Unsurprisingly, conducting research around the world, using sources that span decades, continents, and alphabets, led to various research challenges and conundrums.
The primary source material for this project comprised mainly memoirs and testimonies. Some were oral and recorded on video or audio, some were written—in Hebrew, Yiddish, English, Polish, Russian, German. Some were translated, some were translations of translations, some I translated myself. Some were composed privately, others, for an interviewer. Some were fact-checked, edited, even cowritten with scholars and published (generally by small and academic presses); others were diaries, raw testimony, filled with passion, writing fueled by fury. Some were written immediately after the war or even during the war while in hiding, and contain mistakes, contradictory details, and omissions—things were simply not known or altered for security reasons, or emotional ones. (Some survivors found it too difficult to write about certain people’s deaths.) Some were written quickly, fingers burning, in a desperate attempt not to forget, a purging of experience composed with a fear of being caught. Renia often used initials instead of names (her byline was “Renia K.”), which I believe was for safety—she was writing in wartime about covert underground operations that still held terrific danger. She was also writing at a time when she genuinely did not know how other people’s stories turned out; she herself was awaiting news of whether her friends and relatives were alive. Like many early scribes, Renia wrote out of a desire to tell the world what happened objectively, trying to veer away from her personal stance. Characteristically, she uses the word “we,” and at times it can be hard to discern whether she is referring to herself, her family, her community, or to the Jewish people at large.
Other testimonies were offered later, especially in the 1990s, and though they are often composed with the depth of insight gained over time, the memories may be altered by contemporary trends, others’ memories they’ve heard over the years, and the survivor’s current concerns and goals. Some people argue that those who were traumatized suppressed many memories and that the fighters who were not tortured in camps have stronger recollections—“a surplus of memory,” according to Antek. Others argue that traumatic memories are some of the most pungent, accurate, and relentless. I also sifted through ephemeral primary documents (articles, letters, notebooks) and interviewed dozens of family members—each of whom had his or her own versions of stories, often contradicting one another’s.
Memory twists and turns; memoirs are not “cold data.” Many differences came up among these dozens and dozens of accounts: the details of events were often at odds, and dates, all over the place. Sometimes the same person provided personal testimonies on several occasions over the years, and her own tellings differed dramatically; at times I found inconsistencies within the same text. I found discrepancies between primary and secondary sources; for instance, academic biographers and historians shared accounts of these women that differed from the women’s own stories. Sometimes the differences in primary sources were intriguing—they had to do with taking responsibility, with whom to blame. When this was relevant, I tried to highlight it, usually in the endnotes. I attempted to understand where these differences were coming from and to cross-reference stories with historical analyses. I aimed to present the versions that seemed most reasonable and rich. At times I merged details from many accounts to build a full picture, to present the most emotionally authentic and factually accurate story that I could. Ultimately, when in doubt, I deferred to the women’s testimonies and truths.
I have relayed scenes as directly as possible from my sources. My reconstructions sometimes enhance feelings that were implied in the original text and take into account multiple perspectives of the same event, but all are nonfiction, based on research.
While the differences in accounts were intriguing, overall, I was more taken by the tremendous number of overlaps. Sources from different corners of time and place told the same obscure anecdotes, described similar situations and people. In addition to helping me establish veracity, it was touching and exciting. Each time I revisited the story from another lens, I learned more, dug deeper, felt that I was truly entering their universe. These young people and their passions were connected, figuratively and literally.
Another complex issue in this type of multilinguistic study is names, of both people and places. Many Polish towns sport numerous titles—Slavic, German, Yiddish—having been relabeled continually with fluctuating rulership. To use one name over another is often a political choice—not my explicit intention here. I have tended to use the contemporary place names as they are written in English.
As for personal names, the women in my story, like most Polish Jews, had Polish, Hebrew, and Yiddish names, and nicknames. Some had wartime aliases. Or several. Sometimes they used additional fake identities for emigration papers. (It was usually easier to leave Europe if a woman was faux married.) Then they changed their names to suit the languages of the countries where they ended up. (For instance: Vladka Meed began as Feigele Peltel. Vladka was her Polish undercover name; she married a Miedzyrzecka, which was changed to Meed when they moved to New York.) Further, I searched for these Slavic and Hebraic words in English search engines, based on combinations of Latin letters. I found Renia under Renia, Renya, Rania, Regina, Rivka, Renata, Renee, Irena, and Irene; Kukielka has infinite Anglo spellings as does its Yiddish Kukelkohn; and then there were her various false wartime document names: Wanda Widuchowska, Gluck, Neuman. (I spent at least a half day trying to determine if Astrit the courier was the same person as Astrid, Estherit, A., and Zosia Miller—I believe she was.) On top of this, there is an added layer that often complicates women’s traceability: the married name. “Renia Kukielka Herscovitch” (or is it Herskovitch, or Herzcovitz . . .) has endless permutations—she could so easily have slipped through, be missed, become unarchivable, lost forever.
Perhaps the ultimate example of name complexity: the three surviving Kukielka siblings ended up in Israel as Renia Herscovitch; Zvi Zamir, which sounded Israeli (Zamir is “cuckoo bird” in Hebrew); and Aaron Kleinman—changed because he fought in Palestine in the 1940s and was wanted by the British. Even within an immediate family, discrepancies are endless.
A final word on words:
For ease, imitating Renia, I have used the term Pole to refer to a non-Jewish (Christian) Polish national; however, Jews were also Polish nationals, and I’m enhancing a division that I do not necessarily mean to inflate. Influenced by the scholars at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, I have used antisemitism as one word; to use a hyphen implies that “Semitism” exists as a racial category. The women in my story refer to the Nazis as “Germans,” which I have retained, since these were the Germans they were in contact with; of course, there were anti-Nazi Germans as well.
Several scholars have criticized the use of the term “courier girls.” Courier, they argue, is demeaning. It sounds trivial, passive, like a postman delivering letters. These women were anything but. They were weapons obtainers and smugglers, intelligence scouts, and, as in their Hebrew appellation, kasharyiot, connectors. The very act of courrying (from the French courir, or run) in the Holocaust was as risky as engaging in armed battle. Every time a Jew was found outside a Jewish ghetto or camp, she was punished by death. And these women spent months, sometimes years, crisscrossing the country, escaping from ghetto after ghetto. I found one account of a courier who apparently undertook 240 trips—per week. I, however, continued to use the term, among others, to describe their work in order to accord with existing research on the subject.
The word girls is also considered to be belittling. These were young women, around age twenty, some of them married. Again, I did use the term, among many others, to describe Renia and her cohorts. I also used boys for the youthful men of the movement. For one, I wanted to stress their youth. I am also writing in a context in which girls has been reappropriated and is employed widely in discussions of women’s empowerment.