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

Women According to Nadia Lee Cohen

 

Nadia Lee Cohen’s work needs little introduction on i-D. From her collaboration with Millicent Hailes in 2015 to her solo show in Spain last summer, we’ve been, like so many others, continually fascinated by the elevated, cinematic portrayals of womanhood the photographer creates. And, like a method actor continually fine-tuning her role as one such woman, Nadia too remained a source of fascination; just as mythologised as the bodies in her images.

Based in Los Angeles and often assumed to be American, owing to the recurring motifs of old Hollywood and classic Americana in her work, Nadia in fact grew up in London, moving west after graduating from London College of Fashion. This lineage, and its juxtapositions, can be traced throughout her first book, Women, an anthology of her signature work.

 
A mixture of subjects, some haughty looking, others less guarded, some familiar, some unknown, the book embodies the very best of Nadia’s world. Whether it’s Alexa (Demie) poolside, caked in makeup but still tanning herself beneath the Hollywood sign, or Lilly, tentatively peering out of her curtains yet completely nude, or Anja, pregnant, solemn, leaning against a kitchen counter, there’s infinite stories wrought across each of their faces and bodies.
 
Here, Angela Hill of IDEA, the publishers behind Women -- its fastest selling book of all time -- discusses with her the long journey to creation, the many different artists, actors and directors that informed its narrative, and shooting Charli XCX in a motel full of sex workers and customers.

 
**What were you like as a child and how was your childhood?
 
**I was quite unfeminine, didn’t like wearing dresses or brushing my hair. I was raised on a farm in rural England by very relaxed parents. I spent my time running around wet fields covered in mud, hunting for fossils, stepping in cow shit and building fairy houses out of twigs. I believed in everything there was to believe in; Father Christmas, witches, fairies -- the lot. Nothing could stunt or interrupt my imagination, probably because of how remote the surroundings were.
 
**Why was I so moved by these images? I was hesitant about publishing this book at first, it was the polar opposite of everything we had done before and I am steeped in my love of documentary-style grunge street-type photography. At first the images are brash and obvious and screaming out at you from the page. When we received the first advance copies in the office. I looked through the book and felt more and more emotional. I walked home mentally going over details from some of the images, some subjects appeared so desolate to me, so beaten up by life (we see Scarlett, young yes but already having that world weary look, sitting simultaneously smoking and breast feeding in Hampstead; the lighting is exquisite, the setting dark and heavy, foreboding almost. On later viewings of this image I am drawn to the toast rack, flowers and vase; exactly the vase and flowers my grandmother would have. It’s one of my favourite images in the book), there was a sadness, more than a melancholy, because maybe one indulges in melancholy from time to time and these felt like lives lived that there was a lot to forget about.
 
**I was reminded of the film The Thin Blue Line (1988) -- both in terms of the imagery/scenarios and the soundtrack too which is in turns haunting, plaintive and beautiful. The film is a reconstruction documentary (and was controversial because of this) as is Women.

 
**The location of the last image in the book is of a flat in Finchley and I was reminded of November Sunday evenings at home, suburban London, as a teenager; a feeling of despair, a heaviness, the thought of school the next day, the routine of every Sunday. I got the feeling some of the women you photographed were left alone in every sense after the shoot -- all the glitz and glamour gone -- just themselves to deal with. Is this a valid assumption?
 
**I agree in the sense that there is an approach of adding and subtracting throughout. Adding in terms of the hair, makeup, nails, and general theatrics of their appearance. Subtraction however, in the form of the setting, posing and mood; this is where the darker element settles in. The locations, even if domestic, tend to be somewhat remote or desolate. I'm personally drawn to this sort of space and want the models to reflect their surroundings in their pose, or ‘non-pose’ actually. The idea is that they are captured mid-movement, off guard, or a split second after asking them to relax, slump, hunch, ‘be sleepy’, etc. The majority of the best images seem to be towards the end of a shoot, when the model is maybe slightly more comfortable and has had time to settle into the situation and accept their respective character. Scarlett in particular — tiny baby Mosco was only two months old and was screaming and crying as he didn’t want to feed, the atmosphere was quite intense until he eventually latched on after around eight attempts, so there was a genuine sense of relief felt at the moment that photo was taken.

 
You are in the book, maybe in more ways than just your self portrait. A photographer friend of ours was in the office recently and he said something very interesting in that he didn’t resonate with other photographers’ work if he couldn’t see something of that photographer in their work. And then I thought of how much of Nan Goldin’s work is Nan Goldin herself, or Corinne Day or Tina Barney themselves. We see Finchley and Hampstead juxtaposed with Palm Springs, Brooklyn and LA in the location credits; was it just a practical decision as that was where the models were or was it important for you to revisit your London background and mix it with the high contrast of LA?
 
It did feel important to have London in there. This was one of the elements I felt missing when I looked at the body of work around two years ago; so I made a conscious effort to photograph the places that resonated. The sentimentality is present in the smaller details such as the popping burnt toast and patriotic England mug in “Shocking”. Or the copy of The Sunday People and pint of milk in Scarlett’s; these are nostalgic memories for me. I initially wanted to travel to California as it all seemed very preserved in terms of locations and signage that were still intact from the late 70s-early 80s, and I'm definitely not an advocate for modern architecture. I felt this was missing in the UK, but the more time I spent away from the UK the sooner I realised that this isn’t the case at all. I just struggle with a tendency to become blind to what inspires me about a place unless I am away from it for a long period of time. I’ve actually just got back to the UK following the longest I’ve ever been out of the country and the smallest elements start to feel novelty and quintessentially British. I really start to notice and appreciate every Mr Kipling cake.

 
**Do you agree with this sentiment that, like Freud’s dream analysis, you are every subject in this book?
 
**That’s hard to answer without sounding pretentious, but yes, not in an overt way, probably just in the choice of an object. I’m not sure if this is a great example, but there is a wig that is used in several images that we named ‘Aunty Paulene’. The name came from a time when my mum's friend Paulene turned up at her house sporting it and it wasn’t received in the way that she had hoped, as mum fell about laughing. So she quickly whipped it off and I adopted it. The wig actually looks a bit like my hair, so perhaps this suggests some sort of repressed Freudian desire to inflict this hairstyle on several people.
 
**The book was the fastest selling of any book we have published; what do you think most people’s reasons are for wanting these images so much? For me, I want to look at them again and again and every time I do I notice something else (I have the same feeling with Van Gogh, I notice one flower more than I had ever done before or the way the wood in a chair is painted); another intriguing detail, a fold of fabric, colours, lighting -- they are works of art, each one a tableau, a film, movie that the viewer can construct in their mind. How long did it take from the idea of an image to casting, staging and achieving the final print you were happy with?
 
**I can’t get over that and probably never will. I’m completely speechless at the response it had. I don’t know because I can’t look at them from an objective perspective. Though I do think people enjoy narrative and storytelling. I certainly do in the photography work that I admire, even if it is predominantly documentary, the capture of drama within a still image can make the most mundane of situations magical. One of my favourite books is Ray’s a Laugh by Richard Billingham, the situations of his mother and father in a Birmingham council flat have those same feelings that you mentioned for me in terms of noticing something new every time I look at them. I feel like I've gone off topic, so to answer your question it took absolutely ages from initial idea to execution, especially when I ran out of money for production and had to produce the shoots myself; but those were almost the most fun.

 
I have a stream of consciousness that plays out words, stills from films, music, images etc like triggers that inspire me; it changes from time to time but it has long been there since childhood and it often plays out like this; herbs, British Folk Music, Essex Marshes, owls, eagles and kites, Ralph Vaughan Williams, KES, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, The Go-Between, Edwardiana… like a mantra I have to come back to remember in my work to stick to what is ‘me’. Would you say your main inspiration is film? Which films or directors have really moved you? I love the feeling of watching something and feeling changed afterwards, feeling “OK, that can be done”, “that does exist, that brilliance” and I strive to achieve my goals all over again.
 
 
**Yes and I almost feel guilty for having the same inspirations, but you can’t help what initially shapes you and I continually revisit those with the guilt that I haven’t found something new. A lot of it is from film absolutely, I owe a lot of it to my punk teenage boyfriend who had impeccable taste in film, music and art. I think my taste grew from that. It does come from everywhere though, not just Stanley Kubrick and Fellini. I’m interested in food packaging, signage, pointless trinkets and personal objects in charity shops. Also any artwork that puts a spotlight on mundanity. Duane Hanson’s sculptures epitomise this idea and have been a constant source of wonderment and inspiration. How fabulous would it be to have one in my living room one day.

 
Which was the most difficult image to achieve?

 Charli’s without a doubt. It was photographed towards the end of the project and I had to go back to shooting in a similar style to how I started, with minimal team and minimal funds. Charli is a famous person and we had never met, so when her management asked if there would be ‘security’ at the location I had to explain that there would not… I drove around Hollywood on Friday night to location scout with Sami Knight (hairstylist) and remembered a particular motel. It’s run by this friendly man that I met five years previously, we drove by and it still looked as great as I remembered, he was still there, quietly vacuuming the green carpeted steps outside as though no time had passed. He remembered me and said we could shoot there the next night for the price of a room; $145, a bargain. However, when we turned up the following evening, (now Saturday night) it was quite a different atmosphere. The solitary vacuumer was replaced with a flood of men in tracksuits looking for debauchery. They were intermingled with determined looking sex workers. I found the situation interesting, but Charli’s management didn’t quite feel the same and were terrified generally of placing her in a situation that was unsafe, also concerned that someone might see her and snap a photo on their phone and sell it to TMZ or something. The entire night was a dramatic obstacle course of trying to get this photo at any given quiet moment (there were none). Charli was marvellous though, very calm and this shows in the final image which reflects none of the chaos that was felt that night. This was the only photograph I wrote about in the back of the book, titled ‘Motel Notes’.

 **Can you remember when you first thought of doing this series or was it that it was only after meeting one particular woman that you felt inspired to make it a project?

 **I started in university, it was part of a project that I shot for my end of year assignment and I was naive enough to think that I could complete it in a year. Thank god I didn’t, it would have been terrible. My tastes changed and developed so much over the course of its progress, though there are one or two still in the book from those very early photo shoots that show the progression.

 **What next for you? What is driving you forward into 2021?

 **I’m the worst at working on more than one thing at a time. I was supposed to be working on something else last year but I put everything off in order to get the book out. I’m reluctant to mention what the next thing might be in case it ends up taking me just as long to complete!

 Nadia Lee Cohen’s Women is surreal, sad and sexy. By Ryan White. i-D , December 18,  2020.

 

Nadia Lee Cohen is only 29, but you’d be forgiven for thinking she’s a behemoth of image-making. One look at her debut book, Women, published by IDEA, and you’ll see why.

 
The fruit of six years’ labour, Women brings together 100 portraits of staggering power and beauty. Kept under wraps for the majority of that time, the project was carried out in secret, alongside her work as a director, and was completed in lockdown.
 
“The word ‘Women’ in this case is an idea related to ‘character’,” Cohen says of the title. “It doesn’t reside in the world we live in, nor does it share the same politics, beauty norms or values. It stands as a representation of strong femininity within a series of these 100 mise-en-scêne.”
 
The book sees Cohen capture people of all ages, shapes and sizes, in various states of undress. Each subject appears to be at total ease in front of the camera, unflinching and unapologetic in their femininity.
 
“Regardless of their assigned character, the level of nudity is determined by whatever the individual personally believes it is to feel ‘unclothed’,” the photographer says of the nudity in the book. “This naturally differs between subjects; however, it is, perhaps, the most harmonising thread that injects a universal feeling of strength to these images. The most important character trait being that these ‘Women’ are not weak, they feel empowered and, in turn, empower.”
 
Power is the key word here – these images vibrate with the stuff. They confront you. Command you. Compel you. Meet your gaze head on. And they are full of contradictions, too: simultaneously retro and modern, they draw on a legacy of British and American cinema, but feel new and current. Likewise they are staged and stylised, but at the same time real and irrefutably raw. Meanwhile, the women themselves display both a vulnerability and a strength, presenting a fictional character and also their true self, or at least a version of it. It’s hard to look away and even harder not to feel something.
A gold clothbound hardback, the book itself is a beautiful object in its own right, featuring a foreword by Ellen von Unwerth who praises Cohen’s talent for “skilfully interweaving the equally fascinating creepiness and glamour inherent of American culture”, and an introduction by Alessia Glaviano of Vogue Italia.
 
Here, Cohen discusses this project in further detail, expanding on the process of completing the book and the women at the centre of it.
 
Ted Stansfield: Please can you introduce this book?
 
Nadia Lee Cohen: You might have thought I’d had enough time to think of something a little more profound to say as a response … but here’s what I have: it’s my first photo book and it’s incredibly special to me. It’s a book of stories featuring people I admire in one way or another, each filling the role of an imagined fictional narrative.
 
TS: It is the result of more than six years of work. Can you tell me about the origins of the book, the process of putting it together, and how it feels to have completed it?
 
NLC: Honestly, it’s the largest sense of relief I’ve ever felt. I probably could have gone on for another 16 years but for a much-needed motivational intervention. I started it in university and had the unrealistic idea that I could complete it in a year. How wrong this was. My tastes changed both personally and as an image-maker. Also, taking on work as a director as a means to fund the book slowed down its progress. Though without sounding all doom and gloom, this element in particular I think aided the creation of the imagery, there was an elevation in terms of preconceived narrative, set design, lighting and general character creation. The concepts were more thoughtfully conceived like film stills rather than still images and I was no longer shooting in my mum and dad’s shed.
 
The main frustration was trying to complete the book while simultaneously attempting to keep each image secret. This proved pretty difficult, as people would ask ’how’s the book coming?’ and I was unable to show them anything I’d shot. In a world where we’re so used to instant recognition as a response to imagery, this lack of validation was slightly nerve wracking in terms of wondering if what I’d captured was worthy of a photo book.
 
The pandemic played a pretty considerable part in the book’s completion. Spending weeks inside forced me to face the daunting task of printing and arranging the images around my LA apartment like some sort of crime scene web. Pinning notes to them and obsessing about what needed to be altered, what was missing, have I used this wig too many times? Etc ...

 
TS: Despite the fact that the images were shot over multiple years and in multiple locations, there’s such a strong sense of cohesion to them. How did you achieve this?
 
NLC: Thank you. The stories are pretty similar in tone, although there are differing themes of mundanity, loss, elation, etc, there is a harmonious thread of strength I think that unites them.
 
TS: What is your relationship to these women? How did you cast them and what qualities do you think they share?
 
NLC: On a personal level, some are extremely close friends, others are people I have only met once with the intention of photographing them for the book; together they are all individuals that I admire in one way or another. On a fictional level I feel incredibly connected to their respective characters. The catalyst behind these imagined scenarios were the models themselves, in effect they were the initial spark and inspiration for the birth and progression of each character.

 
TS: There’s such a sense of intimacy to these images. A physical intimacy, yes, but an emotional one too. Is that fair? As a photographer, were you removed from your subjects or were (or are) you emotionally involved?
 
NLC: Emotionally involved in their fictional lives, yes. Even if the subject was a close friend, without risk of sounding like a low-budget ’medium’, there was perhaps a moment where we both disconnected and a new devised character entered the room and took their place. In certain cases after the wigs, make-up and costume design was complete we’d say shall we call them Shirley? Shall we call them Pam? When referring to this fictional creation staring back at us. The point is they weren’t playing themselves, I find when someone’s appearance is altered (at times) almost beyond recognition this brings out something that neither of you recognise in the photograph, even if you know each other very well, that seems to be where the magic is.
 
TS: Unlike a series of images of women by a male photographer, there is that sense of involvement, I think, and empathy in this book. What is your understanding of the female gaze and how is that expressed in this book?
 
NLC: It was a collaborative process in the sense that it was important for me to understand and empathise through each situation what the model felt comfortable with, then together we devised a way to work that into their respective character. I understand first-hand the vulnerability felt in posing, especially without the comfort and barrier of clothing, so there was a mutual awareness throughout.

 
TS: That sense of understanding and empathy is also illustrated in your decision to pose for the book yourself. Can you tell me about the thought process behind this decision and what you hoped to achieve by doing this?
 
NLC: It made the project more personal, had I chosen not to pose it might have made the overall tone feel more voyeuristic as though I was looking inwards at this world, rather than us all looking out.
 
TS: In the pantheon of female representation in art and photography, what do you hope this body of work stands for; what do you hope it achieves?
 
NLC: An intertwining of honesty and fiction. Something that people can relate to whether emotionally or physically. I’d like there to be some longevity in the project, imagery in the contemporary world currently feels quite disposable and transient. For me, a photo book surpasses this and lives with the viewer a little longer, and might be something they pick up and look at again in years to come.

 
TS: What do you hope this project expresses about the lived experience of women today? What issues does it raise or confront the viewer with?
 
NLC: It is of course fictional, which ultimately leaves it up to the viewer’s subjective interpretation. However, even if these scenarios are imagined, they are ultimately based on truth and real life, there’s nothing fantastical there. They stand as a representation of strong femininity however the individual feels to embody that idea, and this will probably confront each viewer in a different way.
 
TS: The book ends on a sombre note, with a portrait of Elie Che, who tragically died last September. Can you tell me the story behind this image, your memory of Elie and why it felt right to include and conclude with this photograph of her?
 
NLC: There wasn’t a sadness to this image before Elie’s death, she wanted to pose this way as this is how she felt the most beautiful. Though now for me it has a particular poignancy. Her death came as such a sudden shock, her close friends and family reached out to ask that her photograph was released early to honour her memory. The battle for trans people is ongoing, to end with her portrait felt important – it’s not to be thought of as a conclusive ending, more of an ongoing conversation to highlight the reality of this struggle for trans people.
 
Nadia Lee Cohen’s Powerful Portraits of Strong Femininity. By Ted Stansfield. Another, December 9, 2020.

Women by Nadia Lee Cohen.  Another, December 9, 2020

There’s a cautiousness to Nadia Lee Cohen. The photographer-filmmaker is mindful of her words, her associations, her 'brand'. And with 'cancelation' rife for successful creatives (and the executioner’s axe now as menial as a popular tweet), it’s only natural that hyper-consideration become par for the course. But there’s more to it with Cohen. It seems as though she doesn’t fear the fragility of her cultural clout, but that people might uncover she never had any to begin with.
 
Perhaps that’s the reason the LA-based-Brit sweats self-deprecation. Upon charting her career highlights -- which, for the record, include a National Portrait Gallery prize, a high fashion campaign starring Sophia Loren and a music video named among Rolling Stone’s favorites -- she responds by comparing herself to her contemporaries. When congratulated on her accomplishments (all by the age of 28, when most are only beginning to tackle credit card debt), Cohen counters, “Have I [done that much]?” While it may be in the Hollywood handbook that transplants exhibit imposter syndrome, Nadia Lee Cohen needn’t. Her work speaks for itself.
 
In fact, the only time Cohen isn’t careful is with her creative output. Upon completing her photography degree at the London College of Fashion, she relocated to California not to proximate to the world’s A-list, but to acclimatize to the distinct blend of glitz and grit unique to the state — both elements that distinguish Cohen’s style. Her visuals are low-brow and lush: swampy depictions of relatable scenes staged beyond recognition; hedonistic-hued portraits of the human condition that perspire debauchery, always alluding to all seven deadly sins with unwavering consistency. The result is somehow repulsive and compelling all at once — like a bad wax reproduction of Paris Hilton. And just like Paris, it’s all emphatically 'Made in America'.

 
Thus, instead of stargazing, the photographer’s fascination with Americana meant that her early days in LA were spent stalking the city streets at night to shoot without a permit, or taking long road trips with pit stops at gas stations and 99 cent stores to document the 'American Worker'. One particular expedition saw her enter a meth den and inexplicably kicked out of a moving car, after advertising for subjects on Craigslist -- a testament to the lengths she will go to spotlight unseen America, and it’s underbelly.
 
“I loved street casting,” she explains. “It was, 'Who can I get to shoot? That person looks interesting…' I was never really trying to seek out jobs in the entertainment industry, making music videos or shooting anyone famous.”
 
Citing Cindy Sherman and Gillian Wearing’s comfort in “comically distorting, or even in some cases altering, images to the point of the grotesque” as primary inspirations, Cohen soon transitioned into self-portraits -- transforming into various characters fashioned from the mementos she’d found on the road for one of her most well-known projects, the pointedly probing and monstrously camp, Name Tag.
 

“The idea was very personal to me as it was my perception of who these people were,” Cohen says. “I thought it would be more interesting to have one person interpret and physically embody these characters -- so I did it myself.”
 
Consequently, everyone knows Nadia Lee Cohen’s face and no one does. The photographer has taken many, many selfies, but she’s rarely without wigs or prosthetics. With a light scroll you can see her cosplay jailbirds, judges and nuns, her work splashed across top-tier publications. It grates Cohen’s modeling agency, Wilhelmina, that the photographer has very few images of her looking, well, normal, but she’s just never found natural headshots as “fun”.
 
“It’s really flattering when people want me in front of the camera, and it’s important to know what it feels like,” Cohen shares of modeling. “But I also think you have to be comfortable to show yourself, and doing those projects makes me feel more comfortable. Spending time in front of the camera also encourages me to be more sympathetic to subjects when I am behind it.”

 
With production at a standstill due to coronavirus, Cohen has had little choice but to become her own muse. It’s been frustrating to maintain audience engagement with increasingly personal photos, without flooding out her professional work from her feed. Then there’s the added pressure of her still untitled first book arriving later this year. It’s a compilation of images spanning the course of Cohen’s career, which mandates many of her archival photos go unpublished on social media or news outlets. This marks the first time the project has been officially announced (and some of the photos shared), and while originally slated for a summer release, it has been indefinitely pushed back due to the pandemic -- only limiting the photographer further in what she can share with fans.
 
“A lot of my friends complain about their work not getting as much attention as a selfie,” laughs Cohen. “I think people tend to feel more of a connection to the person from seeing a low resolution, iPhone image of them — it feels as though they are witnessing reality rather than something curated.”
 
Nevertheless, quarantine itself has treated the creative well. Despite only recently dipping her toes in filmmaking (the 'pig police' theme of A$AP Rocky’s “Babushka Boi,” directed by Cohen, recently recirculated on social media as a symbol for law enforcement ineptitude in the ongoing fight against police brutality) she’s been working on a feature concept for several years. FOMO-free due to mandated social distancing and weeding through years of ideas, Cohen’s script is fast-tracking. Still, a sidestep into the film industry was more "hope" than plan.

 
“When I first started making videos it was almost a test to prove to myself I could make my photographs move and it’d be enjoyable to watch,” she says, adding that she’s now shifted her process of conceptualizing projects from visual cues. “[Now] I’ve been thinking about the story in a narrative way, not a visual way. It feels unfamiliar, yet exciting.”
 
Right now, the battle is maintaining focus. Cohen knows too well Instagram can suck you into a vortex of color and self-comparison, and approaches the app with only the utmost trepidation. Nonetheless, her relationship with social media seems relatively healthy. In fact, she finds Instagram’s subtle inauthenticity "comforting" — a stark contrast to the well-documented anxiety most women experience interacting with the platform. To Cohen it’s a casting goldmine: if she requests a “man with a round, hard belly” for a subject, one will be procured through her direct messages in ten minutes flat. She also counts herself lucky that her followers are there for her work first -- whether or not it features the photographer in it.

Hence why she so deeply values her leagues of disciples. Subscribing to Nadia Lee Cohen’s universe is to embrace her perversely glamorous alternate reality, with triple-breasted women and satanic television personalities all in technicolor. She might cast a gaggle of middle-aged playmates to actualize the Valley Of The Dolls’ men-less utopia of her dreams (for the last ever winter issue of Playboy) one moment, and make out with Danny Trejo the next. As such, her professional fantasy is not necessarily the praise of Scorsese, but merely the industry’s price of admission: a full cinema, there just for her. When you extract the extraordinary from the American everyday, it’s the reaction of the ‘every man’ that means the most.

 “There's certainly people I admire and their opinion of my work would matter to me,” she concludes thoughtfully. “But I think I’d always imagine showing something to an audience… just a room full of people watching something I’ve made.”

 The world according to Nadia Lee Cohen. By Beatrice Hazlehurst. i-D, June 25, 2020

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