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

The Subversive Simone Weil

 

“Everyone knows what attention is,” William James famously declared in his Principles of Psychology. For those who are not “everyone,” James goes on to explain that attention is the “taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness is of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.”

 
Though she agrees with James’s insistence that attention both engages the mind and entails a kind of withdrawal, Weil would have taken issue with the claim that attention requires the mind’s concentration—tensing, really—on a specific issue. For Weil, this kind of mental tautness is, in fact, inimical to true attention. In Weil’s role as a teacher, we catch glimpses of what she understood by attention. For example, Anne Reynaud, one of her students at Roanne in 1933, recalled that Weil would take the class outdoors and gather them under a tall cedar tree where they would together “seek problems in geometry.” The phrase is telling: rather than “finding the answer,” the students instead looked for problems. Reflecting upon a problem, rather than resolving it, was Weil’s goal. No less telling is Reynaud’s recollection that Weil never dictated to the students during her lectures, just as she always refused to give them grades. These habits were bred not from indifference, but instead from a radically different conception of attention.
 
While waiting with her parents in Marseille for their visas to the United States, Weil presented her ideas about the teaching of attention to Joseph-Marie Perrin. In the late spring of 1941, Weil had contacted this nearly blind Dominican priest in order to discuss the possibility of converting to Catholicism. Perrin readily agreed to a meeting, which took place on June 7, 1941, at the Dominican convent in Marseille. Between then and the following May, when she left with her parents for New York, Weil met several more times with Perrin, mostly discussing the theological and dogmatic issues that, for Weil, stood in the way of her conversion. (They almost certainly never discussed their respective participation in Resistance activities.
 

Under Perrin’s guidance, the convent became a safe house for Resistance fighters and French and foreign Jews, while at the same time he oversaw the dissemination of the clandestine journal Les Cahiers du témoignage chrétien.) The conversations between these two friends also unfolded, in sporadic fashion, through the exchange of letters before and after Weil’s departure. In the opening lines of her first letter, Weil set the tone: “I am tired of talking to you about myself, for it is a wretched subject, but I am obliged to do so by the interest you take in me as a result of your charity.”
 
Shortly before leaving Marseille, Weil sent Perrin an essay titled “Réflexions sur le bon usage des études scolaires en vue de l’amour de Dieu” (“Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God”). By “view,” Weil means attention—the one skill all schools should cultivate in their students. But we need to attend to her understanding of the term. Normally, when we pay attention to someone or something, we undertake what Weil calls a “muscular effort”: our eyes lock on another’s eyes, our expressions reflect the proper response, and our bodies shift in relation to the object to which we are paying attention. This kind of attention flourishes in therapists’ offices, business schools, and funeral homes. It is a performative rather than reflective act, one that displays rather than truly pays attention. This sort of attention is usually accompanied by a kind of frowning application—the very same sort, as Weil notes, that leads us to a self-congratulatory “I have worked well!”
 
For Weil, attention is a “negative effort,” one that requires that we stand still rather than lean in. The object of this kind of attention could be mathematical or textual, a matter of grasping a puzzle posed by Euclid or one posed by Racine. Whether we do solve the problem, argues Weil, is secondary. The going is as important as the getting there, if not even more so. “It does not even matter much whether we succeed in finding the solution or understanding the proof, although it is important to try really hard to do so. Never in any case whatever is a genuine effort of the attention wasted.” Scorning practices like memorization and dictation that impose the “right answers” upon students, she acknowledges that the practices she wished to instill in students were alien to schools in her own day (and they remain alien to most schools in our own day). “Although people seem to be unaware of it today,” she declares, “the development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies… All tasks that call upon the power of attention are interesting for the same reasons and to an almost equal degree.”
 
Is it really as simple, though, as saying that it is the going, and not the getting there, that counts? For Weil this could be deeply misleading. First, she gives this notion a particular twist: by embracing the going and not the getting there, we will ultimately get to somewhere more important than the original destination. Even should we fail to solve a geometry problem at the end of an hour, we will nevertheless have penetrated into what Weil calls “another more mysterious dimension.” This dimension is moral: it is the space where, by our act of attention, we grasp what has always been the real mystery—the lives of our fellow human beings.
 
Weil argues that this activity has little to do with the sort of effort most of us make when we think we are paying attention. Rather than the contracting of our muscles, attention involves the canceling of our desires; by turning toward another, we turn away from our blinding and bulimic self. The suspension of our thought, Weil declares, leaves us “detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object.” To attend means not to seek, but to wait; not to concentrate, but instead to dilate our minds. We do not gain insights, Weil claims, by going in search of them, but instead by waiting for them: “In every school exercise there is a special way of waiting upon truth, setting our hearts upon it, yet not allowing ourselves to go out in search of it… There is a way of waiting, when we are writing, for the right word to come of itself at the end of our pen, while we merely reject all inadequate words.”
 
This is a supremely difficult stance to grasp. As Weil notes, “the capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have this capacity do not possess it.” I, for one, know I do not possess it, not only because it collides with the way I think about thought, but also because it collides with the fact that I can rarely, if ever, think about anything or anyone else without also thinking about myself. To attend to a fellow human being entails far more than thinking about or even feeling for that person. Pity, like cognition, involves reaching toward another by acknowledging her suffering. In this respect, my faculty of sympathy fixes on someone else just as my faculty of thought does. And once it does, it most often compartmentalizes and forgets that person. As Weil notes, pity is unlike compassion in that “it consists in helping someone in misfortune so as not to be obliged to think about him anymore, or for the pleasure of feeling the distance between him and oneself.”
 
Compassion, in contrast, means that I identify with the afflicted individual so fully that I feed him for the same reason I feed myself: because we are both hungry. In other words, I have paid him attention. It is a faculty that does not latch onto the other, but instead remains still and open. We do not fully understand a hammer, Martin Heidegger observed, simply by staring at it. Instead, understanding comes when we pick it up and use it. Weil gives this observation an unusual wrinkle: we do not fully understand a fellow human being by staring, thinking, or even commiserating with her. Instead, understanding comes only when we let go of our self and allow the other to grab our full attention. In order for the reality of the other’s self to fully invest us, we must first divest ourselves of our own selves.
 
It is tempting to see this faculty as thinking about thinking, or what psychologists call metacognition. This approach, at first glance, bears a resemblance to the meditation and mindfulness courses that are now multiplying at colleges and universities. One institution of higher learning, Lesley University, now offers a master’s degree in mindfulness studies, while academics can join professional organizations like the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, which seeks “to transform higher education by supporting and encouraging the use of contemplative/ introspective practices and perspectives.” These programs seek to develop what the psychologist Tobin Hart describes as “knowing through silence, looking inward, pondering deeply, beholding, witnessing the contents of our consciousness.”
 
At first glance, this seems to be what Weil meant. Citing Descartes, she told Anne Reynaud and her fellow students that it “is one thing to be conscious, quite another to be conscious that one is.” But the resemblance ends here. Weil’s philosophical stance does not call upon her students to look inward and consider the contents of their consciousness. To the contrary, Weil urges them to look outward and away from the contents of their consciousness. Being conscious of our consciousness is a starting point, not an end point, meta- or otherwise. “Complete attention,” Weil declared, “is like unconsciousness.” As such, it is a state that does not entail a particular action or stance, but instead suggests a form of reception, open and nonjudgmental, of the world. In a beautifully evocative phrase, Weil writes that when we translate a text from a foreign language into our own, we rightly do not seek to add anything to it. Ideally, this is how the student must approach the world. She must see and write about it as if she is translating “a text that is not written down.” In an age where students cannot escape their social media shadows, this is less a Zen riddle than a pedagogical urgency.
 
Such a state is difficult to reach, much less to grade. Reynaud would not have been surprised to learn of her former teacher’s exhortation, made several years later, that students must “work without any wish to gain good marks, to pass examinations, to win school successes; without any reference to their natural abilities and tastes; applying themselves equally to all their tasks, with the idea that each one will help to form in them the habit of attention.” One might as well flunk a new student of basketball who, though absorbed by the exercise, fails to hit the rim with his shots. “Every time that a human being succeeds in making an effort of attention with the sole idea of increasing his grasp of truth, he acquires a greater aptitude for grasping it, even if his effort produces no visible fruit.”
 
Weil’s portrayal of attention has been said to resemble the vita contemplative traditionally associated with ancient thinkers from Plato to Augustine. But the resemblance is potentially misleading, if only because we usually assume the contemplative life is the same as a passive life—a life in which the highest good seems to entail the abandonment of practical engagement in the world. But Weilian attention leads its practitioner precisely back into the thick of the world. Paying attention to others means that I must acknowledge and respect their reality. As we belong to the same world and are equally vulnerable to the crushing reality of force, I reorient my attention to them and away from myself. Peter Winch memorably captured this condition: “I cannot understand the other’s affliction from the point of view of my own privileged position; I have rather to understand myself from the standpoint of the other’s affliction, to understand that my privileged position is not part of my essential nature, but an accident of fate.”
 
 
From The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas by Robert Zaretsky, published by the University of Chicago Press, 2021.

 Simone Weil’s Radical Conception of Attention. By Robert Zaretsky. LitHub, March 9, 2021.

The University of Chicago Press

It’s May 1942 in the city of Marseilles, in what was then Vichy France, and thirty-three-year-old Simone Weil has for the past year been engaged in work for the French Resistance. Though physically frail and wracked by migraines, she has among other things helped distribute the underground journal Cahiers du témoignage chrétien, launched by three clergymen in early 1941, delivering three hundred copies of each of its first three issues. The personal risk is considerable. As Robert Zaretsky tells us in his absorbing new book, The Subversive Simone Weil, one of her fellow couriers was arrested and deported, and Weil herself was twice hauled in and interrogated by the police. But the calm, formidable philosopher and activist was released both times. When she was sent home, Zaretsky notes, “the sense of relief at the station must have been palpable.”
 
Now, as she reluctantly prepares to leave for the United States with her parents (for their safety, not her own), Weil writes a series of long letters to an anti-fascist, philo-Semitic Catholic priest named Joseph-Marie Perrin. The young Father Perrin, about the same age as Weil, has become her friend and de facto confessor, though she has not accepted baptism into the Church—and never will—and thus, according to Catholic dogma, cannot receive the sacraments. In her intensely intellectual, profoundly personal letters to Perrin, published posthumously in Waiting for God (1951), Weil relates her rather unusual “spiritual autobiography.” Raised, as Zaretsky puts it, in a “fiercely nonobservant” haute-bourgeois Jewish family in Paris, having never entered a synagogue, Weil was attracted early to Catholicism, its liturgy, music, and art. But it was only in her late twenties—first while visiting an impoverished fishing village in Portugal, then a Romanesque church in Assisi, and finally, climactically, the Abbey of Solesmes in northern France, famed for its monks’ Gregorian chant—that she experienced a spiritual, what many have called mystical, awakening to Christian faith.

 
Most important, though, in these letters she wants to explain to Perrin why she has chosen to refuse baptism and remain outside the Catholic Church, whatever the consequences for her soul. Pointing to “an absolutely insurmountable obstacle” that stands in her way, Weil writes to Perrin, “It is the use of the two little words anathema sit. . . . I remain beside all those things that cannot enter the Church . . . on account of those two little words. I remain beside them all the more because my own intelligence is numbered among them.” For Weil, what that Latin phrase represents—the sentence of excommunication, banishment, and even, historically, torture and death imposed upon those deemed heretics—carried more than religious significance. A few pages later, she writes, “After the fall of the Roman Empire, which had been totalitarian, it was the Church that was the first to establish a rough sort of totalitarism in Europe. . . . This tree bore much fruit. And the motive power of this totalitarianism was the use of those two little words: anathema sit.” It was by that same kind of power, transposed into secular use, Weil tells the priest, “that all the parties which in our own day have founded totalitarian regimes were shaped.”
 
Weil had little more than a year to live when she handed down that judgment—she died in August 1943 of tuberculosis (and her own refusal to eat) in a sanatorium outside London, where she had gone to work with de Gaulle’s Free French. And while she’s remembered as much today for her secular political and moral philosophy—not to mention the sheer force of her indomitable personality—as she is for her deeply, weirdly Christian theological writings, the letters to Father Perrin seem to hold a key to her life and thought. And what she meant by that word totalitarian—whether referring to the Roman Catholic Church, Nazism and Stalinism, or the tendencies of political parties and organizations in general—hangs over it all. Like others in her own time and since, Weil not only used totalitarian in a literal sense, to refer to specific all-powerful and controlling state systems. She also used it in a more figurative or cultural sense, as a repressive mindset, a coercive social and institutional tendency, an intrinsic characteristic of the all-devouring “collective passions,” what she sometimes called the “social Beast.”
 
And Weil’s use of this charged term, in particular what she called the “totalitarian spirituality” of the medieval Church, feels uniquely relevant to our own moment, with our contemporary plagues of white “Christian” nationalism and colonialism (which Weil fought against in her own day), Big Tech hegemony, and even, ultimately, our planetary environmental catastrophe. It has to do with how Weil saw both theology and ideology, combined with power, as dehumanizing forces—in the way they treat human beings as abstractions (something our social media take to a whole new level), and then turn them into things, cogs in the machinery, mindless slaves, and finally, corpses. Zaretsky’s book reminds us that not just Weil’s ideas but her life as well offer a bracing, often unsettling challenge to any of us who would resist our own totalitarian tendencies, individual and collective, today.
 
It’s hard if not impossible to imagine a figure of Weil’s stature in the intellectual and political culture of today’s left, the only region of the political spectrum where she might possibly fit. And not just because of her religiosity, which would of course instantly ghettoize her. It’s also because she’s so hard to pin down with any neat, easy label—or rather, because the labels are too many and apparently conflicting. (She’d be eaten alive on Twitter from all sides—or, worse, simply shunned and ignored.) “An anarchist who espoused conservative ideals,” Zaretsky writes in his opening pages, “a pacifist who fought in the Spanish Civil War, a saint who refused baptism, a mystic who was a labor militant, a French Jew who was buried in the Catholic section of an English cemetery, a teacher who dismissed the importance of solving a problem, the most willful of individuals who advocated the extinction of the self: here are but a few of the paradoxes Weil embodied.”
 
The key word there is embodied. As Zaretsky succinctly puts it, “Simone Weil fully inhabited her philosophy.” To understand Weil one has to see her whole, in three dimensions, as a full and fully engaged human being, even if she at times comes off as incoherent—a lot like life itself. Then again, a little incoherence may not be such a bad thing, especially when the alternative is the enforced false coherence of a totalizing theological or ideological system. 
 
 
Much as he did for Camus in 2013’s A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning, Zaretsky guides us through Weil’s complexities with impressive lucidity, keeping it lively and accessible, which is no small feat. Because as much as there is to admire about Weil, she can be confoundingly difficult and, as Zaretsky admits, irritating, even insufferable, in her uncompromising judgments. No one, herself included, could live up to her standards. She was a philosopher and mystic who revolted against any merely abstract ideology or theology. For Weil, it was always about the actual person, the actual experience, the immediate world, whether a classroom, a factory, or a farm; a battlefield or a church. Philosophy, ethics, and religion had to be lived in order to be worth anything—and she tried to put this exacting ethos into practice, which often led her to extremes (she rationed her own meals in solidarity with the malnourished). When it came to resistance, for Weil, mouthing slogans was never enough—it required rigorous thought, moral clarity, and action. Fitting, then, that it was Camus who championed and published her posthumously when he was at Gallimard in Paris following the war. When he was asked upon receiving the Nobel, in 1957, to name the writers to whom he felt closest personally, Weil was one of only two (the other was René Char). Though he’d never met her in life, he considered her a friend.
 
And it was from Weil’s own experience that her most distinctive and perhaps most important concept—malheur (affliction)—emerged, without which we can’t grasp what she meant by totalitarian in the fullest sense. In the early 1930s, after graduating from the elite École Normale Supérieure, where she was flamboyantly absorbed in revolutionary politics (with strong anarcho-syndicalist sympathies, she never joined the Communist Party), Weil taught philosophy to lycée students in provincial towns and tirelessly kept up her engagement in the labor movement, teaching night classes for workers in small industrial cities. And as she deepened her contact with the workers, she began to lose faith in revolution. While she admired Marx’s analysis of capitalism, she found the Marxist theory of history a sort of fable, or as Zaretsky aptly puts it, an abstract “millenarian eschatology,” detached from the realities of working-class life.
 
By late 1934, coming to see that an effective working-class politics would need to be rooted in the actual experience of working-class people, she took a fateful and characteristically drastic step: she got a job on the floor of the Alsthom electronic equipment factory in Paris, working long hours operating a stamping press and other heavy machinery under brutal and demeaning conditions. Always physically awkward and weak, eating little and prone to searing headaches, Weil pushed herself to exhaustion and despair alongside her fellow women workers. Inevitably, the job didn’t last (whether she was fired or just physically worn out is unclear), yet she managed to get work in two more factories over the course of a year, seriously compromising her health. She emerged a changed person and thinker. She believed that she had gained insight into the dehumanized condition of a slave, and she called this condition malheur.
 
There’s no word in English that truly captures the meaning of Weil’s malheur, but translators have settled on “affliction.” In a lengthy essay she left with Father Perrin, Weil offers her best description. “In the realm of suffering,” she writes, “affliction is something apart, specific, and irreducible. . . . It takes possession of the soul and marks it through and through with its own particular mark, the mark of slavery.” While affliction always involves pain or the fear of pain (including mental or emotional), she goes on to clarify, “There is not real affliction unless the event that has seized and uprooted a life attacks it, directly or indirectly, in all its parts, social, psychological, and physical. The social factor is essential. There is not really affliction unless there is social degradation or the fear of it in some form or another.”
 
By the time she wrote that essay, with the Nazi Wehrmacht bearing down, Weil believed “affliction is hanging over us all.” And affliction for Weil in the deepest sense, unsurprisingly given her mystic turn, is somehow more than the sum of its identifiable parts: its effect is also inescapably spiritual. Affliction, she writes, “deprives its victims of their personality and makes them into things. It is indifferent; and it is the coldness of this indifference—a metallic coldness—that freezes all those it touches right to the depths of their souls. . . . They will never believe any more that they are anyone.” When Christ on the cross cried out to God, “Father, why have you forsaken me?”, Weil tells us, he was afflicted. “Extreme affliction . . . is a nail whose point is applied at the very center of the soul. . . . [Affliction] introduces into the soul of a finite creature the immensity of force, blind, brutal, and cold. . . . He struggles like a butterfly pinned alive into an album. But through all the horror he can continue to want to love.” Love itself, which for Weil means love of God and neighbor, is the only thing that can still reach the afflicted, if they can only hold on to it themselves.
 
Affliction is the consequence of all-consuming, soul-crushing external force. It is what dehumanizing power—physical, psychological, spiritual—does to a person, whether that power is wielded by a church, a state, a corporation, a political party or movement, or an entire political and economic system. The force that afflicts—that which enslaves, literally or figuratively—is totalitarian.
 
It seems safe to suggest that there are many today who would recognize what Weil was talking about, or who at least have some inkling of how it feels. Indeed, it’s frightening how closely her concept of affliction fits what our techno-capitalist, social-media saturated existence is doing to us politically and culturally. When a person is reduced, by outside forces beyond their control, to an abstract category—a race, a gender, a sexual orientation, a class, a religion, a nationality, a political label, a demographic—they begin to feel the cold steel of affliction. Whatever our various identities, wherever we may fall on the ideological spectrum, we’re in the grip of a dehumanizing force.
 
When American churches—largely white evangelical Protestant— and other religious institutions, preach a form of religion, so-called “Christian” or otherwise, that defines human beings in abstract theological terms as worthy and unworthy, included and excluded, they effectively employ those two little words, anathema sit. And when those same churches and religious institutions align with a political party that defines itself in terms of racial and religious nationalism, affliction is the result—whether it looks like caged migrant children; or incarcerated, pandemic-stricken bodies; or members of Congress hunted by neo-fascists in the hallways of the Capitol.
 
When a political and economic system degrades and dehumanizes workers, the unemployed, and the unhoused, regardless of race or gender or religion, there is affliction. When large segments of a society are abandoned to “deaths of despair,” there is affliction.
 
When technology companies design all-pervasive social media platforms to prey algorithmically upon human weakness, neurological and emotional and moral—and to profit from the exponential amplification of institutionalized mendacity through ever-multiplying echo chambers of mindless collective abuse of the abstract other, so that no one, of any identity or ideology, is spared the coercive pressure of conformity and fear of punishment—something very like affliction becomes the general condition of a society.
 
It even begins to look as though affliction is now our planetary condition. When the prevailing technocratic carbon-industrial regime that runs the global economy pursues a nihilistic course of limitless fossil-fueled growth, or a greenwashed version of the same, so that entire populations of human beings—first and foremost across the Global South—are rendered superfluous (Hannah Arendt’s term) for the sake of profit and power, then we see that the climate catastrophe itself is driven by a kind of totalitarian force. Weil, who was a fierce anti-colonialist, argued in her final work, The Need for Roots, that the uprooting of peoples, the destruction of cultures and traditions and entire histories—as the colonizing powers of white Christendom had been doing for centuries—counted as crimes of the largest magnitude. Historical and cultural rootedness, Weil firmly believed, is a fundamental human need. In our time, fossil-fueled capital turns indigenous homelands into wastelands or drowns them under the waves.
 
It was those uprooted and afflicted global masses, both far and near, with whom Weil stood in solidarity to the end of her short, subversive, and tragic life—a life, as Zaretsky suggests, that was a fully embodied act of resistance. Weil’s whole purpose, philosophically and morally, was to know her fellow human beings as human beings, not abstractions—to understand what they experienced and suffered by living and working alongside them in farm fields, factories, and fishing boats; devoting her time to tutoring those she came in contact with, opening their minds; risking her life alongside them in Spain and with the French Resistance. In both the literal and the broadest sense, she lived an anti-totalitarian life.
 

But we can’t leave it there, tempting as it may be. That’s because Weil’s most unsettling contradiction was her attitude toward her own Jewish heritage, as seen in several of her comments on Israel and Judaism that are widely read as anti-Semitic. Zaretsky, who is Jewish and has written movingly of his own struggle to speak about the Holocaust, squarely confronts this disturbing aspect of Weil’s thought. What’s clear is that Weil saw the ancient Hebrew religion as a form of oppressive and at times genocidal religious nationalism, based on the core dogma of Israel as “chosen people”—a concept Weil abhorred in any context. (“There is no such thing as a holy nation,” she writes in The Need for Roots.) She considered both ancient Israel and her other great enemy, the Roman Empire, as precursors to twentieth-century totalitarianism. But it also seems clear—given Weil’s staunch opposition to Nazism and its oppression of Jews—that her horror was directed at the theology and national ideology of ancient Israel, not at Jews as people, which would obviously negate everything she wrote about the sanctity of each human being. Zaretsky tells us that Father Perrin tried to convince her that she was mistaken in her readings of Hebrew scripture, but whatever the case, there’s little doubt she was deeply alienated from Judaism.
 
All of which leaves a bad taste—and can’t help but color Weil’s attraction to Christianity. And yet this is also why her inner struggle with Roman Catholic dogma and the Church as an institution is crucial. Because as we know, it wasn’t just Israel and Rome that she saw as totalitarian precursors, it was every bit as much the medieval Church, with its persecution and extermination of heretics and infidels. “What frightens me is the Church as a social structure,” she wrote to Perrin. “I am afraid of the Church patriotism existing in Catholic circles. . . . I am afraid of it because I fear to catch it. . . . There were some saints who approved of the Crusades or the Inquisition. . . . they were blinded by something very powerful.”
 
Zaretsky notes that Weil’s theological turn in her later years “marked a rupture” for many readers. “But for others,” he writes, “it is less a break than a broadening of the same concerns that had always driven her thought.” So it’s surprising that Zaretsky makes little of Weil’s decision to remain outside the Church—even though, for a Christian believer, no decision could be weightier. Alan Jacobs, in a moving portrait of Weil in his recent book The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis, sees greater significance in Weil’s refusal of baptism, framing it as central to her life and moral commitments. Indeed, it was perhaps her ultimate and most profound act of human solidarity—and perhaps her most subversive. In one of her letters to Father Perrin before leaving Marseilles with her parents, Weil makes the astoundingly bold confession: “It seems to me that the will of God is that I should not enter the Church at present.” In fact, she tells the priest, when she thinks of baptism and entering the Church, “nothing gives me more pain than the idea of separating myself from the immense and unfortunate multitude of unbelievers.” 
 
“I have the essential need, and I think I can say the vocation,” Weil continues, in what could be a summation of her faith and philosophy, “to move among men of every class and complexion, mixing with them and sharing their life and outlook, so far that is to say as conscience allows, merging into the crowd and disappearing among them, so that they show themselves as they are, putting off all disguises with me. It is because I long to know them so as to love them just as they are. For if I do not love them as they are, it will not be they whom I love, and my love will be unreal.”
 
 
The Social Beast : On the anti-totalitarianism of Simone Weil. By Wen Stephenson. The Baffler April 14, 2021.
 

The French philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943) had a precocious gift for sympathy—and more than a hint of masochism. She sought out the darkness to escape the comfortable bourgeois life—the very model of assimilated Third Republic French-Jewish success—into which she was born. When she was ten years old, in 1919, she disappeared from her Paris apartment only to be found marching down the Boulevard Saint Michel with striking workers, singing The Internationale. On holiday before her last year at the École Normale Superièure—where she would graduate first in her cohort, ahead of Simone de Beauvoir—she toiled on a fishing trawler in Normandy. In 1932, she went down a coal mine and was nearly shaken to pieces when she tried the pneumatic drill.
 
Weil definitively left her privilege behind in 1934, when she took a leave of absence from teaching philosophy at a provincial lycée in Roanneto work at different factories in Paris. There she learned first-hand how “not thinking anymore… is the one and only way of not suffering.” Weil’s clumsiness made her factory career difficult—though it also probably saved her life. Her brief stint with the French-speaking Internationals in the Spanish Civil War (“Happily, I am so myopic that there’s no risk of my killing others,” she wrote, “even when I am aiming at them”) was cut short when she stepped in a pot of cooking oil and was forced back to Paris.
 
After her family fled the Nazi invasion of France, Weil became obsessed by the idea of parachuting behind enemy lines with a brigade of nurses. Her suicidal proposal was rebuffed be de Gaulle; instead, she was tasked with preparing reports on the political and spiritual reconstruction of France. In 1943, she died of tuberculosis aggravated, the coroner found, by her self-imposed malnutrition: she insisted on never eating more than was permitted in her occupied homeland. Her family called her Antigone; her classmates, the “Categorical Imperative in Skirts.”
 
In her brief life, Weil was more of a teacher than a writer—at the lycée, at workers’ reading groups, and with the fishermen and farmers whom she tutored in languages and literature when the day’s work was done. Yet Weil still wrote intensely. Virtually none of her writings appeared in her lifetime, with the exception of her justly famous essay “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” which was published in Vichy France in 1940, and which remains her most accessible work.
 
Her books were all compiled by others, stitched from the essays, letters, and notes she left behind into Waiting for God and Gravity and Grace on her mystic theology, and The Need for Roots on her political theory. Thinkers as diverse as Albert Camus, Pope Paul VI, Iris Murdoch, Jacques Derrida, Susan Sontag and Franz Fanon cite Weil as an influence. Her posthumous productivity—as a thinker and as a myth—makes her hard to pin down.
 

“To a rare degree in the modern age—or, indeed, any age—Simone Weil fully inhabited her philosophy,” writes Robert Zaretsky, in his welcome new book, The Subversive Simone Weil. Drawing on Simone Petrément’s still-unequalled 1973 vie, Zaretsky approaches Weil by essaying “a small number of core themes in her thought that still resonate today”—affliction, attention, rootedness, resistance and the divine. These themes give a sense of the remarkable scope of the work she packed into a mere 33 years. In clear, accessible prose, Zaretsky gives some coherence to Weil’s largely fragmentary oeuvre. What emerges is a portrait of a politically unclassifiable thinker who in her life and writings committed herself to be open to the unbearable reality around her. 
 
Weil’s year-long apprenticeship in Paris factories transformed her early Marxist tendencies into something more sophisticated—and arguably more radical. “Every man’s work should be an object of contemplation for him,” Weil wrote, anticipating Hannah Arendt’s later distinction between meaningful work and mere labour. This spiritual approach to oppression led Weil to develop, as Zaretsky writes, “a fundamentally conservative, if not reactionary, conception of ‘revolution’ and ‘resistance’.” Weil believed not so much in creating a new form of life, but in restoring many aspects of the one industrialisation had swept away. As TS Eliot observed, Weil was “at the same time more truly a lover of order and hierarchy than most of those who call themselves Conservative, and more truly a lover of the people than most of those who call themselves Socialist.”
 
Ideology was, for Weil, less important than suffering. Modern factory work—endlessly repetitive, frantically rushed—induces what she termed le malheur, often translated as affliction: a condition as “hideous as life in its nakedness always is, like an amputated stump, like the swarming of insects.” We look away instinctively from the hollow stare of an exhausted worker, just as we look away from the bloody workings of war—two sorts of dehumanising violence, in Weil’s view. Force, as Weil writes in her essay on the Iliad, “turns anyone who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him.” War and work destroy the complex sensibility that makes us human.
 
 
Weil thought that educating workers to read the classics and to express themselves clearly was more important than fomenting revolution. Education fosters attention, which for Weil is a life-expanding “negative effort,” a kind of negative capability with which we approach the world as though translating a “text that is not written down.” Whether for a worker or an intellectual, as Zaretsky writes, for Weil the “epistemological is the ethical”; being open and available to others is the only way to fully respect them, and the only way to be fully human.
 
Human beings also need to be enmeshed in a community—to have the roots that modernity and war were pulling up. To be rooted means to preserve, Weil writes, “certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations of the future”—the ultimate function of the nation, in her Burkean view. (Notably, Roger Scruton included Weil in his Great Tradition.) The distinctive condition of modern life is déracinement, or uprootedness—“a sort of inner vertigo” deeper and more elusive than alienation. Uprootedness comes with the physical displacement forced upon her and her family by the Nazi aggression—a kind of physical and spiritual colonisation which she boldly asserted was identical to what the French were perpetrating in trying to Gallicise their colonial subjects.
 
Weil’s worldview became progressively more religious, and in the ‘30s she drifted further from her upbringing as a “fiercely nonobservant” assimilated Jew and drew closer to Christianity. Although she refused allegiance to any church, Zaretsky relates how Weil “engaged in a brilliant and often bruising dialogue with Christianity” from her first experience of grace in a Romanesque chapel in Assisi in 1937, when she felt a divine force drive her to her knees to pray.
 
Like so much else in her life, Weil’s Christianity took the form of self-denial—not just of her ties to Judaism, which she relentlessly denigrated as a brutal, ungodly force in history, but also of her own ego. “Relentless necessity, wretchedness, distress, the crushing burden of poverty and of labor which wears us out, cruelty, torture, violent death, constraint, disease—all these constitute divine love,” Weil wrote, describing her version of what the Gnostics call kenosis. “It is God who in love withdraws from us so that we can love him.” In order to approach the divine, we must undergo a process of décréation, an undoing of the fundamental separation that occurred when God created the world. We must overcome the separation by overcoming ourselves.
 
One need not be a Christian to see the value in Weil’s attempt to, in Iris Murdoch’s words, “pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is.” Nor does one need to be a philosopher to see that, despite her sometimes esoteric worldview, Weil’s serious commitment put her in the company of Socrates as one of the great practitioners of philosophy as a way of life. Weil’s example—if not her creed—is a reminder in a secular and individualistic age what it means to live for what you believe.
 
The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas by Robert Zaretsky (Chicago)
 
 
The subversive philosophy of Simone Weil. By Max Norman. Prospect,  April 11, 2021.

In December 1934, Auguste Detoeuf interviewed an applicant for a job at one of his factories. Ordinarily, Detoeuf did not make hiring decisions—he was, after all, the director of Alsthom, France’s largest maker of electric equipment. Yet Detoeuf was hardly an ordinary businessman. A graduate of France’s elite engineering school, the École polytechnique, Detoeuf neither talked the talk or walked the walk of French industrialists. He dressed, as one friend sighed, like a romantic violin virtuoso, and confessed to being an intellectual manqué.
 
Detoeuf no more belonged behind this particular desk than the job applicant belonged in front of it. It was not that she was a she—legions of women, after all, labored in French factories. Instead, it was because she was a graduate of France’s other elite school, the École normale supérieure—which, like the École polytechnique, had been founded by Napoleon—and had, until recently, taught philosophy to lycée students. Yet, the applicant—who, having long theorized about assembly line labor, now wanted to experience it at firsthand—was hell-bent on finding factory work with or without Detoeuf’s help. Given the applicant’s bad eyesight, crippling migraines, and manual dexterity—she had none—he decided it was better if he helped.
 
And so, on a frigid December day in 1934, Simone Weil began work at the Alsthom factory on the Rue Lecourbe, the clanking of her stamping press adding to the din of this industrial neighborhood in southwest Paris. That night, on the first page of her “factory journal,” Weil inscribed two epigrams. The first is hers: “Not only should man know what he is making, but if possible he should see how it is used—see how nature is changed by him. Every man’s work should be an object of contemplation for him.” The second, in Greek, is Homer’s: “Much against your will, under pressure of harsh necessity.”
 
This year marks the 75th anniversary of Simone Weil’s death. Her life was raw and short—she died at the age of 34, perhaps of willed starvation to mark her solidarity with her fellow citizens in occupied France—but her legacy is rich and long. With the posthumous publication of her writings, ranging from her reflections on politics and ethics to theology and faith, Weil now towers as one of the 20th century’s most influential and subversive thinkers. In particular, Weil’s conceptions of necessity and contemplation—couched in her journal’s epigrams but also grounded in her real experiences—remind us why the unique way her thought and life meshed matters more than ever.
 
The very act of thinking, Weil discovered, was the first casualty of factory work. A few days into her job, she was already reeling from fatigue. Her weariness stemmed less from the physical demands of her job—though they were great—than the unrelenting pressure to meet quotas and the numbing repetitiveness of the work. “The effect of exhaustion,” she wrote, “makes it almost impossible for me to overcome the strongest temptation that this life entails: that of not thinking anymore, which is the one and only way of not suffering from it.”
 
But despite near-constant migraines and bone-deep exhaustion, Weil did think about this kind of working life. How could she not? As a 10-year-old, she slipped out of her family’s spacious apartment in Paris to join a labor protest she had glimpsed from the window. As a university student, she earned the nickname “the Categorical Imperative in skirts” by way of acknowledging her fierce sense of moral duty. As a lycée teacher in the provincial city of Le Puy, she angered the authorities by protesting on behalf of the shabbily treated workers in the local stone quarry.
 
Weil’s engagement with the world spilled into her classroom, where she would confront her students with questions like “How many workers’ homes could be built for the price of a luxury liner?” These queries were not distractions from her role as teacher—the great majority of her students passed the baccalaureate, the feared final exam—but its very raison d’être. Weil insisted that humans will be free only when we have “understood the causes of oppression as clearly as we understand the gravity which causes a stone to fall.”
 
The gravitational pull of factories was as strong as that of dark matter for her. Within the walls of the Alsthom plant—along with two other factories where she subsequently worked—Weil discovered the nature of le malheur, or affliction. The factory distilled the hierarchy and its train of harrowing inequities that structured French society. Her coworkers were, with few exceptions, women. During her first week, Weil knew the names of some like Madame Forestier (whose earned her title by her imperious demeanor), but also identified the nameless ones: the “Tolstoy fan,” the “Woman who gave me a roll,” and the “Mother of the burned kid.”
 
Even when she failed to learn the names of her coworkers, Weil captured the tragic nature of their lives. There was the drill operator who brought her 9-year-old son to work. When Weil found the boy fending for himself in the changing room, she asked the mother if he was also coming to work. “I wish he were old enough,” the woman replied matter-of-factly. One metal shearer suffering from inflammation in her pelvis could not get a transfer from the presses—work that, Weil wrote, “irrevocably and completely destroyed her reproductive organs.”
 
The women, Weil quickly found, were subject to the whims of the “big shots”—namely, the foremen. Days after she began at the factory, which made electronic components, Weil was unable to fully control a fly press designed to punch holes into metal boxes. As a result, she botched a full quota of metal components. Mouquet, her foreman, ordered her to redo all the pieces, but in a way that forced her to repeatedly duck her head to avoid the machine’s heavy counterweight. By the time she emptied her box of components, Weil also felt emptied. “I had the idiotic feeling that it wasn’t worth the effort to pay attention to protecting myself.”
 
On this occasion, Weil’s coworkers signaled their “pity and mute indignation” at what had been done to her. More often, though, the working conditions bred distrust and despair. “In this kind of life,” Weil realized, “those who suffer aren’t able to complain. Others would misunderstand them, perhaps laughed at by others who are not suffering, or thought of as tiresome by yet others who, suffering themselves, have quite enough suffering of their own. Everywhere the same callousness, with few exceptions.” To complain to a supervisor was an invitation for further degradation. “It’s humiliating, since she has no rights at all and is at the mercy of the good will of the foremen, who decide according to her worth as a worker, and in large measure capriciously.”
 
In effect, the foreman decided Weil’s worth not just as a worker, but also as a human being. Le malheur resulted less from physical suffering than psychological degradation. Ground down by relentless and repetitive physical labor, workers were also shorn of human dignity. Harried by time clocks and hounded by foremen, serving a machine and severed from a real purpose, the workers were quite simply unable to think at all, much less think about resistance or rebellion. Horrified, Weil realized that the factory “makes me forget my real reasons for spending time in the factory.”
 
Rarely at a loss for words, Weil struggled to explain her state of mind to friends. In her letters, she was often reduced to describing her experience as “inhuman.” But in her journal, she increasingly depicts the condition of workers as “slavery.” You kill yourself, she exclaimed, “with nothing at all to show for it … that corresponds to the effort you put out. In that situation, you really feel you are a slave, humiliated to the very depths of your being.” Before she entered the factory, even the Categorical Imperative in skirts might have raised her eyebrows at such a claim. Once she left the factory, a shaken woman in work clothes had come to see servitude as a near-universal condition.

 
Affliction, it turns out, is an equal opportunity employer. It is too easy, she warns, to comfort women as victims and condemn men as victimizers. Men no less than women, managers no less than workers, even employers no less than employees are all subject to necessity. All of us are driven, at varying speeds, by physical needs and political creeds, economic imperatives and social interests. None of us, as a consequence, escapes necessity’s gravitational pull. “Human history is simply the history of the servitude which makes men—oppressors and oppressed alike—the playthings of the instruments of domination they themselves have manufactured.”
 
Oddly, Weil had to be reminded of this point by Detoeuf. In 1936, more than a year after her factory experience, she related to Detoeuf a conversation between two employers she had overheard in a train. Complaining about the strikes then sweeping France, these two “well fed and well dressed” men believed they had everything to lose should the strikers succeed. That workers should demand their rights, Weil marveled, was seen as a “monstrous injustice” by these comfortable owners.
 
In his reply, Detoeuf agreed that many employers lacked a sense of civic duty and social obligation. Yet, he also suggested that Weil failed to show these employers the same attention she gave to the workers. Leave aside, he asked with restrained irony, “whatever may be rather grotesque and odious in the fact of being portly and well-nourished.” He suggested that if Weil put herself in their place, she would discover that “unless these men were more than human they could hardly think and feel otherwise.” Convinced their material well-being was at risk, they responded as Weil would respond if her mental well-being was threatened. They truly believed that the end of their world—which, for them, was the only world—was nigh. “You must really use your own imagination to try to grasp that these men have not so much imagination as you credit them with. For them, to have nothing more to lose means to have to give up everything that makes up their existence.”
 
Did Weil concede Detoeuf’s point? Her reply isn’t recorded, but it would be odd had she not, because it happens to be her point, too. The exercise of our imagination or attention is our one defense against the onslaught of necessity. Allowing us to peel back the layers of meaning we impose on the world, attention trains us to see others not as white or black, woman or man, worker or manager, but instead as us. In a word, we come to see the true nature of affliction. To acknowledge the reality of affliction, Weil observed a few years later, “means saying to oneself: ‘I may lose at any moment, through the play of circumstances over which I’ve no control, anything whatsoever I possess, including those things that are so intimately mine that I consider them as myself.’”
 
Seventy-five years after Weil’s death, how better to measure her life than by recalling her conception of the world as subjected to necessity, marked by affliction, and starved for our attention. That even Weil could fall short in the work of attention is a happy reminder that few activities are more difficult—or more important—than coming to see someone else as real.
 
Why One of France’s ‘’Most Subversive””Philosophers Chose to Work in a Factoy . By Robert Zaretsky. Zocalo, June 28, 2018.