Renia
OCTOBER 1924
On Friday, October 10, 1924, as the Jews of Jędrzejów were settling in for their Sabbath eve, shutting shops, closing tills, boiling, chopping, frying, Moshe Kukielka rushed from his store. His family home at 16 Klasztorna (Monastery) Street was a small stone structure on a verdant main road, just around the bend from a magnificent medieval abbey known for its turquoise and gilded interior. Tonight the house was particularly abuzz. As sunset approached, the orange autumn light bleeding red into the lush valleys and rolling hills of the Kielce region, the Kukielkas’ oven heated, their spoons clanged, their stove hissed, and the church bells formed their usual backdrop to the family’s Yiddish and Polish clatter. And then, a new sound: a baby’s first wail.
Moshe and Leah were both modern and observant, as were their three older children. They engaged in Polish culture and celebrated Jewish traditions. Moshe was used to hurrying home or to a shtiebel (prayer house) for the Shabbat meal and prayers, walking briskly through the open town square, with its rows of pastel-colored buildings, passing Jewish merchants and Christian farmers who lived and worked side by side. This week, he rushed even more hastily through the cool fall air. Traditionally, candles were lit and Shabbat itself was welcomed as a bride into the home, but that day Moshe had a new guest to greet. An even better one.
And then he arrived to find her: his third daughter, who immediately became the shiny apple of his discerning eye. Rivka in Hebrew, a name whose roots have various meanings, including connection, union, and even captivating. In the Bible, Rivka was one of the four matriarchs of the Jewish people. Of course, in this partly assimilated family, the baby also had a Polish name: Renia. The name Kukielka resembles the Polish Kukielo—the surname of family who for generations had run the local funeral home. Jews often constructed last names by adding winsome endings such as -ka to Polish names. Kukielka means “marionette.”
It was 1924, just a year after the new Poland was finally recognized by the international community and had its boundaries set, following years of occupation, partitioning, and constantly fluctuating borders. (As the old Jewish joke went, a man asks whether his town is now in Polish or Soviet territory. He’s told, “This year, we’re in Poland.” “Thank goodness!,” the man exclaims. “I simply could not take another Russian winter.”) The economy was afloat, and though most Jews in Jędrzejów lived below the poverty line, Moshe succeeded as a small businessman, running a gallenteria shop that sold buttons, clothing, and sewing supplies. He raised a middle-class family and exposed them to music and literature. Their Shabbat table, set that week by the Kukielkas’ older two daughters and relatives while Leah was otherwise occupied, served up the delicacies of the day, which Moshe was able to afford: sweet liquor, ginger cake, chopped liver with onions, cholent (a slow-cooked beans and meat potage), potato and sweet noodle kugel pudding, compote of plums and apples, and tea. Leah’s gefilte fish, offered most Fridays, would become Renia’s favorite. No doubt, the meal was extra festive this week.
Sometimes traits of personality are visible, even unmistakable, in the earliest hours of existence; psychologies stamped on the soul. It’s possible that Moshe knew when he first held her—infusing her with his gentleness, intelligence, and incisiveness—that his spirit would carry her forward on journeys a person in 1924 could scarcely imagine. It’s possible he knew then that his little Renia, with the big green eyes, light-brown hair, and delicate face—his little, captivating marionette—was born to perform.
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Jędrzejów was a shtetl, Yiddish for “small city,” and a word that referred to Polish market towns with significant Jewish populations. Renia’s birth added one to the 4,500 Jews in the village, who composed almost 45 percent of the population. (Her younger siblings, Aaron, Esther, and Yaacov, or little Yankel, would soon add three more.) The Jewish community, established in the 1860s when Jews were finally allowed to settle in the region, was largely poor. Most Jews worked as traveling salesmen, peddlers, and small business owners with shops on or around the breezy market square. The rest were mainly artisans: shoemakers, bakers, carpenters. Jędrzejów was not as modern as Będzin, which bordered on Germany and the West, but even here a small number of elite locals were doctors, emergency medical workers, and teachers; one Jew was a judge. About 10 percent of the town’s Jews were wealthy and owned timber mills, flour mills, and mechanical workshops, as well as property on the main square.
As in the rest of Poland, modern Jewish culture flourished as Renia grew into a child of the 1930s. At that time, Warsaw alone had a staggering 180 Jewish newspapers: 130 in Yiddish, 25 in Hebrew, and 25 in Polish. Accordingly, dozens of magazine subscriptions passed through the Jędrzejów post office. The local Jewish population grew. Different prayer houses were established to suit various flavors of Judaism. Even in that small town, three Jewish bookstores, a publishing house, and Jewish libraries opened; drama groups and literary readings proliferated; political parties boomed.
Renia’s father was engaged in Jewish learning and charitable endeavors, feeding the poor, tending to the dead with the chevra kadisha burial society, and serving as a local cantor. He voted Zionist. The religious Zionists honored writer Theodor Herzl’s nineteenth-century ideals, believing that a true and open Jewish existence could be achieved only in a homeland where Jews were first-class citizens, in Palestine. Poland may have been their home for centuries, but it was temporary. Moshe dreamt of one day moving his family to “the promised land.”
The parties organized lectures and political rallies. One can imagine Renia accompanying her beloved, bearded father to one of the large and increasingly popular Zionist town meetings, like a talk on “The Struggle for a Jewish Palestine,” on May 18 1937. Clad in her Polish schoolgirl white-and-navy-blue “sailor” suit, pleated skirt, and knee-high socks, forever a lover of promenades, Renia clasped Moshe’s hand as they marched past the two new Zionist libraries to the lively gathering where hundreds of Jews debated and discussed—riled by questions of belonging. As Poles negotiated their new identities in their newly stabilized homeland, so did Jews. How did they fit into this novel country, a place where they had lived continually for more than a thousand years, yet were never truly considered Polish? Were they Polish first or Jewish first? The modern question of Diaspora identity was at a fever pitch, especially due to rapidly rising antisemitism.
* * *
Moshe and Leah Kukielka prized education. The country saw a mass influx of Jewish schools: secular Hebrew schools, Yiddish prep schools, single-sex religious schools. Of Jędrzejów’s four hundred Jewish children, one hundred studied at a charity Talmud Torah, a Jewish nursery, or the local branch of the Beit Yaakov girls’ elementary school, where students wore long sleeves and stockings. For reasons of proximity—and because religious education was costly and often reserved for sons only—Renia, like many Jewish girls, attended Polish public school.
No matter. She was at the top of her class of thirty-five. Renia had mainly Catholic friends and spoke fluent Polish in the schoolyard. Unbeknownst to her at time, this cultural immersion, including her capacity to banter in the national tongue without a Jewish-sounding accent, would be her most critical training for the underground. But while Renia excelled and assimilated, she was not entirely included. At a ceremony when she was called up to receive an academic award, a classmate threw a pencil case at her forehead, leaving a lasting impression—literally. So, was she in or was she out? She personally straddled the centuries-old hurdle: the “Polish Jewish identity” question.
Since its foundation, Poland was evolving. With ever-changing geographical boundaries, its ethnic composition varied as new communities folded into its borders. Medieval Jews migrated to Poland because it was a safe haven from western Europe, where they were persecuted and expelled. Jews were relieved to arrive in this tolerant land with economic opportunity. “Polin,” the Hebrew name for the country, comprises “Po” and “Lin,” and means “Here, we stay.” Polin offered relative freedom and safety. A future.
A coin from the early twelve hundreds, on display at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, shows Hebrew letters. Already, Yiddish-speaking Jews were a large minority, integral to Poland’s economy, working as bankers, bakers, and bailiffs. Early Poland was a republic, its constitution ratified around the same time as America’s. Royal power was curtailed by a parliament elected by the small noble class. Jewish communities and nobles had mutual arrangements: the gentry protected the Jews who settled in their towns and gave them autonomy and religious freedom; in turn, Jews paid high taxes and carried out economic activities forbidden for Christian Poles, such as loaning and borrowing capital at interest.
The 1573 Warsaw Confederation was the first document in Europe to legally mandate religious tolerance. But as much as Jews were officially integrated into Polish culture and shared philosophies, folklore, and styles of dress, food, and music, they also felt different, threatened. Many Poles resented Jews’ economic freedom. Jews subleased whole towns from nobles, and Polish serfs begrudged the rule of their Jewish landlords. The Catholic Church disseminated the hateful and absurd falsehood that Jews murdered Christians—especially babies—in order to use their blood for religious rituals. This led to attacks on Jews, with occasional periods of wide-scale riots and murder. The Jewish community became close-knit, seeking strength in its customs. A “push-pull” relationship existed between Jews and Poles, their cultures developing in relation to the other. Take, for instance, the braided challah: the soft, egg-rich bread and holy symbol of the Jewish Sabbath. This loaf is also a Polish chalka and a Ukrainian kalach—it’s impossible to know which version came first. The traditions developed simultaneously, societies tangled, joined under a (bitter)sweet gloss.
In the late seventeen hundreds, however, Poland broke down. Its government was unstable, and the country was simultaneously invaded by Germany, Austria, and Russia, then divided into three parts—each one ruled by a captor that imposed its own customs. Poles remained united by a nationalist longing, and maintained their language and literature. Polish Jews changed under their occupiers: the German ones learned the Saxon language and developed into an educated middle class, while the Austrian-ruled (Galician) Jews suffered from terrible poverty. The majority of Jews came to be governed by Russia, an empire that forced economic and religious decrees on the largely working-class population. The borders shifted, too. For example, Jędrzejów first belonged to Galicia; then Russia took it over. Jews felt on edge—in particular, financially, as changing laws affected their livelihoods.
During World War I, Poland’s three occupiers battled each other on home ground. Despite hundreds of thousands of lost lives and a decimated economy, Poland was victorious: the Second Republic was established. United Poland needed to rebuild both its cities and its identity. The political landscape was bifurcated, the long-honed nationalist longing expressed in contradictory ways. On the one side were nostalgic monarchists who called for reestablishing the pluralistic Poland of old: Poland as a state of nations. (Four in ten citizens of the new country were minorities.) The other side, however, envisioned Poland as a nation-state—an ethnic nation. A nationalistic movement that advocated for purebred Polishness grew quickly. This party’s entire platform was concerned with slandering Polish Jews, who were blamed for the country’s poverty and political problems. Poland had never recovered from World War I or its subsequent conflicts with its neighbors; Jews were accused of siding with the enemy. This right-wing party promoted a new Polish identity that was specifically defined as “not the Jew.” Generations of residency, not to mention formal equal rights, made no difference. As espoused by Nazi racial theory, which this party adopted giddily, a Jew could never be a Pole.
The central government instituted a Sunday-Rest law and discriminated against Jews in public employment policies, but its leadership was unstable. Just a few years later, in a 1926 coup d’état, Poland was taken over by Józef Piłsudski, an unusual mix of monarchist and socialist. The former general and statesman championed a multiethnic land, and although he did not particularly help the Jews, they felt safer under his semiauthoritarian rule than under representative government.
Piłsudski, however, had many opponents, and when he died in 1935, as Renia turned eleven, the right-wing nationalists easily assumed control. Their government opposed direct violence and pogroms (which occured anyway), but boycotts of Jewish businesses were encouraged. The Church condemned Nazi racism but promoted anti-Jewish sentiment. At universities, Polish students championed Hitler’s racial ideology. Ethnic quotas were enforced, and Jewish students were corralled into “bench ghettos” at the back of the lecture hall. Ironically, Jews had the most traditionally Polish education of any group, many speaking Polish (some exclusively) and reading Jewish newspapers in Polish.
Even the small town of Jędrzejów saw increasing antisemitism through the 1930s, from racial slurs to boycotting businesses, smashing storefronts, and instigating brawls. Renia spent many evenings staring out her window, on guard, fearing that anti-Jewish hooligans might burn down their house and harm her parents, for whom she always felt responsible.
The famous Yiddish comedy duo Dzigan and Schumacher, who had their own cabaret company in Warsaw, began to probe antisemitism on stage. In their eerily prescient humor sketch “The Last Jew in Poland,” they portrayed a country suddenly missing its Jews, panicking about its decimated economy and culture. Despite growing intolerance, or perhaps inspired by their discomfort and hope, Jews experienced a golden era of creativity in literature, poetry, theater, philosophy, social action, religious study, and education—all of it enjoyed by the Kukielka family.
Poland’s Jewish community was represented by a multitude of political opinions; each had its own response to this xenophobic crisis. The Zionists had lost patience feeling like second-class citizens and Renia frequently heard her father speak of the need to move to a Jewish homeland where Jews could develop as a people, not bound by class or religion. Led by charismatic intellectuals who championed the Hebrew language, the Zionists disagreed fundamentally with the other parties. The religious party, devoted to Poland, advocated for less discrimination and that Jews be treated like any other citizen. Many Communists supported assimilation, as did many in the upper classes. With time, the largest party was the Bund, a working-class, socialist group that promoted Jewish culture. Bundists were the most optimistic, hoping that Poles would sober up and see that antisemitism wouldn’t solve the country’s problems. The diasporic Bund insisted that Poland was the Jews’ home, and they should stay exactly where they were, continue to speak Yiddish, and demand their rightful place. The Bund organized self-defense units, intent on staying put. “Where we live, that’s our country.” Po-lin.
Fight or flight. Always the question.
* * *
As Renia matured into early adolescence, it’s likely that she accompanied her older sister, Sarah, to youth group activities. Born in 1915, Sarah was nine years older than Renia, and one of her heroes. Sarah, with her piercing eyes and delicate lips that always hinted at a smile, was the omniscient intellectual, the savvy do-gooder whose authority Renia simply felt. One can imagine the sisters, walking side by side at a clipped pace, all duty and energy, both donning the modern fashion of the day: berets, fitted blazers, shin-length pleated skirts, and short cut hair pulled back in neat clips. Renia, a fashionista, would have been put together from head to toe, a standard she upheld her entire life. The interwar style in Poland, influenced by women’s emancipation and by Paris fashions, saw the replacement of jewels, lace, and feathers with a focus on simple cuts and comfort. Makeup was bold, with dark eye shadow and bright-red lipstick, and hairdos and skirts were shortened. (“One could see the entire shoe!” wrote a satirist at the time.) A photo of Sarah in the 1930s shows her wearing low, thick-heeled pumps that allowed her to march—a necessity because women in this era were constant walkers, traveling long distances to work and school by foot. No doubt heads turned when the sisters entered the meeting room.
In the decades between world wars, growing antisemitism and poverty brought about a collective depression among Polish Jewish youths. They felt alienated from their country, their futures uncertain compared with those of their forbears. Jews were not allowed to join the Polish Scouts, and so a hundred thousand joined Jewish youth groups affiliated with the different political parties. These groups provided existential paths and hope for the future. Jędrzejów’s young Jews participated in a thriving youth group scene. In some photos, members wear dark colors and pose as sober intellectuals, arms crossed; in others, they stand outdoors in open land, gripping rakes, muscles flexed, tanned, and flushed with life.
Like her father, Sarah was a Zionist, but unlike Moshe, she belonged to Freedom, a group of secular, socialist Labor Zionists. Mainly middle class and worldly, Labor Zionists hoped for a homeland where they would live in collectives, speak Hebrew, and feel a sense of belonging. While they encouraged reading and debate, physicality was also prized as a way to denounce the myth of the slothful, intellectual Jew and to promote personal agency. Engaging in manual labor and contributing to the group’s resources was paramount. They idealized the working of the land; agricultural self-sufficiency went hand in hand with communal and personal independence.
There were several Labor Zionist youth groups—some more intellectual or secular; others devoted to charity, advocacy, or pluralism—but all took traditional Polish values of nationalism, heroism, and individual sacrifice and gave them a Jewish context. Freedom focused on social action and, uniquely, drew members from the Yiddish-speaking working class. The group established summer camps, training camps (hachshara), and communal farms (kibbutzim) as preparation for emigration, teaching hard labor and cooperative living—often to a parent’s dismay. Not only did Moshe bemoan Freedom for being overly liberated and insufficiently elite, but also “comrades” were prioritized over the birth family, with leaders treated as role models—almost like surrogate parents. Unlike the Scouts or sports organizations, these youth movements touched every part of their members’ lives; they were physical, emotional and spiritual training grounds. Young people defined themselves based on their group.
Sarah championed social equality and justice, and was especially keen on counseling young children. The Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum holds several photos of her at a training camp in the city of Poznán, two hundred miles from Jędrzejów, in 1937. In one, she stands tall in front of a statue, wearing a tailored suit with a high collar, her hat tilted modishly to the side; she holds a book, serious, determined. The modern world was hers for the taking.
Women in Poland held both traditional and progressive roles, spurred on by a positivist education philosophy and by World War I, which had pushed them into employment. In the new republic, elementary school was mandatory, including for girls. Universities were opened to female students. Polish women received the vote in 1918, before most Western countries.
In western Europe, Jewish families were largely middle class and constrained by broader bourgeois mores, with women relegated to the domestic realm. But in the East, most Jews were poor, and out of necessity, women worked outside the home—especially in religious circles, where it was acceptable for men to study rather than toil. Jewish women were enmeshed in the public sphere: in 1931, 44.5 percent of Jewish wage earners were female, though they earned less than men. The average marriage age was pushed back to the late twenties, even thirties, largely due to poverty. This resulted in declining fertility and, in turn, women in the workplace. In fact, to some degree, their work-life balance resembled modern gender norms.
Centuries earlier, Jewish women were accorded “the right to know.” The invention of the printing press led to a proliferation of Yiddish and Hebrew books for female readers; religious rulings allowed women to attend services; new synagogue architecture included a female annex. Now Jewish women were poets, novelists, journalists, traders, lawyers, doctors, and dentists. In universities, Jews made up a large percentage of the female students, enrolled in mainly humanities and science programs.
While the Zionist parties were certainly not “feminist”—women did not hold public office, for example—young women experienced a degree of parity in the socialist youth realm. One youth group, The Young Guard, to which Renia’s older brother, Zvi, belonged, founded the idea of the “intimate group,” with a dual leadership structure. Each section was led by a man and a woman. “Father” was the learning leader, and “Mother,” the emotional leader; equally powerful, they complemented one another. In this family model, “their children” were like siblings.
These groups studied Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, as well as female revolutionaries like Rosa Luxemburg and Emma Goldman. They explicitly advocated emotional discussion and analyses of interpersonal relationships. Members were primarily in their late teens, an age where many women were more mature than the men and, consequently, became organizers. Women led self-defense training; they were taught to be socially conscious, self-possessed, and strong. The Pioneer (Hechalutz) Union, the umbrella organization that included several Zionist youth groups and promoted agricultural training for pioneer life in Palestine, had an emergency plan B in case of conscription to the Polish army, which put exclusively women in charge. Countless photos of 1930s youth show women standing alongside men, dressed in similar dark coats and belts, or work clothes and pants; they too hold up scythes like trophies and grasp sickles like swords, preparing for lives of hard manual labor.
Sarah was a devoted Labor Zionist. Bela, the sister between her and Renia, joined Freedom too, and Zvi was fluent in Hebrew. Renia, too young to join, spent her early teens absorbing her siblings’ passions, and one can picture her dropping in on meetings, sports games, and festivities—the little sister tagging along, taking it in, wide eyed.
In 1938 fourteen-year-old Renia was completing elementary school. A small group of Jewish students received general secondary education at the Coeducational District Secondary School in Jędrzejów, but she was not able to attend high school. In some accounts, Renia blamed this on antisemitism; in others, she explained that she needed to earn money instead of continuing her studies. Many young women’s memoirs of the time speak of their ambitions to be nurses and even doctors, but perhaps Jędrzejów’s more traditional setting, or Renia’s urgent financial needs, made her seek out a secretarial career. She enrolled in a stenography course, hoping to set off on a life of office work. Little did she know that the work she was soon to take on would be of a rather different nature.
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The youth groups all organized summer activities. In August 1939, young Labor Zionists gathered at camps and symposia where they danced and sang, studied and read, played sports, slept outdoors, and led countless seminars. They discussed the recent British white paper that had limited Jewish immigration to Palestine, and considered ways to relocate, desperate to carry on the work of their collective ideals, to save the world. The summer programs ended, and on September 1, the members were just settling back at home, undergoing the transition between the chosen family and the birth one, summer and school, green and ocher, warm breeze and chill, the country and the city.
Also, that was the day Hitler invaded Poland.