Zivia and Frumka
DECEMBER 1939
It was New Year’s Eve, and Zivia Lubetkin was in the northeast of Poland, just outside Czyzew, a town already devastated by fighting. Cold air cuffed her cheeks. One foot in front of another. In darkness, she clambered up winding paths, snow up to her neck, her chin frozen. Every corner, each turn, was a potential end. Zivia was the only woman here, the only Jew. The Polish students who were being transported across the Soviet-Saxon border by the same smuggler hoped that if they were caught, it would be by the Germans rather than the Russian Bolsheviks, whom they loathed. But Zivia was “trembling with fear at the prospect of being caught by Nazis.” As dawn approached, they reached German territory without incident. Zivia was back in her old Poland.
The dream for most Jews was to flee Nazi occupation; Zivia came back.
While Renia began to experience the horrors of German occupation in Jędrzejów, a new community with avant-garde ideas—one that would ultimately transform her life—was developing in other parts of Poland. Despite the war, the Jewish youth movements kept on. When the comrades returned from their summer retreats in September 1939, they did not disband but actually strengthened, constantly redeploying and reforming their missions under the leadership of a few ardent, courageous, and young leaders—many of whom could have easily fled but didn’t. They stayed, or even returned, and arguably, shaped the rest of Polish Jewry.
* * *
One of those leaders was Zivia, a shy and serious young woman, born in 1914 into a lower-middle-class and religious family in the small town of Byten, where the only road was lit by kerosene lamps. Lubetkin’s parents wanted her to function comfortably in Polish society, so they sent her to Polish state elementary school; she was also her after-school Hebrew teacher’s star pupil and became fluent in the language. Zivia was clever, had an excellent memory, and, of her six siblings, was the one her father trusted most. Instead of attending high school, she worked in his grocery. But she was taken by the idealism of Freedom, living for its egalitarian philosophy and muscular cause. Soon she was donning baggy clothes and a leather jacket (the sartorial sign of a socialist), nearly unrecognizable to her parents on her visits home from the kibbutz that she attended against their wishes.
Thanks to her Zionist and socialist passions, her self-control, and work ethic, Zivia (meaning “gazelle” in Hebrew) made quick strides in the movement, and, despite her timidity and awkwardness, was promoted to leadership roles. (Her family used to urge her to loosen up; when guests came over, they forced her to practice giving speeches standing on a chair in the kitchen. She blushed and could barely utter a word.) At twenty-one, she was sent on a mission to lead the failing kibbutz in Kielce, a community that was crowded with “imposters” who wanted to go to Israel but did not subscribe to Freedom’s principles. Her success was hard-won and evident to all; she also had romantic success and met her first boyfriend, Shmuel.
Zivia, strict with others and with herself, was unafraid to offend, always speaking her truth. Her own emotions, including self-doubt, almost never poked through her tough facade. She became known for the ease with which she settled others’ disputes, and commanded respect, even from those rattled by her honesty. Each night, after completing her administrative duties, Zivia joined her female comrades for manual labor in the laundry or at the oven baking bread, and she insisted on trying men’s labor too, like constructing rail lines. She once single-handedly fought off a group of hooligans who’d been taunting the comrades. A stick in her hand, she threatened them until they ran. Zivia was “the Big Sister,” responsible for the whole family.
Promoted to coordinator of The Pioneer’s training programs for all of Poland, Zivia moved to Warsaw, accompanied by Shmuel. The British white paper, which severely restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine, made Zivia’s work even more challenging. Youth hoping to emigrate lost morale while lingering in preparation kibbutzim, but she managed to sustain educational programs and push for additional visas. Her leadership role took her to Switzerland in August 1939 as a delegate at the twenty-first Zionist Congress, a meeting of Zionist delegates from around the world. She enjoyed Geneva, liked strolling along the elegant streets, taking in the manicured lawns, the shop windows, the smartly dressed women. “If I, Zivia, ever decide to write a novel,” she said, “I shall call it From Byten to Geneva.” But despite the city’s dazzle, twenty-four-year-old Zivia was eager to rejoin her pupils, poor children, and teach them the path to personal fulfillment. The delegates sensed the difficult political future ahead; many leaders found ways to flee Europe from Switzerland. Zivia was given a special certificate allowing her to travel immediately to Palestine and completely bypass the impending war.
She did not use it.
France had closed its borders, roads were blocked, trains rerouted. It was not easy for Zivia to return to Poland, but she arrived in Warsaw on August 30, right in time for the first day of Hitler’s campaign. In the early days of the war’s chaos, Zivia traveled to shut down movement farms and seminar sites. The Pioneer’s plan B went into effect, placing her and fellow female movement leaders at the helm.
But with the immediate retreat of the Polish army, this plan, like so many that responded to the constantly shifting political reality, was revoked. Instead, Zivia and her comrades were told to head east, past the Bug River, to Russian territory, the same direction in which Renia’s family fled. For several months, the movements were based in towns that were under Soviet control, where the youth had relative freedom. During this period of upheaval, the groups solidified as strong and organized units. Zivia ensured that Freedom stayed committed to its ideals while learning how to handle new situations, like the increasingly forceful Soviet ban on religion and Jewish activity. Her new skill: quickly shifting to a new modus operandi when circumstances flipped.
As early as November 1939, dozens of branches of Freedom were active in the Soviet area, continuing to promote their Zionist, socialist, and pioneer values. Of the four main leaders, two were women: Zivia, who managed communications and intelligence, and Sheindel Schwartz, who coordinated educational activity. Sheindel was romantically involved with a third leader, Yitzhak Zuckerman, who became known by his nom de guerre, Antek.
Zivia, based in Kovel, toured the area, connecting comrades. “We raced about like madmen in the face of constant and mortal danger in an attempt to contact lost and remote members of the movement” she later wrote. She helped comrades find sustenance and comfort, but also focused on identifying escape points, trying to get people illegally to Palestine via Romania. Even though her superiors would not let her start an underground movement to fulfill her socialist Zionist aims, Zivia persisted. “It was impossible for us not to establish the pioneer-youth underground.”
She sent her boyfriend Shmuel on one of the escape routes that she’d organized, but he was caught, imprisoned, and disappeared. Devastated, Zivia kept her feelings private, and threw herself even more fiercely into work.
Zivia was in demand. Serious Frumka, who had already returned to Warsaw to lead the youth there, wrote to the Freedom leadership to request that her dear friend Zivia return too, claiming that she’d be the best person to deal with the new Nazi government. Everyone senior had fled Warsaw, leaving that vital city with only second-tier captains who were ill-prepared to liaise with German authorities or with Poles.
Because of the growing Soviet threat, Zivia was supposed to relocate to Vilna, a city newly controlled by Lithuania, which she felt was Freedom’s way of protecting her. She resisted this coddling, insisting that she go to Warsaw to help guide her movement, to comfort the youth whose lives had been thrown into chaos, and to promote pioneer education and Labor Zionist goals. As usual, she made her own decisions and plunged headfirst into the fire.
* * *
On New Year’s Eve 1939, Freedom held an all-night conference, which was part fete, part first official underground meeting. “We ate, drunk, and made merry,” Zivia wrote later, “and between drinks discussed the Movement and its future course.” In a member’s apartment in Lvov, Zivia feasted on chocolate, sausage, and black bread with butter, and listened as leaders reiterated the importance of keeping the Zionist flame alive, of “upholding Jewish humanity” in the Soviet area and in German-occupied Poland.
That night, despite pleas from Antek, the tall, blond, and handsome coleader with whom Zivia had become increasingly close, she left in the direction of Nazi-occupied Poland, afraid of what she’d encounter and doubting whether she would be able to withstand life in the new regime. She was saddened to leave friends with whom she’d spent stormy months engaged in dangerous work, whom she’d come to rely on to greet her at the end of difficult missions. But Zivia was also determined. “While I was still preoccupied with these grim thoughts,” she later testified, “the train thundered to the platform, and people pushed their way into the cars.” She felt warm hands, warms tears, and then she too was off, lurching away from her comrades.
Zivia was smuggled back into Nazi territory in a plan arranged by Frumka. She endured a long journey of train rides and that all-night, snow-drenched hike alongside a group of male Polish students who were trying to get home. Once the group reached the border town, their courteous attitude toward Zivia changed. In Soviet land, a Jewish mate was an asset, but in Nazi territory, Zivia became an inferior being. At the station, they watched as a German slapped a group of Jews and told them they could not wait in the same waiting room as Poles and Aryans. Zivia’s group complained that she too should be removed, but she didn’t react. “I clenched my teeth and didn’t move an inch.” Zivia had to develop a new type of inner strength; the ability to hold her head high in the fog of degradation. The train car was nearly pitch black—there was no lighting—and everyone hid from the Germans. A man heaved a sigh, and Zivia watched as he was brutally attacked by a group of Poles who accused him of giving “a Jewish sigh.” He was thrown out of the carriage.
It was now 1940. A brand-new year. A brand-new experience of being a Jew—from pride to humiliation. And, she thought, as her train rolled into Central Station, past the grand boulevards and open squares of pecking pigeons, a brand-new Warsaw.
* * *
Jews had arrived relatively late to Warsaw. Antisemitic laws banned them from the Middle Ages until French emperor Napoléon I’s conquest in the early eighteen hundreds. Jews financed his wars, initiating the city’s Jewish banking culture. In the mid-nineteenth century, by then under Russian occupation, the Jewish population increased, and a small class of assimilated, “progressive” Jews developed in this verdant metropolis that spread along both banks of the Vistula River, bustling with vendors and trams, and crowned by a striking medieval castle.
After 1860, when the Jews from the Pale of Settlement—the Russian territory where they had been allowed to settle—were permitted access to the city, the population exploded. By 1914, Jews were a dominating force in Warsaw’s industry, and finally authorized to settle wherever they wanted. Jewish culture—theater, education, newspapers, publications, political parties—proliferated; the population comprised both the urban impoverished and the wealthy cosmopolitan. The thriving community was symbolized by its Great Synagogue, a grandiose building consecrated in 1878. The largest synagogue in the world, it was designed by Warsaw’s leading architect, with elements of imperial Russian style. Not a traditional prayer house, it hosted an elite congregation, with an organ, a choir, and sermons delivered in Polish. The spectacular edifice was a marker of Jews’ prosperity and acculturation—and of Poland’s tolerance.
The Warsaw that Zivia knew was the epicenter of all prewar Jewish life. When the Nazis invaded, 375,000 Jews of all backgrounds called it home, about a third of the capital’s population. (For contrast, in 2020, Jews make up roughly 13 percent of New York City’s population.)
Zivia had been gone barely four months, but came back to a dramatically divided landscape: non-Jewish Warsaw and Jewish Warsaw were now two different territories. She immediately noticed that the streets were crowded—with Poles only. Antisemitic legislation had been put into place right after the occupation, with new discriminatory regulations passing each day. Jews were no longer allowed to work in Christian factories or take trains without special permission. Only a few Jews were visible on the avenues, with the white armbands they were forced to wear—their “badges of shame”—stepping quickly, their eyes darting to ensure they weren’t being followed. Zivia froze, horrified. How would she ever get used to this? But then she wondered whether the Jews wore their bands defiantly, in secret contempt for their oppressors. She held this thought and let it reassure her.
The roads were filled with elegant cars, carriages, red trams. But Zivia preferred to walk rather than take the streetcar. She wanted to see up close the dynamic city she’d left behind; the city she recalled for its café terraces, balconies adorned with flowers, and lush parks lined with mothers, nannies, and their ornate prams. She’d heard rumors of the city’s ruin, but now, with her first steps into town, aside from a few bombed buildings, things looked quite as they had been. Poles filled the streets, business as usual. “There was a pleasant feeling in the air,” she recalled, “as if nothing had happened.” The only change came with the appearance of German convoys down the streets, scattering the terrorized population.
And then there was the old Jewish neighborhood. Zivia headed straight for The Pioneer headquarters. She found a pile of rubble. Here it was clear that times had changed. Zivia was reentering a new world, with Jews hiding in the shadows, fearing open air, clinging to buildings to avoid contact with a German and whatever humiliation might be inflicted.
Searching for Jews of “a different mettle,” Zivia headed to the Freedom headquarters at 34 Dzielna Street, where many movement members had lived before the war. Dzielna, four three-storey buildings set around a courtyard, had always been a lively locale, but Zivia was stunned by the thick crowd, which included hundreds of comrades who’d made it to Warsaw from small towns. They, in turn, were shocked, and elated, to see her. The man in charge of food threw a spontaneous party in her honor, declaring it “an official holiday,” serving extra rations of bread and jam. Zivia and Frumka huddled affectionately, reviewing everything that had happened since the Nazis attacked, what had been done, and, most important, what had to be done next.
* * *
One can imagine Frumka’s joy at seeing her old friend and trusted comrade Zivia walk into their headquarters. For several months, she had been a main leader of the Freedom movement in Warsaw, helping to reestablish Dzielna as a site of family, of warmth, hope, and passion, despite all the new horrors.
Born near the overwhelmingly Jewish and intellectual eastern city of Pinsk, Frumka Plotnicka was the same age as Zivia, twenty-five, which suddenly made them among the eldest members of the group. Frumka, with her pronounced features, her high forehead and straight hair, was the middle of three daughters in a poor Hasidic family that followed the Karliner rabbi, whose values included straightforwardness and the pursuit of perfection. Frumka’s father had trained to be a rabbi but, on his rabbi’s advice, instead became a merchant in order to support his family. The family business was the steer trade. Unfortunately, he was not a natural steer trader. Frumka’s parents could not afford to educate her, so she was taught by her older sister, Zlatka, a sharp thinker who excelled at a gymnasium (Polish prep school). Zlatka was a Communist who, like their father, held her emotions close.
Frumka, on the other hand, was like their mother: industrious, devoted, and humble. An ardent socialist Zionist, she joined Freedom at age seventeen and was fully committed—an extra sacrifice for a poor girl whose family needed her help. Though she was a deeply analytic thinker, she was awkward, with a serious and somber demeanor. She had trouble connecting with people and sustaining friendships, and remained on the sidelines of the movement for some time. Through activity, however, Frumka channeled her turbulent emotions and her natural compassion. She cared for comrades and insisted that a sick member stay at the training camp rather than go home; she managed retreats, organizing everything from curricula to catering, and disciplined the youths, getting lazy ones to work, and refusing handouts from local farmers. She shone in a crisis, where her moral compass was unwavering.
“In gray times, she hid in a corner,” a senior emissary wrote about her, “but in critical moments, she held herself at its head. Suddenly she revealed greater merit and virtue than anyone; her moral vigor, the intensity of her analysis always led to action.” Frumka, he continued, had the unique ability to “unite her capabilities at analyzing life experience with gentleness, love, and motherly worry.” Another friend explained, “Her heart never beat to the rhythm of minutia. She seemed to be waiting for the big moments where she could unload the love inside her.”
Frumka could usually be found wrapped in her wool coat, in a dark crook of the room, listening. Really listening. She remembered every detail. On other occasions, she would suddenly address the whole room in her “magical accent”—a folksy, literary Yiddish. One comrade recalled a spontaneous speech she gave “about the fears of a Jewish girl who found her way but still hasn’t found peace in her heart.” She gripped everyone’s attention with her simplicity and sincerity: “the blush in her face turned into fire.” A friend wrote a story about their time together in the Białystok public garden, noting how Frumka skipped through the flowers, entranced by their beauty.
Frumka’s soft chin rounded out her stark features, revealing her warmth. Comrades appreciated her composure and passion, and she was constantly being asked for advice. Like shy Zivia, Frumka had been an obedient introvert, and she, too, surprised family with her leadership role. If dedicated, no-nonsense Zivia was the group’s big sister, then empathetic, gentle Frumka became “Die Mameh” (the mother, in Yiddish).
After slowly ascending the ranks, one rung at a time, and traveling around the country teaching seminars, Frumka moved to Warsaw to work for The Pioneer headquarters with Zivia. In the summer of 1939, activity proliferated, but emissaries from Palestine began postponing their visits, and Frumka took on senior responsibilities. Moving to Eretz Israel, the “land that’s all sun,” was her dream. She was supposed to make “aliyah” (emigrate to Palestine) that summer, but the leadership asked her to wait until the fall. She dutifully accepted, even though her yearnings overwhelmed her, and she was terrified of never making it. Indeed, it was not a good fall.
Once war broke out, Frumka went east as instructed. But fleeing a crisis did not suit her, and she immediately asked the Freedom leaders to let her leave the area where her family lived and return to Nazi-occupied Warsaw. Her comrades were stunned. Frumka was the first one to go back.
Now Zivia was here too.
* * *
Frumka and Zivia found themselves a secluded corner in a quiet room, and Frumka filled Zivia in on all that she’d achieved at Dzielna over the past three months. The commune provided refuge for youth fleeing their towns; most of its residents were women. Frumka led them in establishing aid initiatives and became known around town for providing food, employment, and comfort in these times of hunger, confusion, and scattered families. The ethos of Freedom had shifted: it no longer focused solely on its movement and pioneering goals but on helping the suffering Jewish masses. Zivia, who’d always championed social equality, was immediately on board.
With support from “the Joint”—the American Joint Distribution Committee, or JDC, founded in 1914 to aid Jews across the world—Frumka established a public soup kitchen that fed six hundred Jews. She set up study groups, spearheaded collaborations with other movements, and housed nonmovement people in any available room. Just across from the infamously brutal Pawiak Prison, in an area filled with police, spies, and lethal gunshots, this buzzing nest of revolutionaries inspired new thoughts and action. According to a female Freedom youth group counselor, “The Pioneers longed to live, to act, to realize dreams. . . . Here one did not run away from the truth, but also, didn’t make peace with it. . . . The work broke bodies and ruined spirits, but in the evening, when everyone assembled in our house on Dzielna, we felt no anger.” Zivia sensed the warm camaraderie and positive spirit that infused the space, thanks to Frumka and the young women around her.
Frumka had also been working outside Dzielna, even outside Warsaw, prescient about the need to forge long-distance connections. She’d dressed up as a non-Jew, covering her face with a kerchief, and traveled to Łódź and Będzin to glean information. The Freedom kibbutz in Będzin ran a laundry and served as a hub, helping local refugees. In Łódź, the commune was led almost entirely by women who had refused to flee, including Frumka’s sister Hanzte, as well as Rivka Glanz and Leah Pearlstein. The women sewed for the Germans who, on many occasions, threatened to confiscate their equipment. Each time, feisty and responsible Leah stood up to the Nazis. She always won.
* * *
That first evening, together with other Freedom leaders, Zivia and Frumka decided to focus on finding escape routes to Palestine as per their Zionist goals, and also on community aid. To do both, they needed to uphold the movement’s values, while keeping its regional kibbutzim strong.
Not to be outdone by Frumka’s activity, Zivia barely took a moment to rest at Dzielna before she was off. First, to make connections and begin lobbying at the Judenrat.
Early on, the Nazis decided to pit Jew against Jew. The ghettos, they decreed, would be managed and whipped into shape by Jews themselves—not the elected kahals, that had governed Jewish communities for centuries, but by Nazi-controlled councils, or Judenrats. Each Judenrat registered all Jewish citizens, issued birth certificates and business permits, collected taxes, distributed ration cards, organized labor forces and social services, and oversaw its own Jewish police or militia. In Warsaw, these militiamen—who wore caps and boots and wielded rubber clubs—were mainly educated middle-class men, often young lawyers and university graduates. To many, including Renia, the militias enlisted “only the worst type of people,” who dutifully fulfilled Gestapo orders, searching, regulating, and surveilling Jews. Some Jews claimed that they were forced into the Judenrat at the risk of being killed; some hoped that by volunteering to participate, they would save their families (they didn’t) or even help the larger community. The Judenrats as an institution were a tool to suppress Jews, but the subjective will of their many individual members varied, and their tone varied by ghetto. These were heterogeneous groups, with players ranging from heroic helpers to Nazi collaborators.
Unlike others who feared the Judenrat, seeing them as Gestapo puppets, Zivia badgered them for additional food ration permits. Hair unbrushed, a cigarette dangling permanently from her lips, as if her “vexations dissolved in the rings of smoke that she blew,” she became an enduring fixture in the halls of the main Jewish community organizations. She spent entire days at 5 Tlomackie, the Jewish Self-Help organization, with its white, marble pillars and grand, open hallways. Built adjacent to the Great Synagogue in the 1920s, the building had been Warsaw’s Judaic Library and the first Jewish research center in Europe that focused on both theological and secular studies. In wartime, it became the center of Jewish mutual aid.
There, Zivia spent afternoons haggling with the heads of the JDC and welfare organizations, exchanging information with youth group leaders, trading underground publications, and convincing rich Jews to loan her significant sums. She was in charge of the money sent to Warsaw for the Zionist youth groups, and the recipient of secret correspondence from foreign units. At night, Zivia toiled with her female comrades in the laundry. Eating little herself, and growing so thin she worried others, she was constantly giving members pep talks, listening to their woes, and, of course, jolting them with her straight talk. The young comrades adored her lack of pretension, quick decision-making, and frank advice.
In a climate of hunger and humiliation, Zivia felt responsible for feeding and housing the youth and tried her best to protect them from being abducted and sent to work camps. In Warsaw, all Jews aged twelve to sixty were subject to forced labor, a violent and abusive situation they all feared constantly. To obtain workers, the Germans would cordon off a street and snatch all the Jews who happened to be there—even those running home with a slice of bread for their children. People were herded into trucks and driven away to do hard labor while being beaten and starved. Zivia intervened on several occasions, freeing captured comrades, a string of cigarette smoke tracing each of her movements.
A main project of hers was negotiating the reestablishment and maintenance of communal training farms, which, so far, had been spared by the Nazis. During the war, the farms in Grochów and Czerniaków became important sites for labor, employing in the fields, flower gardens, and dairy farms youths who might otherwise have been abducted. They also served as centers for education, with singing and dancing. Zivia used to travel extensively in her attempts to coordinate educational activities in the regions, but she particularly enjoyed visiting these leafy landscapes, where at night she could expose her Jewish features and revel in the relative freedom, and which served as escapes from hunger, lice, and the rampant epidemics of Warsaw, not to mention random shootings and daily torture.
Later in the war, Zivia used to bribe a Jewish policeman, scale the ghetto wall, and leave via the cemetery. Then she’d fume at the waste of time it took to get out. This is also how Zivia would accompany émigrés out of the ghetto: slip cash at the right instant and then cross the gate, carrying a briefcase, appearing like an assured schoolgirl striding down the street, ready for a day’s work.
But for now, there was no walled ghetto in Warsaw. Despite despair, confusion, and the odd violent episode, there was not even the premonition of the imprisonment and murder that was to come; the youths’ worst fear was that pogroms would erupt among Poles when the Nazis inevitably lost and retreated. For now, these young Jews were simply busy social activists, passing on pioneer values by teaching history and social theory. For now, they were busy strengthening units that would soon come to serve a wholly, and holy, different purpose.
* * *
One day in spring 1940, Zivia returned to Dzielna to find the usual hum of activity. Also, Antek.
He too had returned to Nazi-occupied territory. Some suspected he’d followed Zivia. Guarding her emotions, Zivia wrote nothing about their personal relations; Antek, on the other hand, reminisced about their earliest interactions. Once, back in Kovel, when Zivia was sick, he trekked out in the mud to bring her fish and cake. Instead of a warm thanks, she scolded him for looking so messy. “I was amazed at her nerve,” he said. “She was talking like a wife.” Months later, he saw her deliver an impassioned lecture, pounding her fist with verve—and fell in love.
Antek joined Zivia and Frumka as leaders, and they built up Freedom in Warsaw and the provinces. Despite her “Jewish nose” and “halting” Polish, Frumka maintained connections between Warsaw headquarters and the Polish towns, offering support and recruiting new members. She traveled more and more, to lead seminars and maintain cross-country connections among the movement, but also, some guessed, to avoid Antek and Zivia. She was rather fond of Antek, but it was increasingly clear that his romantic interest was directed entirely at her best friend.
At Dzielna, Zivia (and Frumka, when she was there, and Antek) enhanced the mood in the evenings by sharing an anecdote from the day, a quiet song, a short play—all behind draped windows. The community drew courage from stories of bravery in Jewish history. They read books, learned Hebrew, and engaged in stormy discussions. They maintained their beliefs in compassion and social action in a world of terror, murder, and every man for himself. They hoped to build strong Jews who would survive the war (most of them, they still thought). They were preparing for a future they still believed in. A light mood existed among the members—a “spirit of freedom,” as was once articulated by the famed poet Yitzhak Katzenelson, who lived and taught at Dzielna for several months.
“Zivia” became the secret code name for the entire movement in Poland.