‘The Light of Days’ Review: To Resist and Connect

The young women of the Polish ghetto were a defiant and resourceful breed, acting as couriers, smugglers and, sometimes, warriors.

Image from article: Comrades from the pioneer training commune in Białystok, 1938. PHOTO: COURTESY OF GHETTO FIGHTERS' HOUSE MUSEUM 

By Diane Cole, The Wall Street Journal, March 30, 2021 6:30 pm ET

They were nicknamed the “ghetto girls” but the label does not do justice to the defiant, mostly forgotten Eastern European Jewish women in their teens and 20s who, acting in resistance to the Nazis, undertook one mission impossible after another to disrupt the machinery of the Holocaust and save as many Jews as they could.

Now, in her well-researched and riveting chronicle “The Light of Days,” Judy Batalion brings these unsung heroines to the forefront. She has recovered their stories from diaries and memoirs written variously in Yiddish, Polish and Hebrew, some composed during the war (one in prison, on toilet paper, then hidden beneath floorboards), others afterward, still more recorded in oral histories. This group portrait forcefully counters the myth of Jewish passivity, at once documenting the breadth and extent of Jewish activism throughout the ghettos—armed resistance groups operated in more than 90 of them, according to Ms. Batalion—and underlining in particular the crucial roles women played in the fight to survive. Indeed, several of the women whose stories Ms. Batalion tells also helped lead the most significant act of anti-Nazi Jewish resistance, the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising, which is recounted here in brutal detail.

The tasks and responsibilities these female fighters took on were as myriad as the false Christian identities they adopted to avoid capture, their disguises so successful that one was even hired as a translator by the Gestapo in Grodno. But mostly they traveled, seemingly nonstop, to surrounding Polish towns and in and out of the barricaded ghettos that they managed, through bribes and stealth, to penetrate. In the ghettos the Nazis not only segregated Jews from Aryan society but also prevented evidence of the massive deprivations and punishments Jews suffered there from leaking to the world outside.

This Nazi-imposed isolation made the female couriers all the more welcome when they arrived, living proof that those locked inside the walls were not forgotten. During their visits, the couriers acted as “human radios,” carrying greetings from other ghettos, bringing warnings of forthcoming deportations to the death camps, and serving as liaisons coordinating the efforts of ghetto resistance cells with those of armed partisan groups in the forests. They also took on the grim responsibility of reporting the latest massacres and other atrocities against the Jews. The eyewitness testimonies they conveyed were harrowing. But rather than spread hopelessness among the ghetto population, the couriers often did the opposite, breeding greater determination to resist, to leave a legacy of action and defiance rather than submissiveness. As one ghetto slogan declared, “It is better to be shot in the ghetto than to die in Treblinka!”

PHOTO: WSJ THE LIGHT OF DAYS By Judy Batalion Morrow, 558 pages, $28.99 

Skilled black marketers, they also smuggled in food to supplement the ghettos’ ever-dwindling food rations; medical supplies to fight typhus and the other diseases that ran rampant amid appallingly cramped, broken-down living conditions; and as many rifles, pistols, bullets, grenades and bomb-building components as possible, to spark an uprising.

Behind all these operations lay a deftness and aptitude for creating and maintaining resistance webs and networks both within and among different ghettos, as well as with sympathetic Aryans throughout Poland. That is why they were also often described as kashariyot, the Hebrew word for “connectors.” It was through these links that they set up hiding places for Jewish children outside the ghetto, found safe houses to conceal resistance fighters, provided forged papers and plotted escape routes to Palestine, even facilitated prison breaks. Nor did they hesitate to take up arms themselves, leaving Nazi troops so surprised to see women wielding guns and grenades that one startled SS commander was left to wonder if they were “devils or goddesses.”

Ironically, Nazi male chauvinism aided the success of female couriers. German guards could not imagine, Ms. Batalion writes, that a smiling, flirtatious peasant woman or chic city girl would be hiding bullets inside a jam jar, a pistol inside a teddy bear, or a grenade inside her menstrual pad. Often the Nazis would even make chivalrous offers to carry the women’s bags or baskets, never suspecting that contraband was concealed inside the flour sacks or sewn inside the hems and seams of packed garments.

More critically, even if they were questioned, women had a better chance of teasingly talking their way out of suspicion than men, for whom the common Nazi demand of a “pants-drop test” would reveal they had been circumcised, marking them as Jews. Nonetheless, the women still remained easy targets for rape, sexual blackmail or other traps. As one courier wrote, “Every step outside the barbed wire [of the ghetto] was like passing through a hail of bullets . . . every street a dense jungle that had to be cleared with a machete.”

Yet both individually and as a group, these valiant Jewish women remain mostly unknown. One reason for this is that few of them survived the Holocaust, which means we don’t know how many additional stories went unrecorded. Ms. Batalion also posits political motives. For instance, the leaders of the newly founded state of Israel often preferred to emphasize the heroism of those who fought for the country’s independence over the horrors endured by Europe’s Holocaust survivors. Sexism, too, tamped down memories of the roles women played, and some of the surviving women themselves preferred to remain silent to protect themselves and their children from bearing the burden of their memories.

Ms. Batalion’s book is both comprehensive and important, but reading it can prove frustrating and confusing, especially as the author toggles back and forth in time and from one woman’s story to another. And although Ms. Batalion—a former academic in her native Montreal, now a freelance writer in New York—does not flinch from describing the wanton acts of Nazi-inflicted cruelty and torture these women witnessed and endured, readers may need to pause for air. Yet spelling out the specifics of these horrors underscores the monumental strength and resolve these extraordinary women possessed. “The Light of Days” pays tribute to their individual grit and their collective will to keep the Jewish people alive. 

Ms. Cole is the author of the memoir “After Great Pain: A New Life Emerges.” Copyright ©2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8 Appeared in the March 31, 2021, print edition as 'To Resist And Connect.'