Three Lines in History—A Krakówian Christmas Surprise
Gusta
I pledge to engage in active resistance within the framework of the Jewish Fighting Organization of the Halutz Youth Movement.
I swear by everything most dear to me, and above all by the memory and honor of dying Polish Jewry, that I will fight with all the weapons available to me until the last moment of my life to resist the Germans, the National Socialists, and those in league with them, the mighty enemies of the Jewish people and of all humanity.
I pledge to avenge the innocent deaths of millions of children, mothers, fathers, and aged Jewish people, to uphold Jewish spirit, and to raise the flag of freedom proudly. I pledge to shed my own blood fighting to achieve a bright and independent future for the Jewish nation.
I pledge to fight for justice, freedom, and the right of all human beings to live in dignity. I will fight side by side with those who share my desire for a free and equitable social order. I will serve humanity faithfully, dedicating myself without hesitation to achieving human rights for all, subordinating my personal desires and ambitions to that noble cause.
I pledge to accept as a brother anyone willing to join me in this struggle against the enemy. I pledge to set the seal of death on anyone who betrays our shared ideals. I pledge to hold out to the end, not to retreat in the face of overwhelming adversity or even death.
Gusta Davidson arrived in Kraków, the capital of the General Government, exhausted. She had been on the move for days, waking at dawn, walking for miles, constant nervous tension, constant danger. First, she’d helped her family members, who were trapped in a town surrounded by police. Then, the sleepless trip back to Kraków involved endless logistical quagmires: connections, horse and buggy, droshky carriage, motorcycle, and hours of waiting in train stations.
Gusta’s swollen legs now dragged her into her city and to the Jewish Quarter, a small area of low-rise buildings on the south bank of the river, far from the city’s red-roofed, grandiose castle and colorful, winding medieval center. Before the war, sixty thousand Jews lived in Kraków, or a quarter of the city’s population; the old Kazimierz area hosted seven historic synagogues with magnificent architecture dating back to 1407.
She approached the ghetto, her normally glossy lips and high cheekbones unusually pale. Black bags lingered under her eyes. She was overcome by fatigue. But as Gusta neared the barbed wire and heard the purr of the busy streets, of crowds “wafting the hum and buzz of their existence into the surrounding buildings,” as she recognized faces she knew and noted those she didn’t, she felt energized, ready to hug them all. The ghetto had been formed more than a year earlier but was constantly changing. Jews fled, then refugees came, as if it was a safe haven. Like Gusta, everyone had been on the run, from one besieged city to the next, fleeing in circles until they ran out of money or strength, or an Aktion caught them by surprise. She felt secure, even belonging, in her very homelessness. She was tempted to ask each Jew she passed, “Where did you escape from?”
Many of them, she sensed on that warm Sunday afternoon, had lost the will to live, knowing they were nearing their end. Still, they hoped for death to catch them by surprise; they refused to surrender. Make them chase us down. Gusta also understood how “older folks lacked the fighting spirit”—how years of degradation and baiting affected their “bruised, despairing souls.” The youth, on the other hand, had such a lust for life that, ironically, they pushed themselves to resistance and certain death.
At the narrow gate, an opening in the ghetto walls, which were shaped purposefully to resemble tombstones, Gusta was met by several comrades who helped drag her along. Their voices and faces, their concern over her delayed return, all merged into one warm blur. One of the few Jewish communities left, Kraków was now a center of the resistance movement, despite being a city swarming in top-level Nazis. Gusta, who’d grown up in an extremely religious family, was a leading member of Akiva, a local Zionist group. A friend had introduced her to it, and she was taken by the idealism and self-sacrifice. She served on the central committee, as writer and editor for their publication, and as record keeper for the whole organization. Unlike the secular leftist Zionist groups, Akiva emphasized Jewish tradition, celebrating Oneg Shabbat, a Sabbath ceremony, each Friday.
Just that past summer, the group was based on a farm in the nearby village of Kopaliny, a peaceful oasis amid the brutality and violence. “The stillness exhaled by the deep woods floated down from the sky to be inhaled by the earth,” Gusta described. “Not so much as a single leaf quivered.” They lived communally among pear trees, orchards, ridges, and ravines, under a sun that “rolled slowly through the azure sky.” But Gusta’s husband, Shimshon, an Akiva leader, knew that the movement would die—that most of them would die. He called a meeting. The war was not a momentary tremor: the savagery would be worse than they’d imagined; the diabolical mass killings a success. Gusta and her comrades believed Shimshon, but they also felt committed to their Akiva ideals: “to move the youth into the vanguard . . . to counteract the spreading cynicism,” to maintain decency and humanity and “cling to life.”
At the outbreak of war, Shimshon had been arrested for anti-Fascist writings. The couple, who married in 1940, made a pact that if one of them was caught, the other would turn themselves in. So Gusta went to jail too. They got out by paying an enormous bribe, and kept working. “You can’t try to preserve fighters by shielding them in a shelter,” they believed. During the summer of 1942, however, like their comrades in Warsaw and Będzin, they realized that the movement had to change.
“We want to survive as a generation of avengers,” Shimshon declared at a meeting. “If we survive, it has got to be as a group, and with weapons in our hands.” They debated: Would the Nazis’ retaliation be too great? Should they rescue only themselves? But no, they had to fight. Even Gusta—violence wholly alien to her bookish nature—felt the deep desire for revenge; to kill the enemy who had killed her father and sister. “Hands, now caked with fertile loam,” she wrote, “would soon be soaked in blood.” Akiva’s creation would be destruction. By August, they had merged with The Young Guard, Freedom, and other groups to form Kraków’s Fighting Pioneers.
Now, just inside the gates, she heard the comrades murmuring about Shimshon’s temper; how worried he’d been by her delayed arrival. She blushed, laughed loudly to conceal her embarrassment that she was the subject of gossip. Her husband even tore himself away from his work to greet her. She felt the pressure of his hard, narrow palm on her back and stared at his steely-blue eyes as they stood face-to-face. Gusta suddenly understood: he was now a full-time combatant, his fight was his “femme fatale.” She, alone, would take care of everything else. He no longer saw her—with those piercing, dark eyes, that movie-star bob—but the future.
“I only have a moment to spare,” he whispered, and she knew that was forever. He had to go to a meeting. Gusta had been to many of the weightiest leader sessions, but here she was not invited. She sensed it: they were planning their own action.
* * *
Kraków was a strategic city for the Nazis, and so they claimed it was a Saxon town, with Prussian roots. It was made the capital of the General Government in place of Warsaw and was thus heavily protected. The Jews who lived here, then, did so in close proximity to many high-ranking SS officers. The youth resistance worked in this particularly charged environment.
So, weeks later, when Shimshon did not return home for days, Gusta was beside herself. Catastrophe could strike in a second; if someone merely thought he or she recognized Shimshon, he was finished. But her husband was savvy, she consoled herself, and considered that if the resistance had put as much effort into actually fighting the enemy as it had into proclaiming its readiness to fight, it would have won many battles by now! When Shimshon finally returned, he did so only for a moment before heading back out. She was overcome with sadness. Was it better to be separated physically and imagine their reunion, or to have him close yet emotionally distant?
From Shimshon’s return, everyone knew that a momentous battle was being planned, inside the ghetto and in the forest. Everyone wanted to be involved despite cold autumn conditions. As per the underground blueprint, the Kraków group split into fives, each self-sufficient unit having its own leader, communications expert, administrator, and supply officer. Each group had its own weapons, provisions, operating area, and independent plan of action. Only members in a group knew who the other members were and knew of its plans, and even within a group, members did not know the others’ whereabouts.
All this military secrecy was anathema to their youth group culture of openness and nonviolence. But the devotion among members, who’d each lost home and family, was formidable. “The group had become the last refuge on their mortal journey,” Gusta explained, “the last port of their innermost feelings.” Though comrades were not supposed to congregate—their laughter and camaraderie were simply too conspicuous to others—they couldn’t resist. “Their displays of exuberance provided a desperate outlet for their prematurely scarred psyches,” Gusta intuited. “If someone were to ask whether they might be too immature to be effective movement fighters, then what answer could one give, since they had never had the chance to experience youth at all and never would?” The leaders forgot their movements’ ideological differences and congregated in the heart of the ghetto, even though these gatherings were exposed and risky.
Shimshon, an amateur typesetter experienced in etching and engraving, was in charge of the “technical bureau.” It was an age of “papers, clutter, stamps, passes, certifications,” Gusta observed, and Shimshon forged fictitious papers to ensure the fighters’ freedom of movement. At first, Shimshon carried the whole office “in his coat pockets,” searching furiously for a room whenever he needed to make a document and unfolding his equipment onto a tablecloth. But he needed more space and started carrying a briefcase to work out of; he would roam the ghetto, from empty room to room, with his “floating office.” Alas one briefcase didn’t suffice, so he needed two. Then more. A team of assistants trailed behind him, carrying his collection of valises, boxes, a typewriter, packages—this became a serious security issue for the entire workshop brigade. The bureau needed a permanent home.
In Rabka, a small town outside Kraków, Gusta set up an apartment in a beautiful villa. In addition to a large room with two windows, it had a kitchen and a veranda, and was “furnished modestly but tastefully and glowed with domestic tranquility.” She placed flowers on the table, hung curtains on the windows, and put up pictures on the wall—all to give the space a homey feel, like a “cozy nest,” she wrote.
Here Gusta was to “play the role of an ailing wife spending the golden autumn” in a resort region. Her six-year-old nephew Witek was with her; during the days, they would frolic in the garden, go for walks, or rent a boat on the calm river. Shimshon took the bus to Kraków each morning, becoming friendly with the other commuters. He was mysterious, wore a firm expression, and “cut an intimidating figure,” Gusta wrote. People thought he held a government job, so they gave up their seats for him. Everyone assumed the family was wealthy and that he brought work home in his briefcase to spend more time with his young wife and son. No one suspected that their villa housed the Jewish resistance’s forgery factory.
In one corner, away from the window, Gusta set up a full office: desk, typewriter, equipment. If her days were spent reveling in domestic tranquility, her nights, after Shimshon’s late arrival, were all work. When lights went out in the village, Gusta covered the windows and bolted the door. Until three in the morning, she forged documents and wrote and published their underground newspaper. Issued every Friday, the Fighting Pioneer consisted of ten typed pages, which included a list of Jewish collaborators. Gusta and Shimshon printed 250 copies that were distributed by pairs of fighters throughout the Kraków region. Then they grabbed a few hours of sleep before Shimshon had to make the seven o’clock bus back to the city—on which he had to appear refreshed.
Hanka Blas, an Akiva comrade and Shimshon’s courier, lived twenty minutes away. She and Gusta shared a “sisterly love,” according to Gusta, and though it would have been safer for them to cut all contact, they simply couldn’t stay apart, comforted in the company of friends who knew their true identities and understood their despair. The neighbors assumed that Hanka was Witek’s nanny. Hanka smuggled underground bulletins, and some mornings, loaded her basket with eggs, mushrooms, apples and the material from the night before, put on a kerchief, and got on the bus as if she were going to market. Sometimes Hanka sat right next to Shimshon, pretending she didn’t know him.
* * *
One beautiful day, Gusta relayed, Hela Schüpper arrived in the Kraków ghetto, having returned from Warsaw. A “voluptuous beauty,” with a fair complexion and full, rosy cheeks, Hela used her charm, eloquence, and deep savvy to become Akiva’s main courier. Hela grew up in a Chasidic family and attended a Polish public school. When organizers from a women’s nationalist organization came to recruit students and no one volunteered, Hela joined, ashamed by her Jewish peers’ lack of patriotism. Their meetings exposed the girl to culture, sports, and riflery and pistol practice, but she eventually quit, repulsed by what she perceived to be an antisemitic motion proposed by an affiliated leader. Shimshon convinced her to join Akiva, promising that it was not an atheist group. The Schüppers were more upset about this than about her participation in the Polish organization. Hela ran away from her family—the movement became her home.
Possessing confidence and impeccable self-control, as well as a commerce degree, she had represented Akiva that past summer at the Warsaw meeting when the youth groups decided to form a fighting force; she’d been carrying information and documents between the cities. But this morning in the fall of 1942, Hela arrived with something new: a stash of weapons. Two Browning rifles hung inside her loose sports coat, and she had three hand weapons and several clips of cartridges in her fashionable bag.
“No one had ever been greeted with the outpouring of affection that was showered on Hela,” Gusta later wrote. “It is impossible to describe the ecstasy inspired by those weapons.” People stopped into the room where she was resting just to glimpse the bag hanging on the wall, and Shimshon, she recalled, was “happy as a child.” The leaders began to fantasize: with these weapons they could garner exponentially more. This was the start of a new era.
However, they didn’t have any military training, or even the faintest military ethos. They felt uncomfortable leading their members to their deaths, to say the least. They knew they needed to collaborate with the PPR, the underground Polish Communist Party. Their main link was Gola Mire, a feisty Jewish poet who had been thrown out of The Young Guard years earlier because of her radical left-wing views. An active Communist, she’d been sentenced to twelve years in prison for organizing strikes. (Her trial defense was so moving, the prosecutor bought her roses.) In the chaos of the Nazi invasion, Gola led an escape from the women’s jail and searched the country for her boyfriend. They married in Soviet territory, and he joined the Red Army. Eventually, to avoid a Nazi manhunt, she went into hiding and delivered her first baby alone, cutting the umbilical cord herself.
After several months, though, Gola needed help and made it to the ghetto, where her infant died in her arms. She worked in a German factory, secretly puncturing holes in the food tins until the sabotage became too dangerous. Gola maintained connections with the PPR, and though the party was reluctant to collaborate with Jews, she convinced its members to help find them forest guides and hiding places. Akiva saw her as “a fierce fighter with a genuinely female heart.” The PPR, however, could not always be counted on. One time, party members were supposed to guide a Jewish five to a rebel group in the forest; instead, they misled and betrayed them. In other instances, they promised weapons and money that never arrived.
The Jewish party decided to become an independent force. The youth ate dry crusts, wore boots with holes, and slept in cellars, but they were proud. They raised money for weapons. The technical bureau sold false documents, and other monies were received, likely through robbery. One group of fighters scoured for złotys, another scouted the forests for potential bases. Hela and two other women sleuthed for safe houses around the forest. Other women were dispatched to nearby towns to warn of impending Aktions. Gusta found hiding places, accompanied groups to the forest, consulted with leaders, and connected communities. She maintained contact with Kielce, where the comrades debated whether to focus on rescuing young Jewish artists or their own families. The group had developed various proposals and sought money, but Gusta felt that they were deluding themselves. She wasn’t the right person to sell their ideas to the leadership.
Gusta was frustrated that women were not only barred from attending high-level resistance meetings but also were admonished for merely disturbing the men. Women were seemingly equal—the group had many active leading females—yet they remained outside the select circle of major decision makers. She worried that the four male leaders could be hotheaded and stubborn, but she consoled herself by hoping that at least one of the men would remember: every life counted.
* * *
A balmy October day, the sun’s autumnal rays still strong, no sense of anything unusual. But this was the morning of a massive Nazi Aktion in Kraków. Taking place a day earlier than the movement expected, they were caught off guard. Gusta and her comrades were unable to save their parents, barely making it out of the ghetto alive themselves. They hid in a warehouse, then moved from basement to basement. The worst part, Gusta felt, was the absolute silence. If in other towns the Aktions were grotesque, bloody affairs, with whole families being mowed down by machine guns, this was a “capital city” event: quiet and orderly. Most of the Jews were too weak from hunger to even scream. This silence, the loss of their families, the horror—all spurred on the youth. For distraction and revenge, they launched into action.
It was an exceptionally beautiful fall. “The leaves held on to their green freshness well into the season,” Gusta wrote. “The sun turned the earth to gold, warming it with benevolent rays.” But the movement knew that each day was a gift. When the cold, wet autumn arrived, it would be too difficult for them to navigate the forest. And so, they changed tack. The fighters decided to commit their acts right there in the city, targeting high-ranking Nazis so that “even a minor attack here would strike at the heart of authority and could damage an important cog in the machine,” Gusta wrote, eager to raise havoc and stir anxiety among the authorities. “Rational voices” told the youth to wait it out and not arouse the Nazis with small acts, but the fighters simply didn’t think they’d be alive much longer.
This was an incredibly busy time, with all the comrades working dusk to dawn. They quickly set up bases inside and outside the ghetto, as well as contact points and safe apartments in surrounding cities. The comrades went in groups of two or three to make inquiries, work as couriers, spy on the secret police, continue technical work, distribute flyers on busy streets, and confront enemies. Fighters would jump from a dark alley, deliver a blow, confiscate a weapon, and disappear. They prioritized killing traitors and collaborators. Because they looked Jewish, it was hard for many of them to work on the Aryan side without disguises; one leader donned a Polish police uniform and then “promoted himself” to a Nazi.
New and intense bonds formed among the group, and the members created a novel kind of family life to help heal from the ones that had been destroyed. For comrades across the country, the movement was their whole world, and their decisions were life-or-death, their mutual reliance paramount. The youth were college age, a time in life when partnerships are central to self-concept and identity. Some became lovers, their development rushed, rerouted. Sexual relations were often passionate, urgent, and life-affirming. Others became surrogate parents, siblings, and cousins to one another.
In Kraków, the ghetto base at 13 Jozefinska Street, a first-floor, two-room apartment, accessible off a long, narrow corridor, became their home—one that they all knew would probably be their last. Because most youth were the only living members of their families, they brought their “inheritances” (underwear, clothes, boots) to the hideout and would “arrange a liquidation”: redistributing belongings to those who needed them. Or they’d sell them for common funds. They deeply wanted to love and be loved, and created a commune where they shared all, with a common cash box and kitchen. Elsa, an intense but good-humored comrade, took the reins at the stove, and “dedicated her life and soul to kitchen management.” The kitchen was tiny, with pots and pans stacked on the floor. One had to move them to open the door. The apartment served as the base of operations, where they’d check in and then be dispatched to their posts. A minute before curfew, they all ran back, reporting success or failure, telling tales of dodging bullets—literally.
The group ate meals together at Jozefinska. Every evening was extraordinary, with conversation and laughter. Anka, who was so strong that when she was arrested, it looked like she was walking the police; Mirka, charming and radiant; Tosca, Marta, Giza, Tova. Seven people slept per bed, others on chairs or the floor. It was neither sophisticated nor particularly clean, but it was their cherished abode and the final place where they could live their true identities.
All this time, the group kept up the Akiva tradition of Oneg Shabbat. On Friday, November 20 they met for festivities from dusk to dawn. They’d spent two days preparing the meal, and came together in white blouses and shirts, at a table set with a white tablecloth. After a moment of silence, they bellowed the same songs they’d been singing for years in a deluge of harmonies. But tonight they greeted the Sabbath bride together for the final time. Someone called out, “This is the last supper!” Yes, that’s right, they all knew. At the head of the table, a leader spoke at length about how death was near. It was time “to fight for three lines in history.”
Activity ramped up. The group had to leave the ghetto because of deteriorating conditions. One night the leaders hid in a park and shot a Nazi sergeant as he walked by. They sauntered out of the bushes, mixed into the scared crowds, and zigzagged back to Jozefinska; no one even followed them. But this bold act was more than authorities would tolerate. The Nazis, determined to crush this humiliating rebellion, lied to the public about what had happened, beefed up security, moved up curfew, took hostages, made a list. They were after the leaders, who were themselves planning for their climax: an open-air fight.
After a few more successful Nazi killings in town, the movement decided to escalate activity and combined forces with Jewish members of the PPR for their crescendo. On December 22, 1942, when many Nazis were in town shopping for Christmas gifts and attending holiday parties, forty Jewish men and women fighters headed into the Kraków streets. Women distributed anti-Nazi posters throughout the city, while men carried flags of Polish partisans and left a wreath of flowers on the statue of a Polish poet—all so that Jews wouldn’t be blamed for what was about to happen. Then, the fighters attacked military garages and set off fire alarms across town, causing confusion. At seven o’clock in the evening, they descended upon three coffeehouses where Germans gathered and bombed a Nazi Christmas party. Fighters threw grenades into the Cyganeria, a café in the magnificent old town that was an exclusive meeting spot for eminent German soldiers. This effort killed at least seven Nazis and wounded many more.
Though resistance leaders were arrested and killed afterward, Jews continued to bomb targets outside the city, including the main station in Kraków, coffeehouses in Kielce, and a movie house in Radom—all with Gola Mire’s help.
* * *
A few weeks after the December attacks, Hela was on a train, panicking about where to sleep and what to eat, when she struck up a conversation with a young Polish academic. He reassured her, “The war will soon be over.”
“How do you know?” she asked.
He explained that Polish forces had started to move. He was so proud of the Polish underground—they had blown up the café!
Hela could not control herself. What if she was the last Jew? She needed him to know the truth. She had no one left to betray. “You ought to be aware, kind sir,” she said, “that the attack to which you referred, on the Kraków cafés, was the work of young Jewish fighters. If you live to see the end of the war, please, tell the world about it. And by the way, I too am a Jew.”
The man was stunned. The train approached Kraków.
“Come with me,” he said firmly when they arrived. Was this Hela’s end? Did it even matter?
Then he brought her to a warm apartment to safely spend the night.