by asserting that Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Treblinka were much worse.” As Margolin saw matters, the Nazis and the Soviets had together destroyed Europe in 1939. Neither side was right in the war that began in 1941,and so defending one by referring to the crimes of the other was a logical mistake. Margolin was himself physically trapped between the two systems. But human freedom, for him, was the ability to judge both on higher criteria, rather than on the terms their alliance or their clash seemed to force.
 
Margolin has a final word for those who would shrug their shoulders at the history of Soviet concentration camps in the belief that in so doing they are somehow serving progress. “The people who justify Soviet camps, who say ‘Let them sit in camps’ or ‘Perhaps this is not true’ or simply ‘What do we care?’ may consider themselves anti-fascists and wear a mask of rectitude. It is clear to me that these people are preparing a second edition of Hitler in the world.” If you lose your concern for the facts of history, you have lost your concern for humanity. If you choose evasion and propaganda, then the anti-fascists lose out to the fascists, the better evaders and the better propagandists. The act of truthfully recording human suffering, by contrast, is also the act of affirming human value. The dignity of recalling detail is also the dignity of passing judgement. As a matter of individual ethics and also as a matter of democratic pragmatism, no “trampling on human rights should remain anonymous.”
 
Witness undoes anonymity, and judgment girds an ideal. Margolin thought that democracy transcended a shallow quarrel between Right and Left. The Right was not bound to defend fascism, and the Left was not bound to defend the Soviet Union. And no one was bound to identify with Right or Left. The trap of us-and-them was dehumanizing. What humanized was an active moral concern for truth, access to the historical record, and the freedom to express what was learned. Although every democracy is flawed, as he recognized, the flaws can be seen as such. When the witness and judgment of individuals informs the discussion and choices of citizens, a democracy can be corrected and renewed.
 
Foreword  in  Journey Into the Land of the Zeks and Back: A Memoir of the Gulag by Julius Margolin.Oxford University Press, 2020.
 
A Zek Remembers Stalin’s Camps. By Timothy Snyder. Tablet, October 1, 2020.

Oxford University Press

Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back: A Memoir of the Gulag by Julius Margolin.
 
The first full English translation of a masterful Gulag memoir that preceded Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago by decades.
 
Panelists:
• Deborah Kaple, Princeton University (the author of Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir)
• Stefani Hoffman, Hebrew University (book translator) 
• Leona Toker, Hebrew University (the author of Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors)
Chair: Eli Lederhendler, Hebrew University.

 YouTube

Julius Margolin was a Polish Jew caught between the twin 1939 invasions of Poland by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. He spent the years 1940-1945 in Soviet labor camps, finally returning to his family in Palestine, in 1946. In her book Journey Into the Land of the Zeks and Back (Oxford UP, 2020), Israeli scholar Stefani Hoffman has provided the English-speaking world with its first full translation of Margolin’s story, which reiterates the importance of individual human dignity, no matter the circumstances.

 Aaron Weinacht  talks with Hoffman.

 New Books Network, November 12, 2020

Julius Margolin (1900-71), a philosopher-writer, after having barely survived five years in the Soviet gulag with other zeks (a Russian slang term from the abbreviation of the word zakliuchennyi, meaning “convict, a prison or forced labor camp inmate”), found himself stuck in Marseilles for three weeks in 1945, waiting for a ship to Palestine. He had two books by Jean-Paul Sartre with him, Nausea and Being and Nothingness.
 
Margolin’s time in the gulag profoundly influenced his experience of reading these two books. He remembers in Journey Into the Land of the Zeks and Back that Sartre’s “world was quite simply not the one in which I lived, and I resolutely refused to submit to Sartre’s ‘nonbeing.’” Later he asks, “How could [Sartre’s philosophy] help my friends whom I had left in Russia in the camp hell, and whom it would have been so easy for me to néantiser [turn into nothingness] according to Sartre’s prescription?”
 
In other words, Sartre had written of life in the West as an existential hell, but Margolin had lived in an actual hell, that of the Bolshevik concentration camp. He had left a wife and child behind in Palestine to seek work in his native Poland; unfortunately, he did so in September of 1939 and was swept up in the German invasion from the west and the subsequent Soviet invasion from the east. After attempts to get home ended in vain, he found himself on the Soviet side of Poland. Because he didn’t have a Soviet passport and the Soviets didn’t recognize his Polish one (because Poland no longer existed), he was rounded up with thousands of other Poles, a mix of Gentiles and Jews, and crammed into boxcars sent to the gulag in northwest Russia.
 
Margolin’s memoir of his five years there reminded me of Varlam Shalamov’s two books Kolyma Stories and Sketches of the Criminal World: Further Kolyma Stories, and of Solzhenitsyn’s three-volume work, The Gulag Archipelago. Margolin’s work is not as well-written as theirs: Shalamov was the equal of Hemingway, and Solzhenitsyn brings Tolstoy to mind. Yet Margolin’s lesser talent as a writer (though he is no less passionate) makes Margolin’s book more affecting, at times, as a record of the hell of the gulag.
 
But he wrote for a world that did not want to hear him. The West had been allied with the Soviet Union in the war, and many Jews in Palestine and elsewhere were still hopeful about the Soviet Union. Further, the world did not want to read more bad news. After the Allies had ripped out what Margolin calls the “thorn” in the body politic of Hitler’s concentration and extermination camps, few wanted to read of camps that were worse, in terms of population and duration, even if not dedicated to genocide.

But now we have the first English translation of the book, and in our current political climate it behooves people on both sides of the political aisle to read it. It reiterates what Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn describe: the severe malnutrition combined with absurd work quotas; the ravages of the urki, or criminals whom the camp commanders often allowed to run the camp interiors; the arbitrariness of the sentences prisoners received.

 Almost all of them (except the urki) were innocent of any offense; the Party had set quotas for how many people from each district should go to the gulag, and Russian prisoners of war were always given 10 years on principle. Margolin mentions a middle-aged man sent to the camps for three years because he had murdered his wife, and a younger man who, for sweeping a floor for German occupiers, was given 20 years.

 Where Margolin’s book differentiates itself from Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn is in the depths of one man’s experience. Shalamov shares his experience in a shattering series of stories, but one comes away with a kaleidoscopic view of the Far East gulag. Solzhenitsyn tells the epic story of the gulag as a whole: his personal story, but also the historical and political development of what he calls “our sewage disposal system.” Shalamov spent 17 years in the gulag, Solzhenitsyn 10; Margolin, there for five years, wrote a more concentrated and distilled work.

 Trained as a philosopher, he also makes occasional philosophical and psychological asides. In fact, he wrote several philosophical works in the camps, but they were destroyed by guards. In Chapter 32, “The Doctrine of Hate,” Margolin tells of how he wrote it and gives a précis of what he wrote. “That man,” Margolin writes, meaning Stalin, “hates, which means that some kind of inner weakness develops into hate, the result of some organic problem. Some kind of lack, defect, or unhappiness may remain within the bounds of his sense of self, but it may also spread to his social milieu and be transmitted to other people.”

 Hitler, Margolin says, must have felt himself to be “deeply hurt.” “Had he wanted the truth, he would have found a real cause, but the truth was too much for him to bear. He therefore began to search for external guilty parties.” He goes on to explain:

 “All haters are great unmaskers. Instead of a mask, however, they tear off live skin, the true nature, and they replace reality with a creation of their inflamed fantasy. Hatred starts with an imaginary unmasking and ends with real flaying, not in theory but in practice…. It is sufficient to compare the tirades of Mein Kampf with Lenin’s passionate polemics and his thunderous charges against capitalism to sense their psychological affinity. It is the language of hate, not of objective research.”

 We hope, Margolin concludes, to assuage our own suffering with our hate, and restore “mental equilibrium.” But this possibility is imaginary, and the result is “eternal mental anguish.”

 Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism that “dwelling on the horrors” of the concentration camps, although not helpful in forming political programs, can help us determine if a political movement is prone to totalitarianism. Concentration camps sprang up as soon as both Lenin and Hitler came to power. Their present-day prototypes in the West are warnings.

 The left, when it strives for utopia, comes up with communism; the right with fascism. Both ultimately produce concentration camps where, as Arendt said, people are “superfluous.” Hell can be other people, as Sartre said, but as Margolin describes in his latter chapters, lovers know their temporary heaven. It is the ultimate irony that the two movements of the 20th century that tried to create heaven on earth—one of a future workers’ paradise, the other of a nostalgic hearkening back to a glorious nationalist past—ended up creating instead the hells of the concentration camps.

 Review: Never forget the suffering and injustice of the gulag. By Franklin Freeman.  America : The Jesuit Revue, April 22, 2021.

 

 

‘It was a gray mass of people in rags, lying motionless with bloodless, pale faces, cropped hair, with a shifty, gloomy look.’ Julius Margolin’s first encounter with Soviet prisoners takes place in August 1940 on the way to a labour camp in the north of Russia. Four years later, waiting at another transit point, he sees ‘semi-cripples, former, present and future invalids’, ‘bony shadows with hands and feet like sticks, in smelly tatters and dirty rags’. He has another year of horror ahead.
 
A Polish Jew stranded in the USSR at the beginning of the second world war, Margolin refused to take Soviet citizenship and as a result was sentenced to five years of forced labour. There followed a succession of prison camps with their inhumane conditions, everyday brutality, hunger and diseases. Margolin’s account of those years, first published in 1947, is as clear and detailed as it is chilling, his analysis of human behaviour under terror not blurred by what he had to live through.
 
‘I immediately ceased to be a human being,’ he says of his arrest. His abiding memory is of man being reduced ‘to a bestial condition, where the moment of satiety becomes the culminating point of every day, the sole stimulus of his actions’. That Margolin managed to survive, both physically and mentally, was partly down to luck — at one point a doctor gave him three months to live — and partly to his ability to adapt. For many inmates, however, hardship was but the first step to total dehumanisation, a loss of dignity more irreversible than physical demise. Deprivation paralysed their spirit, making them want ‘to fade into the common mass, to be as obedient as possible, an industrious instrument of another’s will’.
 
‘Every day the food ration is ready,’ former peasants say of their life in the camp. ‘At liberty I did not live better.’ Such testimonies demonstrate how far from reality the radiant future promised by the Soviets is for the majority of the population; but also, even more importantly, how little it takes for human beings to forget what makes them human, to stop noticing ‘the abnormality of the abnormal’. This motif runs through the book: ‘In camp, they say the words: man, culture, home, work, radio, dinner, cutlet, but not one of these words means what it normally signifies in freedom.’ In that, the camp is a replica of totalitarian society as a whole, one in which language has degenerated into empty propaganda.
 
When the war broke out, the choice for many of the Jews trapped in occupied territories was between a Nazi ghetto and a Soviet camp. Inevitable comparisons between the two lead Margolin to conclude that it is wrong to defend the Gulag as an antidote to Auschwitz. ‘The people who justify Soviet camps,’ he writes, ‘are preparing a second edition of Hitler in the world.’ The historian Timothy Snyder reiterates this view in his foreword, quoting the Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski, who said that ‘when we choose the lesser evil we must remember that it is evil’.
 
Margolin repeatedly turns to the West’s perception of the Soviet system, talking of ‘imagined communism’ and other illusions entertained by sympathisers of the USSR, labelling reports from enthusiastic visitors to the country as ‘childish prattle’. When Journey first appeared, the crimes of the Stalinist regime were relatively little known in the wider world; by now they have receded far enough into the past to be seen by some as a historical aberration. And yet totalitarianism remains a threat to this day. That is why documents like this book must be read and remembered.
 
The brutality of the Gulag was totally dehumanising. By  Anna Aslanyan. The Spectator, December 12, 2020.
 

People in the gas chambers knew, when they were dying, that the world had risen up against their executioners. People in the (Soviet) camps, however, did not have even this consolation.
 
These stark, shocking words were written by Julius Margolin over 70 years ago in Tel Aviv after a forced sojourn of five years in a camp in the Gulag Archipelago.
 
His account as “an accursed zek (prisoner)” and the daily struggle to survive in the permafrost is now being published for the first time in English this month.
 
Margolin’s memoir, Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back, was not only one of the earliest accounts of the incarceration of millions by Stalin’s regime, but one which significantly also mentioned the suffering of Jews in the Gulag.
 
Born in Pinsk, Margolin was a follower of Jabotinsky and a writer on Zionism. He was the archetypal Polish Jewish intellectual who spoke many languages and completed his PhD in Germany.
 
In 1936, he emigrated to Palestine with his wife and son, but had to borrow £1,000 to qualify for a visa. In order to pay off this debt, he returned to Poland to manage a textile factory in Łódz. He was due to return to Tel Aviv on 3 September 1939 — the very day that war broke out between Nazi Germany and this country.
 
Two days before, Hitler had invaded Poland from the West. Two weeks afterwards, Stalin invaded Poland from the East. Poland ceased to exist — the outcome of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the friendship treaty between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia.
 
A desperate Margolin tried to cross the border into Romania, but discovered that Jews were barred from entry. He returned to his aged mother’s home in Pinsk, which became a centre for gatherings of the Jewish intelligentsia.
 
In many towns, the entry of the Red Army was welcomed by the Jews as salvation from official discrimination. In Pinsk, Jewish youth demonstrated in the streets — carrying portraits of Pushkin and Stalin. Reality soon began to overwhelm such enthusiasm.
 
The NKVD (forerunner of the KGB) began the Sovietisation of Pinsk with the closure of newspapers, libraries and bookshops. The Jewish school of 700 pupils was closed down. The works of the Hebrew poets, Bialik and Tchernikovsky, were declared illegal. Yiddish replaced Hebrew as the language of educational instruction.
 
The phoney war ended with the invasion of Norway, the fall of France and the Battle of Britain in 1940. In Soviet-occupied Poland, Zionists and Bundists were arrested and deported in increasing numbers. It is estimated that between the outbreak of war in September 1939 and Hitler’s invasion of the USSR in June 1941, more than a quarter of a million people were arrested by the NKVD in eastern Poland. As Margolin comments: “They were doomed to fall into the meat grinder and to be reworked into a formless glob in the Soviet kitchen.’
 
Margolin regarded the Soviet Union as being in neither Europe nor Asia, but more a hybrid where arbitrary commands by indifferent apparatchiks could mean the difference between life and death.
 
Some Polish Jewish refugees could not cope with this environment and actually crossed back into Nazi-occupied Poland — much to the astonishment of the Germans. As one returnee put it: “With the Germans, there is the threat of physical death, but here it is moral death. With the Germans, you don’t have to lie or conceal your thoughts.”
 
Polish Jews were prevailed upon to take Soviet citizenship. Margolin refused because he knew that if he did so he would never be able to return to Tel Aviv. Margolin placed his hopes in receiving a visa for Palestine. He suspected that the British in Tel Aviv were blocking entry as a matter of policy.
 
Although he did eventually receive a visa extension because he possessed a permanent residence certificate, the NKVD still arrested him for violating passport regulations. His Polish passport was one of a country that now no longer existed. His documents were not recognised and instead he was imprisoned for many weeks, awaiting deportation.

 
All the prison inmates were covered in armies of lice. Margolin remarks: “Lice of all sizes and colours swarmed on the undershirts: chestnut, brown, black and transparent white lice, brunettes and blondes and powerful pregnant lice.”
 
Within weeks, he was one of 700 people, aboard “the Wandering Coffin”, a train pulling bolted boxcars to the Gulag.
 
In the camps, only the strong survived. In Margolin’s camp, the work of tree felling began at 5 am, at -30°C during the harsh winters. Margolin describes the bewilderment of Galician Chasidim from Złoczów and the proud aristocratic wives of Polish officers on arrival. The descent into “Dante’s Hell” included both Silesian coalminers and Jewish writers from Vienna. The “urki”, Russian camp criminals, preyed on the newcomers and stole their possessions with total impunity. Women who fell pregnant had their babies taken away after birth.
 
Everyone had to work. Fundamentalist Christians, “the little christs”, refused to work on a Sunday — and were shot.
 
There were four levels of food supplied. Those who did not fulfil the work norms were given 500g of bread and “a thin soup” in the morning and evening.
 
The bread ration rose to 700g for those who fulfilled the norm. The third level was those who passed the norm by 125 per cent and the top level those who surpassed it by 150 per cent. They received macaroni and peas — and “a goulash” of rotten horsemeat.
 
The prisoners of the first two levels simply did not survive through lack of food. The zeks were reduced to “hungry beasts” — labouring machines for their masters.
 
Margolin survived years in the camp because he was able to avoid the rigour of inhuman labour. His proficiency in language, friendship with doctors and plain luck saw him through. He was able to occasionally read books in the camp and regarded his sole weapon as “the power of the word”. Yet other prisoners now called him ‘Grandpa’ instead of ‘Dad’ as his hair had turned white — he was still in his forties.
 
Margolin writes that antisemitism was widespread and that all intellectuals were regarded as ‘Jews’. Religious Jews, he observed, possessed “great moral strength and fortitude” and yeshiva students seemed to fare much better than former members of the Komsomol (Young Communists).
 
News filtered into the camp sporadically. When Rudolf Hess flew to Scotland, the zeks believed that this was an attempt to forge a pact with Britain in which both countries would turn against the USSR.
 
After several false starts, Margolin was finally released from the camp into a year’s internal exile. His aim was to return to Poland and then travel home to his wife in Tel Aviv who had no idea of what had happened to him.
 
In Poland he came across starving German prisoners. “While remembering that my tortured mother lay in a mass grave in Pinsk, with a feeling of fastidious horror, I gave them bread.”
 
When Margolin had completed this book, he found it extremely difficult to find a publisher. No one wished to criticise the Soviet Union whose armed forces had helped to defeat Hitler. The imagery of the victory parade in Red Square was preferable to the knowledge of the parallel world of the Gulag. No European Communist wished to believe this “fake news” about the beloved Soviet motherland. Margolin regarded his book in the same light as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin — it was a clarion call to condemn slavery and slave owners.
 
Margolin died a few weeks after the first show trial of Soviet Jews in Leningrad exactly 50 years ago this month. He lived long enough to bear witness therefore to the genesis of the great emigration movement which eventually brought one million Jews to the state of Israel.
 
The publication of his book finally in English brings his remarkable story to a new generation.
 
 
A journey to the Gulag and back: one survivor's account of Stalin's slave camps. By Colin Shindler. The Jewish Chronicle , December 4, 2020. 

If a writer’s message is unwelcome, it may not be heeded for many years. January 21 marks the 40th anniversary of the death of the Polish Jewish author Yuli Borisovich Margolin at age 70. Margolin — whose first name is also transliterated as Julius or Yuly, and was also known as Yehudah in Israel — should be as familiar a name as Solzhenitsyn for bearing witness to the Soviet gulag system. Yet the first-ever complete edition of Margolin’s almost 800-page-long gulag memoir in any language only appeared last November from the small Paris literary press Les éditions Le Bruit du temps.
 
“Voyage au pays des Ze-Ka” (“Trip to the Land of Ze-kas”), now edited and translated by Luba Jurgenson — a Moscow-born Sorbonne professor who specializes in modern Russian history — was written in 1946 but neglected for decades. In France, an abridged edition of Margolin’s book appeared in 1949, under the title “La Condition Inhumaine” (“Inhuman Condition”), a title which parodied that of André Malraux’s naïve prewar Marxist novel, “La Condition Humaine” (“Man’s Fate”). This was followed by another abridged Russian-language version, which appeared from a New York publishing house, since it was impossible to print it in Stalinist Russia. An unsparing, often furious narrative, Margolin’s work was out of sync with widespread Western European admiration for the USSR.
 
Born in Pinsk, Margolin earned a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Berlin in 1929, but became a resident of Palestine in 1937, after meeting Ze’ev Jabotinsky and other leading Zionists. Unfortunately, Margolin decided to visit his homeland in 1939, just before war broke out. He was arrested in Pinsk in 1940 and imprisoned by the Soviet secret police as a “Ze-Ka” (or Z/K). The term is a Russian-language abbreviation for zakliuchyonnyi, or “inmate,” a term which originally referred to prison laborers who built the White Sea Canal in the early 1930s. Unlike 8,000 of the slave laborers who died in that earlier project, Margolin survived his imprisonment in several gulags. He returned to Palestine in 1946, where he wrote his memoir in Russian, finally finishing the book in 1947.
 
 
However, Israeli publishers and politicians did not want to hear about the gulag system in the USSR, which was seen as a wartime ally against Hitler. In February 1946, Margolin wrote letters to such leading Israeli politicians as Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Moshe Sharett and Yosef Sprinzak, informing them of the situation of Soviet Jews imprisoned in the gulags; none of these leaders replied. Nor did English-language publishers take any interest, despite the advocacy of Arthur Koestler. (Jurgenson notes that Koestler “tried in vain to interest influential English-language personalities to get the book published.”)
 
Margolin’s book caused some stir in Europe, mostly in conservative circles. Excerpts were serialized in the right-wing newspaper Le Figaro, and these were accentuated when the French political activist and Buchenwald survivor David Rousset called for a commission composed of former Nazi concentration camp inmates to inspect the USSR’s slave labor camps. Pierre Daix, a hard-line Marxist art historian, friend of Picasso and survivor of the Mauthausen concentration camp, refused to believe Rousset, calling him a “counterfeiter.” Rousset sued for libel, and in 1951, Margolin traveled to Paris to testify on his behalf, since Rousset had based many of his arguments on “La Condition Inhumaine.” Margolin informed the tribunal:
 
 
“I am a Jew. In the streets of Tel Aviv, Mr. Daix’s article is sold as a pamphlet entitled ‘Why did David Rousset invent Soviet camps?’… Neither Mr. Rousset nor myself invented these camps. In these camps, my hair turned white. Who will claim that Mr. Rousset invented my white hair? Let me personalize the words of a great Polish poet [Adam Mickiewicz]: ‘My name is Million, for I love and suffer for millions of people.”
 

With Margolin’s support, Rousset won his case against Daix, who is still thriving in Paris today at age 88. When a lawyer asked Margolin how he dared attack Stalin, that staunch enemy of Hitler, Margolin replied: “Hitler shed enough Jewish blood, so there is no need to attribute Stalin’s victims to him as well.” Yet Margolin’s memoir is more than merely accurate in a legal sense. It’s an uncompromising work with a gimlet eye for literary detail. Even when describing the most harrowing oppression, Margolin often pauses for a pen portrait of a friend, as if realizing that his verbal description may be all that will remain of someone otherwise lost in the war and subsequent Soviet oppression.
 
One such victim was his friend, the Polish Jewish poet Mieczysław Braun (born Bronsztejn; 1902-1942), who, despite having suffered combat wounds in 1920 defending Warsaw against Bolshevik invaders, was by 1939 shunned as a Jew by fellow Poles. Margolin notes that Braun had to “cross the challenging path from socialist assimilation to Zionism.” In 1939, Braun wrote a poem about secret immigration to Palestine, situating among the youngsters fleeing anti-Semitic Poland on a hazardous ship the anachronistically caped figure of poet Heinrich Heine, also “returning home.”
 
Not just Heine, but also Dostoyevsky is invoked after Margolin’s arrest and deportation to a series of gulags. Among the scant reading materials available in Siberia was Dostoyevsky’s novel “The House of the Dead,” which provided unexpected comic relief for Margolin and his fellow prisoners. In his 19th century Siberian prison camp, Dostoyevsky employed his own personal servant to cook for him, keep his samovar warm and go to the market for his favorite delicacies. Margolin recounts: “‘That’s a penal colony for you!’ we guffawed. ‘They went shopping!’” More seriously, Margolin notes that since Dostoyevsky’s time, the Soviet camps’ “school of depersonalization” was marked by “contempt for humanity which far exceeded anything in the Tsarist penal colonies… Instead of thousands, as in Dostoyevsky’s time, the prisoners now numbered in the millions.”
 
Writings by another Soviet-approved author, John Steinbeck, were also represented in the gulag library. Even the benighted Joad family in Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” victims of the Great Depression, had it comparatively easy, Margolin argues: “[The Joads] were free to travel across the country, to protest, to struggle. Steinbeck’s pen advocated for them, whereas our mouths were gagged. Had Steinbeck lived for a time in our camp, he would have reacted less violently to the American mess.”
 
Ever the philosophy student, Margolin also reflects on what he terms the “paradox of hatred,” seen in the “anti-Semitism of those maniacs who are incapable of doing without Jews.” Margolin cites the example of the rabidly anti-Semitic Polish author Adolf Nowaczynski, who wrote a 1921 novel, “The Anonymous Power,” about Jewish bankers ruling the earth and whose mania is well described in Aleksander Hertz’s 1988 “The Jews in Polish Culture,” from Northwestern University Press. Margolin writes: “[Nowaczynski’s] life would have been quite empty without the Jews; if they had not existed, he would have had to invent them.”
 
Such reflections, born of bitter experience, are found throughout Margolin’s massively impressive account, which on its merits should have been translated into English decades ago. Preceding even Gustaw Herling’s compelling 1951 gulag memoir, “A World Apart: Imprisonment in a Soviet Labor Camp During World War II,” Margolin’s text substantially foreshadows Solzhenitsyn’s works, written in the 1960s, and also offers a unique Jewish perspective on this tragic chapter of modern history. Margolin spent the remaining years of his life as a militant for the rights of Soviet Jews and lived long enough to see more recent gulag inmates finally reach Israel, emerging from the inhuman prisons he had so unforgettably described.
 
Forgotten Witness to the Gulag.    By Benjamin Ivry. Forward , December 28, 2010

Jewish Women Resistance Fighters in Nazi-Occupied Poland

 

The British Library reading room smelled like old pages. I stared at the stack of women’s history books I had ordered—not too many, I reassured myself, not too overwhelming. The one on the bottom was the most unusual: hard-backed and bound in a worn, blue fabric, with yellowing, deckled edges. I opened it first and found virtually two hundred sheets of tiny script—in Yiddish. It was a language I knew but hadn’t used in more than fifteen years. I nearly returned it to the stacks unread. But some urge pushed me to read on, so, I glanced at a few pages. And then a few more. I’d expected to find dull, hagiographic mourning and vague, Talmudic discussions of female strength and valor. But instead—women, sabotage, rifles, disguise, dynamite. I’d discovered a thriller.
 
Could this be true?
 
I was stunned.
 
I had been searching for strong Jewish women.
 
In my twenties, in the early 2000s, I lived in London, working as an art historian by day and a comedian by night. In both spheres, my Jewish identity became an issue. Underhanded, jokey remarks about my semitic appearance and mannerisms were common from academics, gallerists, audiences, fellow performers, and producers alike. Gradually, I began to understand that it was jarring to the Brits that I wore my Jewishness so openly, so casually. I grew up in a tight-knit Jewish community in Canada and then attended college in the northeast United States. In neither place was my background unusual; I didn’t have separate private and public personas. But in England, to be so “out” with my otherness, well, this seemed brash and caused discomfort. Shocked once I figured this out, I felt paralyzed by self-consciousness. I was not sure how to handle it: Ignore? Joke back? Be cautious? Overreact? Underreact? Go undercover and assume a dual identity? Flee?
 
I turned to art and research to help resolve this question and penned a performance piece about Jewish female identity and the emotional legacy of trauma as it passed over generations. My role model for Jewish female bravado was Hannah Senesh, one of the few female resisters in World War II not lost to history. As a child, I attended a secular Jewish school—its philosophies rooted in Polish Jewish movements—where we studied Hebrew poetry and Yiddish novels. In my fifth-grade Yiddish class, we read about Hannah and how, as a twenty-two-year-old in Palestine, she joined the British paratroopers fighting the Nazis and returned to Europe to help the resistance. She didn’t succeed at her mission but did succeed in inspiring courage. At her execution, she refused a blindfold, insisting on staring at the bullet straight on. Hannah faced the truth, lived and died for her convictions, and took pride in openly being just who she was.

 
That spring of 2007, I was at London’s British Library, looking for information on Senesh, seeking nuanced discussions about her character. It turned out there weren’t many books about her, so I ordered any that mentioned her name. One of them happened to be in Yiddish. I almost put it back.
 
Instead, I picked up Freuen in di Ghettos (Women in the Ghettos), published in New York in 1946, and flipped through the pages. In this 185-page anthology, Hannah was mentioned only in the last chapter. Before that, 170 pages were filled with stories of other women—dozens of unknown young Jews who fought in the resistance against the Nazis, mainly from inside the Polish ghettos. These “ghetto girls” paid off Gestapo guards, hid revolvers in loaves of bread, and helped build systems of underground bunkers. They flirted with Nazis, bought them off with wine, whiskey, and pastry, and, with stealth, shot and killed them. They carried out espionage missions for Moscow, distributed fake IDs and underground flyers, and were bearers of the truth about what was happening to the Jews. They helped the sick and taught the children; they bombed German train lines and blew up Vilna’s electric supply. They dressed up as non-Jews, worked as maids on the Aryan side of town, and helped Jews escape the ghettos through canals and chimneys, by digging holes in walls and crawling across rooftops. They bribed executioners, wrote underground radio bulletins, upheld group morale, negotiated with Polish landowners, tricked the Gestapo into carrying their luggage filled with weapons, initiated a group of anti-Nazi Nazis, and, of course, took care of most of the underground’s admin.
 
Despite years of Jewish education, I’d never read accounts like these, astonishing in their details of the quotidian and extraordinary work of woman’s combat. I had no idea how many Jewish women were involved in the resistance effort, nor to what degree.
 
These writings didn’t just amaze me, they touched me personally, upending my understanding of my own history. I come from a family of Polish Jewish Holocaust survivors. My bubbe Zelda (namesake to my eldest daughter) did not fight in the resistance; her successful but tragic escape story shaped my understanding of survival. She—who did not look Jewish, with her high cheekbones and pinched nose—fled occupied Warsaw, swam across rivers, hid in a convent, flirted with a Nazi who turned a blind eye, and was transported in a truck carrying oranges eastward, finally stealing across the Russian border, where her life was saved, ironically, by being forced into Siberian work camps. My bubbe was strong as an ox, but she’d lost her parents and three of her four sisters, all of whom had remained in Warsaw. She’d relay this dreadful story to me every single afternoon as she babysat me after school, tears and fury in her eyes. My Montreal Jewish community was composed largely of Holocaust survivor families; both my family and neighbors’ families were full of similar stories of pain and suffering. My genes were stamped—even altered, as neuroscientists now suggest—by trauma. I grew up in an aura of victimization and fear.
 
But here, in Freuen in di Ghettos, was a different version of the women-in-war story. I was jolted by these tales of agency. These were women who acted with ferocity and fortitude—even violently—smuggling, gathering intelligence, committing sabotage, and engaging in combat; they were proud of their fire. The writers were not asking for pity but were celebrating active valor and intrepidness. Women, often starving and tortured, were brave and brazen. Several of them had the chance to escape yet did not; some even chose to return and battle. My bubbe was my hero, but what if she’d decided to risk her life by staying and fighting? I was haunted by the question: What would I do in a similar situation? Fight or flight?
 
At first, I imagined that the several dozen resistance operatives mentioned in Freuen comprised the total amount. But as soon as I touched on the topic, extraordinary tales of female fighters crawled out from every corner: archives, catalogues, strangers who emailed me their family stories. I found dozens of women’s memoirs published by small presses, and hundreds of testimonies in Polish, Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, German, French, Dutch, Danish, Greek, Italian, and English, from the 1940s to today.

 
Holocaust scholars have debated what “counts” as an act of Jewish resistance. Many take it at its most broad definition: any action that affirmed the humanity of a Jew; any solitary or collaborative deed that even unintentionally defied Nazi policy or ideology, including simply staying alive. Others feel that too general a definition diminishes those who risked their lives to actively defy a regime, and that there is a distinction between resistance and resilience.
 
The rebellious acts that I discovered among Jewish women in Poland, my country of focus, spanned the gamut, from those involving complex planning and elaborate forethought, like setting off large quantities of TNT, to those that were spontaneous and simple, even slapstick-like, involving costumes, dress-up, biting and scratching, wiggling out of Nazis’ arms. For many, the goal was to rescue Jews; for others, to die with and leave a legacy of dignity. Freuen highlights the activity of female “ghetto fighters”: underground operatives who emerged from the Jewish youth group movements and worked in the ghettos. These young women were combatants, editors of underground bulletins, and social activists. In particular, women made up the vast majority of “couriers,” a specific role at the heart of operations. They disguised themselves as non-Jews and traveled between locked ghettos and towns, smuggling people, cash, documents, information, and weapons, many of which they had obtained themselves.
 
In addition to ghetto fighters, Jewish women fled to the forests and enlisted in partisan units, carrying out sabotage and intelligence missions. Some acts of resistance occurred as “unorganized” one-offs. Several Polish Jewish women joined foreign resistance units, while others worked with the Polish underground. Women established rescue networks to help fellow Jews hide or escape. Finally, they resisted morally, spiritually, and culturally by concealing their identities, distributing Jewish books, telling jokes during transports to relieve fear, hugging barrack-mates to keep them warm, and setting up soup kitchens for orphans. At times this last activity was organized, public, and illegal; at others, it was personal and intimate.
 
Months into my research, I was faced with a writer’s treasure and challenge: I had collected more incredible resistance stories than I ever could have imagined. How would I possibly narrow it down and select my main characters?
 
Ultimately, I decided to follow my inspiration, Freuen, with its focus on female ghetto fighters from the youth movements Freedom (Dror) and The Young Guard (Hashomer Hatzair). Freuen’s centerpiece and longest contribution was written by a female courier who signed her name “Renia K.” I was intimately drawn to Renia—not for being the most well-known, militant, or charismatic leader, but for the opposite reason. Renia was neither an idealist nor a revolutionary but a savvy, middle-class girl who happened to find herself in a sudden and unrelenting nightmare. She rose to the occasion, fueled by an inner sense of justice and by anger. I was enthralled by her formidable tales of stealing across borders and smuggling grenades, and by the detailed descriptions of her undercover missions. At age twenty, Renia recorded her experience of the preceding five years with even-keeled and reflective prose, vivid with quick characterizations, frank impressions, and even wit.
 
Later, I found out that Renia’s writings in Freuen were excerpted from a long memoir that had been penned in Polish and published in Hebrew in Palestine in 1945. Her book was one of the first (some say the first) full-length personal accounts of the Holocaust. In 1947 a Jewish press in downtown New York released its English version with an introduction by an eminent translator. But soon after, the book and its world fell into obscurity. I have come across Renia only in passing mentions or scholarly annotations. Here I lift her story from the footnotes to the text, unveiling this anonymous Jewish woman who displayed acts of astonishing bravery. I have interwoven into Renia’s story tales of Polish Jewish resisters from different underground movements and with diverse missions, all to show the breadth and scope of female courage.
 
From the book The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos by Judy Batalion.

Uncovering the Stories of the Jewish Women Resistance Fighters in Nazi-Occupied Poland. By Judy Batalion. LitHub , April 6, 2021.
 

Spring 1943. It had been six months since Renia Kukiełka had arrived in Bedzin, a town in southwest Poland now annexed by the Third Reich. After fleeing a ghetto, escaping a forced labor camp, running through forests, jumping off a moving train, and pretending to be a Christian housekeeper, nervously genuflecting at weekly church services, she’d come here to join her sister in the Jewish underground. Renia, aged nineteen, quickly became a “courier” — in Hebrew, a “kasharit,” or connector. “Courier girls” risked death to connect the locked ghettos where Jews were imprisoned. They dyed their hair blond, took off their armbands, put on dazzling fake smiles, and secretly slipped in and out of ghettos and camps, bringing Jews information, supplies and hope. On her first missions, Renia was sent to obtain intelligence, transfer currency and purchase fake IDs. Now, the resistance needed weapons.

 
She was paired with twenty-two-year-old Ina Gelbart, whom Renia described as “a lively girl. Tall, agile, sweet…. Never for a moment feared death.”
 
Renia and Ina had fake papers enabling them to travel. Obtained from an expert counterfeiter in Warsaw, they’d cost a fortune, but as Renia reflected, it was hardly the time to negotiate a bargain. When the girls arrived at the checkpoint, they assuredly handed over government-issued transit permits and identity cards, inlaid with their portraits.
 
The guard nodded.
 
Renia was by now confident operating in Warsaw, and she and Ina set out to find their contact, Tarlow, a Jew who disguised himself as a Christian and lived on the Aryan side. He had connections.
 
The revolvers and grenades that Renia smuggled came primarily from the Germans’ weapons storehouses. “One of the soldiers used to steal and sell them,” Renia explained, “then another sold them; we got them from perhaps the fifth hand.” Other women’s accounts speak of weapons coming from German army bases, weapons repair shops, and factories where Jews were used as forced labor, as well as from farmers, the black market, dozing guards, the Polish resistance, and even Germans who sold guns they’d stolen from Russians. After losing Stalingrad in 1943, German morale fell, and soldiers sold their own guns. Though rifles were easiest to come by, they were hard to carry and hide; pistols were more efficient and more expensive.
 
Sometimes, Renia explained, a weapon was smuggled all the way to the ghetto only for them to find that it was too rusty to fire or did not come with compatible bullets. There was no way to try before you buy. “In Warsaw, there was no time or place to try out the weapons. We had to quickly pack any defective one up in a concealed corner and get back on the train to Warsaw to exchange it for a good one. Again, people risked their lives.”
 
The girls found Tarlow, and he directed them to a cemetery. That’s where they’d buy the cherished merchandise: explosives, grenades, and guns, guns, guns.
 
To Renia, each weapon smuggled in was “a treasure.”
 
In all the major ghettos, the Jewish resistance was established with barely any arms. At first, the Białystok underground had one rifle that had to be carried between units of fighters so that each could train with a real weapon; in Vilna, they shared one revolver and shot against a basement wall of mud so they could reuse the bullets. Kraków began without a single gun. Warsaw had two pistols to start.
 
The Polish underground promised arms, but these shipments were often canceled, or stolen en route, or delayed indefinitely. The kashariyot were sent out to find weapons and ammunition and smuggle them to ghettos and camps, often with little guidance, and always at tremendous risk.
 
The courier girls’ psychological skills were especially important in this most dangerous task. Their connections and expertise in hiding, bribing, and deflecting suspicion were critical. Frumka Płotnicka was the first courier to smuggle weapons into the Warsaw ghetto: she placed them at the bottom of a sack of potatoes. Adina Blady Szwajger did the same with ammunition, and one time, when a patrol ordered her to open her bag, her smile and the cocky way in which she opened it saved her. Bronka Klibanski, a courier in Białystok, was smuggling a revolver and two hand grenades inside a loaf of country bread in her suitcase. At the train station, a German policeman asked her what she was carrying. By “confessing” that she was smuggling food, she managed to avoid having to open her bag. Her “honest confession” evoked a protective response from the policeman, who instructed the train conductor to take care of her and make sure no one bothered her or her suitcase.
 
Renia knew she wasn’t the first courier to bring in booty for a rebellion: kashariyot had obtained and transported weapons into the ghettos for both the Kraków and Warsaw revolts. When Hela Schüpper, a master courier in Kraków, was sent to Warsaw to buy guns, she knew she’d be spending twenty hours undercover on trains. She scraped her face with special soap to hide her scabies, dyed her hair bright blonde (using a potent blue capsule of bleach), tied her hair in a turban-like scarf, borrowed a stylish outfit from a non-Jewish friend’s mother, and purchased an expensive jute handbag with a floral print, fashionable in war-time. She looked like she was on her way to an afternoon of theater. Instead, she met a People’s Army contact, Mr. X, at the gate of a clinic. She was told he’d be reading a newspaper. As per instructions, she asked him for the time and to see his newspaper. He walked away, and Hela followed at a distance, embarking a different train car and landing at a shoemaker’s apartment.

 
Hela waited several days for the goods: five weapons, four pounds of explosives, and clips of cartridges. She taped the handguns to her skin and hid the ammo in her chic purse. She did not go to the theater; she was the theater. A photo of her in Aryan Warsaw shows her smiling, content, wearing a tailored skirt suit that ends just above the knee, loafers, an updo, and a lapel pin; she clutches a small, stylish tote. As courier Gusta Davidson described Hela: “Anyone who observed the way she flirted shamelessly on the train . . . flashing her provocative smile, would have assumed she was on her way to visit her fiancée or to go on vacation.” (Even Hela got caught on occasion. Once, she broke out of a jail bathroom and bolted. She never wore long coats on missions, making sure to keep her legs unencumbered.)

In Warsaw, underground members on the Aryan side spent months trying to obtain weapons. Posing as Poles, they used basements or convent restaurants for quiet meetings, changing subjects whenever the waitress approached. Vladka Meed began by smuggling metal files into the ghetto — these were for Jews to carry so that if they were shoved onto a train to Treblinka, they could cut through the window bars and jump. She dressed like a peasant, headed to a Gentile smuggling area, and jumped over the wall. Some couriers paid Polish guards to whisper a password at the wall; a resistance member waiting inside would climb up and grab the package. Vladka procured her first gun from her landlord’s nephew for 2,000 złotys. She paid her landlord 75 złotys to put the box through a hole, or meta, in the wall, in an area where guards were easily bribed. People bearing “gifts” also passed to and from the Aryan side by joining labor groups and jumping off trains that ran through the ghetto. Items were smuggled in garbage trucks and ambulances, and sent through drainpipes. In Warsaw, many couriers used the courthouse, which had entrances on both the Jewish and Aryan sides.
 
Once, Vladka had to repack three cartons of dynamite into smaller packages and pass them through the grate of a factory window in the subcellar of a building that bordered the ghetto. As she and the Gentile watchman, who had been bribed with 300 złotys and a flask of vodka, worked frantically in the dark, “the watchman trembled like a leaf,” she recalled. “I’ll never take such a chance again,” he mumbled when they finished, drenched in sweat. When Vladka left, he asked her what was in the packages. “Powdered paint,” she replied, careful to gather up some spilled dynamite from the floor.
 
Havka Folman and Tema Schneiderman smuggled grenades into the Warsaw ghetto in menstrual pads, and in their underwear. As they rode through the city in a crowded streetcar, a seat became available and a Pole chivalrously insisted Tema take it. If she sat down, however, they all might explode. The girls chatted their way out of it, their loud laughter covering their tremendous fear.
 
In Białystok, courier Chasia Bielicka did not work alone. Eighteen Jewish girls collaborated to arm the local resistance, while leasing rooms from Polish peasants, and holding day jobs in Nazi homes, hotels, and restaurants. Chasia was a maid for an SS man who had an armoire filled with handguns to shoot birds. Chasia periodically grabbed a few bullets and dropped them into her coat pocket. Once, he called her over to the cupboard in a rage; she was sure she’d been caught, but he was upset only because the weaponry wasn’t adequately organized. The courier girls stashed ammo under their rooms’ floorboards, and passed machine-gun bullets to the ghetto through the window of a latrine that bordered the ghetto wall.

 
After the Białystok ghetto’s liquidation and the youth’s revolt, the courier ring continued to supply intelligence and arms to all sorts of partisans, enabling them to break into a Gestapo arsenal. To get a large gun to the forest, the girls transported each steel piece on a separate journey. Chasia carried a long rifle in broad daylight in a metal tube that resembled a chimney. Suddenly two gendarmes appeared in front of her. Chasia knew if she didn’t speak first, they would. So she asked them for the time.
 
“What, it’s already so late?” she exclaimed. “Thank you, they’ll be worried about us at home.” As Chasia put it, “feigning extreme confidence,” was her undercover style. In offices, she’d complain to the Gestapo if she had to wait long for her (fake) ID. On one occasion, a Nazi saw her trying to enter the ghetto, and, without thinking, she pulled down her pants and urinated, throwing him off. Similarly, if a Polish woman was suspicious of a Jewish man, he was wise to immediately offer to drop his pants and prove his lack of circumcision—this was usually enough to startle and repel her.
 
Chasia got a new day job; her new boss was a German civilian who worked for the German army as a building director. She knew he’d helped feed his Jewish workers, and one night she told him she was a Jew herself. Her roommate, Chaika Grossman, who’d led the Białystok uprising and fled the deportation, also worked for an anti-Nazi German. The five courier girls who were still alive initiated a cell of rebellious Germans. When the Soviets arrived in the area, they introduced them too and chaired the Białystok Anti-Fascist Committee, composed of all local resistance organizations. The girls passed guns from the friendly Germans to the Soviets, provided all the intelligence for the Red Army’s occupation of Białystok, and collected weapons for them from fleeing Axis soldiers.
 
In Warsaw, too, after the ghetto uprising, fighters needed weapons for defense, as well as for revolts in other camps and ghettos, like Renia’s. Leah Hammerstein worked on the Aryan side as a kitchen helper in a rehab hospital. Her underground comrade once stunned her by asking if she might be willing to steal a gun. He never mentioned it again, but Leah became obsessed with the idea. One day, she passed an empty German soldiers’ room. Without thinking, she approached the closet, and a pistol was right there, waiting for her. She slipped it under her dress, then walked to the bathroom and locked the door. What now? She stood on the toilet and noticed a small window that opened onto the roof. She wrapped the gun in her underwear and slipped it out. Later, when it was her turn to throw out potato peelings, she went up to the roof, retrieved it, and threw it into the hospital garden. A hospital wide search ensued, but she wasn’t worried — no one would suspect her. At the end of her shift, she picked the wrapped gun out of the weeds, put it in her purse, and went home.
 
From the book : The Light of Days : The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler's Ghettos by Judy Batalion.
 
'The Light Of Days' Tells The Stories Of Young Jewish Women Resistance Fighters In WWII Poland. By Peter O'Dowd and Allison Hagan. WBUR , April 5, 2021.

In this episode of "Keen On", Andrew is joined by Judy Batalion, the author of "The Light of Days", to discuss a largely untold story of the holocaust, the story of the young Jewish women who formed a resistance movement and fought back against the Nazis.

 Judy was born and raised in Montreal, where she grew up speaking English, French, Yiddish and Hebrew, and trying to stay warm. She studied the history of science at Harvard then moved to London to pursue a PhD in art history. All the while, she worked as a curator, researcher, editor, lecturer, comic, MC, script-reader, dramaturge, performer, actor, producer, translator, muffins server, and a temp – at a temp agency. Eventually, Judy transformed these experiences into material, and wrote essays and articles for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Vogue, the Forward, Salon, the Jerusalem Post and many other publications. Her stories about family relationships, the generational transmission of trauma, pathological hoarding and militant minimalism came together in her book White Walls: A Memoir About Motherhood, Daughterhood, and the Mess in Between (NAL/Penguin, 2016). White Walls was optioned by Warner Brothers for whom Judy is currently developing the TV series “Cluttered.”

 Back in 2007, during her phase of career promiscuity, Judy was doing research on strong Jewish women at the British Library when she happened to come across a dusty, old Yiddish book. Freuen in die Ghettos (Women in the Ghettos), a Yiddish thriller about “ghetto girls” who hid revolvers in teddy bears, bribed Nazis with whiskey and pastry, and blew up German supply trains, became the inspiration for The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos (William Morrow/HarperCollins, 2021). The Light of Days will be published across Europe, and in Brazil and Israel, and was optioned by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Partners, for whom Judy is co-writing the screenplay.

Judy Batalion on The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler's Ghettos | Keen On. Now TV  , April 5, 2021. 

It takes something special to be even more astounding than a Matt Gaetz alibi, but Judy Batalion’s new book, “The Light of Days,” achieves that and much, much more.
 
Even the book’s subtitle – “The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos” – doesn’t do justice to the amazing tales recounted in this labor of love from the Canadian-born New Yorker.
 
The 20 young Jewish women she spotlights lived remarkable lives during World War II, and it’s easy to see why Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment snapped up the film rights at manuscript stage in 2018.
 
Batalion, 44 this month, is currently co-writing the screenplay, and while no director is currently attached, many of the true stories here feel like something from the mind of Quentin Tarantino (think “Inglorious Basterds”) rather than a more traditional Holocaust drama like “Schindler’s List.”
 
Take, for example, the story of Bela Hazan, a fearless 19-year-old from southeastern Poland who took a job working in, of all places, a Gestapo office. This was the perfect cover for her to act as a courier for a rebel group from the Dror youth movement, smuggling news bulletins, money and weaponry across Nazi-occupied Poland. (Dror and other youth movements like Hashomer Hatzair became a de facto Jewish resistance network in the war.)
 

Then there’s Renia Kukielka, who was just 14 at the start of the war but went on to become a crucial courier ferrying messages between ghettos. Or Zivia Lubetkin, who was in her mid-20s when she played a key – yet long overlooked – role in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1943 as part of the Jewish Fighting Organization (also known by its Polish acronym, the ZOB).
 
“The Light of Days” – the book’s title comes from a line written by a young Jewish girl for a ghetto song contest – is both a profoundly moving and breathtaking read, full of tragic and audacious stories. Yet it also provokes anger that it has taken some 75 years for these stories to themselves see the light of day and for these acts of heroism finally to be acknowledged.
 
Some of the young women Batalion showcases were partisans, literally fighting the Nazis deep within the forests of Eastern Europe. Many others operated as couriers, bringing news of Nazi atrocities to Poland’s 400-plus ghettos or smuggling in munitions, cash and even fighting spirit.
 
Why were women chosen for these tasks? Obviously, there was no way for the Nazis to physically prove a woman was Jewish. But equally importantly, many were more familiar with Polish culture than their male peers and could blend in more easily. These were educated young women who could think on their feet and “pass” as their Aryan compatriots.
 
“The Light of Days” begins with the war’s most celebrated Jewish resistance fighter, Hannah Szenes. It was while researching a story on her, at the British Library in London in the spring of 2007, that Batalion discovered a very dusty blue volume among the small pile of books about the volunteer parachutist.
 
 She almost set it aside, but the historian in her forced her to pick it up and examine it. It was an unusual book for the British Library to hold, since it was in Yiddish. But that wasn’t the only unusual thing: Batalion actually speaks Yiddish too, so was able to read the 1946 book, called “Freuen in di Ghettos” (“Women in the Ghettos”).
 
“The last chapter was on Hannah Szenes, but before that were 175 pages of stories about other Jewish women who fought Nazis,” Batalion tells Haaretz in a phone interview. “The chapters had titles like ‘Ammunition’ and ‘Partisan Battles,’ and in one part there was an ode to guns,” she recalls. “It was so not what I expected, and so foreign to the Holocaust narrative I had grown up with. It really startled me.”
 
Batalion comes from a family of Polish-born Holocaust survivors and grew up in a tight-knit Jewish community in Montreal, but says much of her early life was “an attempt to run away from that.” Hence, she found herself in London, performing stand-up comedy and working in the art world, but with questions gnawing away about her Jewish heritage.
 
But 2007 wasn’t the right time for her to “emotionally commit” to such a mentally exhausting project. “The last place I wanted to be at that time in my life was spending my afternoons in 1943 in Warsaw – emotionally, socially, intellectually,” she recalls. “To write this kind of book, I would have to sit with dozens, even hundreds, of these testimonies, and I wasn’t ready to do that until later in my life.”
 
Still, Batalion applied for and received a grant to translate “Freuen” into English, which took about five years (“It was a very complicated translation because, first of all, my Yiddish was rusty – I don’t use Yiddish that much in my daily life. It was also a more Germanic Yiddish, and I grew up with a more Polish Yiddish”). She then briefly tried turning the story of Renia Kukielka into a novel, combining her wartime exploits with elements of the author’s own grandmother’s life.
 
“And finally, in 2017, it was my literary agent who asked me, ‘Wait, what? This really happened?’ She was the one who told me, ‘You have to write this as a nonfiction book. It’s very important to tell the true story,’” Batalion recounts. And that’s how we find ourselves in the rare position of having to praise an agent for their efforts on our behalf.
 
“Freuen” was just the starting point for “The Light of Days,” though. That source material was “like a scrapbook,” Batalion says, comprising clippings from different newspapers, obituaries, speeches and memoirs about female fighters from Jewish youth movements. Her own extensive research included revisiting numerous wartime sites across Poland, reading and watching whatever testimonies existed, and interviewing the families of the women who survived the war.

 
But the biggest initial challenge was to work out the chronology of events and how lots of separate stories might mesh together. “It took me about six months to do a rough first draft,” she says. “I’m writing history out of memoir, so I had to put together what happened, and when. I was working with personal stories: You can have a whole memoir that takes place in one week and the rest of the war takes up one page, so I had to figure out how these stories worked together.”
 
“The people who had survived, or had survived long enough to write about their experiences, were characters that I could focus on, because they had left more detailed, robust stories,” she explains.
 
Then there was the small matter of trying to verify stories that haven’t been told in nearly 80 years, if at all, and were sometimes written when typewriters, pens and paper weren’t exactly easy to access.
 
“The book has 65 pages of endnotes and a lot of them say, ‘I took this from this section and this from this, and this memoir said this and in this testimony it said something a little different,’” Batalion says. “I tried to piece together stories, and a lot of times the details did conflict – what happened in one account isn’t exactly the same as in another account. But the accounts often refer to the same events, which was also exciting as a researcher. They’re all talking about that day in 1942. I had to decide what version seemed the most historically accurate and made sense.”
 
Another challenge in a book like this is getting the right balance between the “heroes” and “martyrs,” to use the Hebrew term for Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day – which, significantly, occurs on the anniversary of the start of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
 
“There were a lot of balances to get right,” Batalion notes. “I’m writing here in the U.S., where a huge percentage of the millennial population doesn’t even know what Auschwitz is,” she says, referring to the 2018 survey that found two-thirds of millennials had never heard of the death camp. “It’s very tricky to tell a story about the Holocaust, because I want to explain the deeply horrific nature of this genocide, but I also want to tell a story of the people that fought it.

 
“A scholar who wrote a book about humor in the Holocaust wrote, ‘If you want to write about humor in the Holocaust, the danger is that it seems like the Holocaust wasn’t that bad.’ This resonated with me. I didn’t want to make it sound like there was a massive Jewish army who was fighting the Nazis. This was a horrific genocide, and these were teenagers who tried to organize to overcome.”
 
The author didn’t make life easy for herself by choosing to relate the stories of tens of different women (the film, by necessity, will have to focus on a couple of leading characters), and Batalion says this was her most difficult writing decision. “This wasn’t a story of just two or three women – this was a movement of organized resistance across the country that involved hundreds, if not thousands, and it was important that that came across,” she explains.
 
The author’s research uncovered “more incredible resistance stories” than she “ever could have imagined,” but I wonder if she found any common traits among these young women to help explain their apparent fearlessness.
 
“You know, I’ve thought about this a lot,” she says. “I think their bold and savvy behavior was shaped by their training, by their youth movements and how they were educated – but I also think many of these women had a very strong sense of instinct, and followed it. I’m always obsessed with people that I feel have what I lack.”

 
She recounts a meeting with Renia Kukielka’s family in Israel a few years ago. “They said to me, just in passing, ‘Renia wasn’t someone who, when she crossed the street, would look left and right, left and right.’ And that stayed with me, because I am someone who looks left and right, left and right, left and right. I think many of these rebels had strong impulses and trusted their gut and just moved.”
 
“The Light of Days” conjures up many indelible images: women hiding razor blades in their hair; secret libraries and makeshift weapons labs being established in ghettos; female couriers donning layers of skirts to hide contraband in the folds; and young women determined not to “go like sleep to the slaughter,” to quote Jewish partisan leader Abba Kovner’s resistance mantra.
 
Two other things leap out at you. One is to be reminded of the sheer scale of the Nazi killing machine, with the Germans establishing over 400 ghettos across Poland alone. For Batalion, “it’s both the big numbers and the smallness of the places that overwhelm. Over 400,000 Jews were forced to live in the Warsaw ghetto alone. That’s a huge number. I was also shocked by the scope of resistance participation: Over 90 European ghettos had armed Jewish underground movements. I’d had no idea.
 
“And then, on the other hand, there’s the smallness. When you go to these towns and walk through the streets of former ghettos, they’re just small-town streets. Even some of the camps that I visited, they’re very human in size – in my head they loomed so large. The Gestapo headquarters [in Warsaw] is a four-story building, it’s so regular – which is equally troubling, in a way.”
 
The second thing that strikes you is the joie de vivre exhibited by so many of these young Jews, despite – or perhaps because of – the horrors of everyday ghetto life. Indeed, a recurring question as you read the book is, when did these people ever sleep?

 
Batalion: “Every testimony I read, every memoir I read, was just so full of action – they were so alive. These were stories of constant activity, and they drew me in. These women were literally jumping off trains, running between towns, getting dressed up, dyeing their hair. These were stories with so much action, and I think that also just changed the tone of the Holocaust narrative for me. It’s so different from the more staid narrative I had been exposed to.”
 
It is also impossible not to read “The Light of Days” and see it as the current Polish government’s worst nightmare in light of its controversial, some would say revisionist, stance regarding the role its citizens played in World War II: a book that presents the Holocaust in all its complexities, depicting some non-Jewish Poles as heroes but many others as aiding and abetting the Nazis or committing their own atrocities.
 
The good news is that “The Light of Days” will be published in Poland next year, so locals will be able to make up their own minds, while Batalion has only good things to say about the Poles who assisted her in the writing process.
 
“My only reactions have been from people who helped me do research in Poland – translators, research assistants, drivers, fixers – and I honestly felt that they were as interested in this story as I was,” she says. “They were so passionate about it, this was so important to them. To them, this is Polish history; this is their story too. For me too, this is a Polish history book.
 
“I made fascinating connections in Poland, mainly with young people in their 20s and 30s. At my Polish publisher, I was saying casually that all four of my grandparents were from Poland and they laughed, saying, ‘You’re more Polish than any of us!’ I have a fraught and complicated relationship to Poland, but I was taken by how passionate these young Poles were about my project.”

 
Polish historian Emanuel Ringelblum, the noted chronicler of Warsaw ghetto life, is quoted in Batalion’s book describing how the women put themselves “in mortal danger every day” to “carry out the most dangerous missions. … Nothing stands in their way. Nothing deters them.” Yet his prediction that “the story of the Jewish women will be a glorious page in the history of Jewry during the present war” turned out to be far from accurate.
 
Why has it taken so long for these stories to finally be told and for these women to get their “three lines in history,” as one young ghetto activist puts it? Batalion has her own theories.
 
“The story of why I don’t know this story is to me as interesting as the story itself,” she says. “There are many reasons why this tale disappeared – some of them have to do with the Zeitgeist and the interests of the times; some of them have to do with politics. And some of them are very personal. “These women didn’t tell their story. Or they told them right after the war, like Renia, and that was it. The telling was in a sense the therapy, or part of the therapy, and then they had to move on. It was so important to start afresh. As I mentioned in the book, some of these women weren’t believed. Some of them were accused of leaving their families or sleeping their way to safety. Many of these women suffered terrible survivor’s guilt.
 
“So, things were silenced for many reasons, and a lot of it had to do with these women feeling very determined to create families, to create a new generation of Jews – and they didn’t want to hurt them. They wanted their children to be healthy and happy and normal.”
 
As her own toddler starts screaming in the background, demanding her attention, Batalion just has time to express her hopes for a book 14 years, or perhaps several lifetimes, in the making: “I just want people to know these stories. I want people to know their legacy. I want people to know the names of these women who fought against all odds for our collective justice and liberty.”
 
The Young Jewish Women Who Fought the Nazis – and Why You’ve Never Heard of Them. By Adrian hennigan.  Haaretz, April 6, 2021.
 

Judy Batalion was raised in Montreal surrounded by Holocaust survivor families with stories of loss and suffering. “My genes were stamped — even altered, as neuroscientists now suggest — by trauma,” she writes in “The Light of Days.” “I grew up in an aura of victimization and fear.”
 
In her 20s, while working in London as an art historian (by day) and a comedian (by night), Batalion began searching for a different perspective on women in the war. She found it in the forgotten stories of Polish “ghetto girls” — dozens of Jewish women who did not ask “for pity” or flee the Nazis. Instead, they stayed and fought them. Or flirted with them, then shot and killed them. They also led groups of Jewish fighters into combat against the Wehrmacht.
 
Batalion centers her book on one such group of exceptional women, some as young as 15, all part of the armed underground Jewish resistance that operated in more than 90 Eastern European ghettos, from Vilna to Krakow. Knowing that there would be no mercy in capture, only torture and a brutal death, the women bribed executioners; smuggled pistols, grenades and cash inside teddy bears, handbags and loaves of bread; helped hundreds of comrades to escape; and seduced Nazis with wine and whiskey before killing them with efficient stealth.
 
There were uprisings in at least nine cities, including Warsaw and Vilna — sustained by the labyrinth of underground bunkers hand-dug by women, together with their attacks on the electrical grid. And in part thanks to such acts of female heroism, armed Jewish resistance broke out in Auschwitz and other death camps. In all, 30,000 Jews joined partisan units in European forests, a significant number of them women, despite the rough treatment (including rape) they often received at the hands of male comrades.
Why, Batalion wonders, had she not heard these women’s stories before? She stumbled across them only by chance on the dustier shelves of London’s British Library. The problem she then confronted in writing this book, which pulses with both rage and pride, was choosing which women to include and which to leave out. Her desire to pay tribute to as many as possible is understandable, but a simpler narrative with fewer subjects might have been even more powerful.
 
One story that definitely needed to be told is that of Vitka Kempner, a partisan leader in Vilna, who had escaped through the bathroom window of her small town’s synagogue to command fighters on the front line. Perhaps the standout woman here, though, is the hugely appealing Renia Kukielka, whom Batalion describes as “neither an idealist nor a revolutionary but a savvy, middle-class girl who happened to find herself in a sudden and unrelenting nightmare.”
 
In September 1939, when the Germans came to the Polish town of Chmielnik and burned or shot a quarter of its people, Renia saw how only one Jewish boy tried to confront them. Outraged, she vowed to join the resistance. She went on to lose her family, her home, her friends and her money, but never her iron will. Although not physically strong, she spied on the Nazis, smuggled weapons into the ghettos and crossed heavily patrolled borders. When tortured by the Gestapo to the brink of death, she remained defiant.
 
Of course, Jewish men in the resistance performed heroic feats as well, but because of the women’s ability to blend into the background they were often assigned more daring roles. In the larger context of the war, their victories were small and their sacrifices great. But the spirit of their resistance was, as Batalion rightly notes, “colossal compared with the Holocaust narrative I’d grown up with.”
 
The ‘Ghetto Girls’ Who Fought the Nazis With Weapons and Wiles. By Sonia Purnell. The New York Times, April 6, 2021

Website Judy Batalion