Renia and Vladka
JULY 1943
Weeks after the deadly partisan fiasco, the head of the Będzin Judenrat was arrested. Renia knew what that meant: the final expulsion was coming. The end of the ghetto. The end of them.
The kibbutz had to prepare.
But there was discord. Most of the group no longer dreamed of a grand battle. So many potential fighters had died already. It was time to run. Chajka and comrade Rivka Moscovitch, however, refused to leave, still insisting on revolt. Fight or flight.
Frumka and Herschl decided to send out the children; the strong would go last. Aliza Zitenfeld, the Atid teacher, disguised the orphans as Aryans in order to ship them to German farms. Renia and her comrades transformed documents, covering up old data with false information and fingerprints. At dawn, Ilza Hansdorf snuck the children out and accompanied them to the town council of a rural village. The children explained that they had no parents and sought work. Many farmers agreed—the cheap labor was welcome. In a matter of days, Ilza found places for eight children. As per plan, the orphans wrote letters, directing them to a Polish address, reporting that all was well. Then two girls stopped writing. Renia figured they’d been recognized, “and who only knows what happened to them.”
The children who looked the most Jewish remained in the ghetto.
Zivia wrote to the Będzin group from her hiding spot in Warsaw. One missive urged them to give up their dreams of rebellion. Having seen the results of her own uprisings, she no longer promoted fighting—the death toll was not worth it. If they wanted to stay alive, she told them, come to Warsaw.
Chajka was livid and called this message “a slap in the face that stunned us.” She guessed that the Warsaw fighters were “spiritually exhausted” and “afraid of what they had started with their own hands, and the responsibility that had fallen on their shoulders was too great.” Why should the Będziners live in the shadow of their glory and rest peacefully on their laurels?
Zivia suggested that those with Aryan appearances could manage in the big city with false papers. Those with mixed appearances would live in bunkers. “The Poles would let them sit in their hiding places,” Renia explained, “naturally, for great sums of money.” The hidden business of hiding.
* * *
Later in the war, especially after ghettos were destroyed, a main role of the courier girls was the rescue and sustenance of Jews in concealment—either as Aryans or in physical hiding. The kashariyot relocated ghetto Jews, including many children, in the Aryan side of town; found them apartments and hiding places (melinas) inside homes, barns, and commercial spaces; supplied them with false papers; and paid the Poles who hid them, taking care of room and board. In the East, they placed many Jews in partisan camps. In Warsaw and western towns, the kashariyot visited their charges—but not too often—bringing them news and moral support. They constantly had to stave off schmaltzovniks who threatened to “burn” the hideouts, and frequently had to relocate Jews when their landlords gave them up or because they were on the verge of being found out. They did this all while maintaining a disguised life themselves.
Vladka Meed began rescuing children while the ghetto was still intact. The Nazis were particularly brutal with children, who represented the Jewish future. Boys and girls who were not useful for slave labor were some of the first Jews to be killed. Along with two other Bundist couriers—Marysia (Bronka Feinmesser), a telephone operator at the Jewish children’s hospital, and Inka (Adina Blady Szwajger), a pediatrician, she tried to place Warsaw’s few remaining Jewish children with Polish families. These women took children from crying mothers’ arms—mothers who had already saved their sons and daughters time and time again; mothers who knew this might be their final farewell but also knew their kids’ chances of survival were likely better on the Aryan side.
Jewish children had to cross the wall, keep their identities a secret, take on new names, and not slip up or mention the ghetto. They could not ask questions or engage in childlike babble. They had to speak proper Polish. They could not give away information if captured. And the host families had to commit and not pull out at the last minute. One hostess was upset that the ten-year-old twins delivered to her door had brown eyes and dark hair. In the end, she accepted them, but they were miserable away from their mother and stopped eating. Vladka visited them frequently, bringing letters. When the host family moved to an apartment facing the ghetto, the girls realized they could see their mother through the window. The children begged the husband—who worked in the ghetto—to bring food to their mother and tell her about the window. The mother passed by many times a day; the girls were overjoyed to see her but had to sneak their peeks. If a guard saw them, he’d point his carbine directly at the window. Vladka had to harden her heart and warn them that what they were doing could endanger everyone’s lives.
In another family, Vladka brought a Jewish toddler dresses, toys, and food, but the host gave them all to her own children. Vladka kept moving a six-year-old boy because his hiders either could not deal with his depression or became fearful of German raids—despite the fact that they were being paid 2,500 złotys a month. (Currency values fluctuated a great deal during the war, but according to rates for 1940–41, that would have been the equivalent of about $8,000 today.) In a testimony given at the Holocaust Survivors’ Centre in London in 2008, “hidden child” Wlodka Robertson recalled being shipped from family to family. Each month, she worried that no one would come pay her “rent,” but each month, Vladka Meed arrived, courageous and flirtatious, gaining access wherever needed.
Once the ghetto was razed, the resistance workers on the Aryan side were at a loss—the uprising had been their raison d’etre. The stench of burning still lingered, the Germans were everywhere, searching and arresting Poles, killing those who helped any Jews. Local Polish defense forces were established: they provided security for their neighborhoods but reported all outsiders, which made Vladka’s job even harder. Now the ZOB’s efforts went toward helping the surviving fighters as well as other surviving Jews. Several Jewish relief organizations, based on party affiliations, were established. Żegota (the Council for Aid to the Jews), a Catholic Polish organization founded in 1942, was also hard at work. Żegota’s leader—an outspoken antisemite before the war—claimed that they would do everything to help Jews, and risked their lives to do so (though, apparently, with the hope that after the war, the Jews would leave Poland for good).
These organizations, which found Jews hiding places, supported them, helped children, and kept up contact with the Polish underground, labor camps, and partisans, had many overlaps. They all received foreign money, some via the Polish government in exile in London. Funds came from the US Jewish Labor Committee (supporting the Bund) and the American JDC, the same body that financed the ghetto soup kitchens and the uprising. Before 1941, the JDC was able to send money—donated mainly by American Jews—directly to Poland. After 1941, borders were closed, and funds were borrowed from wealthy Jews within Poland (who were not allowed to possess more than 2,000 złotys), and from those who were fleeing and could not take their savings with them. Most of the capital came from prewar wealth, though some Jews continued to earn money in the Warsaw ghetto, as smugglers, from selling off the goods stored in warehouses in the ghetto area, and in manufacturing for the German army and the private Polish market. Other money was smuggled into Poland illegally. Memoirs tell of cash that arrived from London and was converted from dollars to pounds to złotys on the black market—and, how groups accused one another of skimming off exchange rates. Overall, the JDC provided more than $78 million in US dollars to Europe during the war, or roughly equivalent to $1.1 billion today, with $300,000 donated to Poland’s Jewish underground in 1943–44.
Rescue groups used the funds to smuggle crucifixes and New Testaments into camps for Jews who wanted to escape, and to support penis and nose surgeries as well as abortions. Żegota had a “factory” to forge fake documents, including birth, baptismal, marriage, and work certificates, as well as a medical department with trusted Jewish and Polish doctors who were willing to visit melinas and treat sick Jews. Vladka found a photographer who could be trusted to come to Jewish hiding places to take pictures for fake documents. She became a main courier for rescue; her organization helped twelve thousand Jews in the Warsaw area. And the young woman did all this without keeping written records of Polish names or current addresses, which was too risky. Some couriers used fudged receipts that they hid under their watchbands; many used code names. Vladka remembered everything.
Most of the Jews who survived until late 1943, Vladka found, were adults, and of the professional class. They’d been able to pay smugglers, they’d had Gentile contacts, they spoke a more refined Polish. Some of them had stored valuables with Gentile friends, but most were left with nothing. An estimated twenty thousand to thirty thousand Jews remained in hiding in the Warsaw area, and Vladka’s work spread by word of mouth. Jews found her through mutual friends, approaching her at random on the streets. To receive aid, Jews had to submit a written application detailing their position and their “budgets.” Vladka read through these scribbled appeals.
Most applicants were the sole survivors of their families, having run from camps or jumped off trains. An oral surgeon requested dental instruments so that he could work; another man requested money to support his orphaned niece and nephew. A young newspaper delivery boy had outlived his family and found shelter with a Polish family that cared for him as long as he brought in wages. He refused to enter a hiding spot and coveted his freedom, but he was desperate for a winter coat so he could continue to work during the cold months. The organization had only enough to offer 500 to 1,000 złotys per person per month, when the cost of living was about 2,000. But it did all it could. Young, Aryan-looking Jewish women went out to deliver the monthly funds, visit their charges, and help when plans backfired—as they often did.
Some ads for rooms were traps, some neighbors were nosy, and, in some cases, the landlord would raise his price once the Jew arrived. Kashariyot often had to imply that the Polish resistance was involved, to make the hosts feel proud. In one melina, a woman started hallucinating in Yiddish. The son of the Pole hiding them poisoned her out of fear and hid her body under the floorboards of the bunker. The other Jews, including this woman’s daughter, were traumatized. Vladka arranged for a new apartment to house the Jews and the landlady.
Similarly, Vladka found a young Jewish woman named Marie a housekeeping job—these were the best situations because they provided food and lodging and one rarely had to go outside. One day the little girl of the house asked Marie what life was like in the ghetto. Marie panicked. It turned out the girl’s mother was Jewish, and the father had banished his wife to the ghetto. The Gestapo came over to search their home for the missing mother. Marie felt unsafe, so Vladka found her a new shelter.
One Jewish couple lived with their former maid in her miniscule bedroom inside an SS residence—Vladka had to move them. Another woman and her son lived under a pile of debris, in the dark, crouching there for months on end; they had not washed the whole time. The landlady had sold all their clothes. Again, Vladka had to carefully relocate them and provide medical treatment.
As the Germans began to lose on the eastern front, the reign of terror in Warsaw peaked. Poles were kidnapped for slave labor or sent to Pawiak Prison. Hiding places had to be even more creative. In one apartment, a wall was built next to a toilet so that a Jew could hide in the remaining space in the bathroom. The wall was painted and hung with decorative brushes. Another Jew hid in a hollow tiled stove.
Some people hid in more “liveable” melinas, where—despite the anxiety and depression caused by being confined—they could still function. Vladka brought composition paper to a hidden musician who’d been playing on a tuning fork; she gave two women books to tutor the household children. Vladka’s fellow underground operative, Benjamin, hid with his family in the kitchen of a shed inside a Catholic cemetery on the outskirts of town. They had little food but were able to light Sabbath candles.
Thirty Jews—including the historian Emanuel Ringelblum—lived in a secure suburban hideout under a garden; the admission fee was 20,000 złotys per person. These Jews collected research and wrote essays and reports. To hide his large food shipments, the host opened a grocery store. Tragically, the man had a fight with his mistress, the only person outside his family who knew about the bunker. She reported it—everyone was killed.
Vladka made connections with Hungarian smugglers, with partisans, and with Jews outside Warsaw. She traveled without papers to help a group of Jewish fighters who’d escaped from the Częstochowa ghetto and were hiding with peasants in the countryside. On the train, she pretended to be a smuggler, carrying fake merchandise—money for the Jews was hidden under her belt. At a major inspection, a “fellow smuggler” directed her to a freight train where all the smugglers hid. She learned that Polish smugglers had good tactics for avoiding Nazis and often followed them. She arrived in the village and found the house that Antek had described, but the landlady denied all knowledge. Vladka persisted, and finally the woman led her to a shed. The comrades—already in debt—were ecstatic, and from then on, she brought them cash, clothes, and medication on a regular basis. Once, funds from the US and London were delayed, and she visited later than expected to find that the landlady had evicted them. Several had been killed, others joined partisan groups, a few hid in the forests, skeletal. Vladka arranged for new Poles to take them in.
Vladka also helped Jews in forced-labor camps, most of whom were in horrific physical and spiritual condition. She had great difficulty accessing the Jews in a brutal labor camp in Radom. She asked locals where she could go to buy cheap goods from Jews. They explained that the Jews had nothing good left to sell but informed her about the Jewish bathing time, when one could approach the fence. Vladka found it crowded with smugglers selling scraps of food. They didn’t want competition and tried to kick her out, but she convinced them she was a buyer. Eventually she managed to speak to a Jew, but he didn’t trust her—even when she used Yiddish. Another contact kept the money she handed him for himself.
Finally, she spoke with a Jewish woman who was responsive. The woman was overjoyed that they hadn’t been forgotten and asked Vladka for news, mainly curious about hidden children. While she was conversing, local kids threw stones at Vladka and yelled “Jew!” Vladka ran, found a horse and carriage, and sped to the train station, where she waited all night. Soon after, she returned to the camp with 50,000 złotys. She asked a Ukrainian guard for permission to enter to buy shoes from the Jews and successfully delivered the cash. The guard expected to take her out on a date that evening, but by dinnertime, she was gone.
Through all this harrowing work, each courier had to maintain her own life fiction, dealing with extortionists and informants. Marysia was once recognized on the street by a Pole from her childhood neighborhood who offered her a choice: come with me to the Gestapo or to a hotel room. She ran into a candy shop, and the owners walked her “home” to a nearby house. To avoid being found out again, she spent the night in the forest.
Vladka moved flats several times. She had hidden the head of the Bund youth movement at her place, and her apartment was “burnt,” or ratted out, by an informant. The Poles locked them in. She set fire to all her papers, and she and the Bundist tried to escape from the window by climbing down bedsheets, but the leader was badly wounded. They were both arrested, but comrades bribed the prison guards, and she was released for 10,000 złotys. The Bund leader, however, died. The movement sent Vladka to the countryside for a while so that she’d be forgotten by authorities. Though she felt free in the forest, where she didn’t have to pretend in front of the trees, she found the constant pretense—in particular, spending Sundays at a village church—to be particularly oppressive.
When back in Warsaw, Vladka continued to search for good ID papers for herself, and to move around, pretending to be a smuggler to explain why she was out all night. She rented a tiny, dreary apartment passed on by another Jewish courier. Benjamin, the operative who was living in the cemetery shed, helped her create hiding places like a valise with a double bottom and a ladle with a hollow handle. The neighbors found out that the former tenant was Jewish and began to suspect Vladka. But if she left, it would reinforce their suspicion and detract from the Christian identity she’d spent so long cultivating. She stayed and acted ultra Polish: she arranged for a Polish friend, her “mother,” to visit her frequently; she obtained a phonograph and played cheerful music; she invited her neighbors over for tea. In order to prove themselves, Jews in hiding mailed themselves letters from nearby towns to make it seem that they had local friends and family; Chasia had a “suitor” visit her. Vladka’s “mother” hosted her patron saint day party, to which Vladka invited her surviving Bundist friends. They sang only in Polish, with Yiddish whispers. A party was a difficult thing for the young Jews—the more joy they pretended, the more sadness they felt.
Like Vladka, roughly thirty thousand Jews survived by “passing,” their lives a constant act. Most were young, single, middle-class and upper-middle-class women with “good” Polish accents, documents, and looks. Half were—or had fathers who were—in trade or worked as lawyers, doctors, and professors. More women than men tried to pass because of the relative ease of disguise. Women also asked for help and were generally treated more courteously. Many Jews were galvanized into saving themselves once their parents (in particular, mothers) were killed, and they finally felt alone and free. Men usually made this decision alone, spontaneously, while women were often encouraged by friends or relatives. Some parents urged their children to flee to the Aryan side, giving them the mission, and permission, to “live for their family.” Most passers had previously been mistaken as non-Jews, so they felt confident they could pull off the role. They usually had to share rooms, giving them no privacy or reprieve.
Those who had a Jewish social circle where they could be “out” lived a double identity but ultimately fared better psychologically because they had a “backstage”—a rest from their constant performance and time to recharge. Friends who appreciated their strength fed their confidence at playing a “front stage” role. Most passers were not affiliated with any organization, but some were recruited by the Polish underground, which assumed they were non-Jews. These women lived in a “city within a city, the most underground of all underground communities,” wrote Basia Berman, a leader of rescue efforts. “Every name was false, every word that was uttered carried a double meaning, and every telephone conversation was more encrypted than the secret diplomatic documents of embassies.”
In this constant pageant of deception, Vladka and the Jewish rescue committee had become a family. Many Poles helped them, not for money but out of Christian morals, anti-Nazi sentiment, and sympathy, offering Jews jobs, hiding places, meeting spots, bank accounts, food, and testimony to their non-Jewishness. The resistance members had to avoid landlords who became suspicious of visitors; they aimed for places where they could hide documents under floorboards and install concealed safes for money. In one such flat, two nails protruding near the front door were actually a clandestine doorbell—comrades placed a coin between them, setting off a current and a bell. Inka and Marysia rented an apartment that became a main meeting spot. Each floorboard and nook contained hidden documents and cash. A record player muffled sound, vodka was consumed, and the neighbors assumed they were prostitutes, hosting endless streams of men.
Another hub of activity was Zivia’s melina. She looked too semitic to go out on the street. After years of relentless, life-or-death activity, Zivia now had a lot of time on her hands. To be in hiding was to be cooped up with people who you didn’t necessarily choose to live with, or even like. The world outside “was filtered through others” and every knock on the door sent you panicking to a shelter. Antek brought back detective novels to help her pass the time, but her guilt and depression ballooned. She busied herself with obsessive housekeeping and letter writing, especially as she desperately wanted to share her advice. Having seen the death toll in Warsaw, Zivia pleaded with the Będzin group to flee instead of fight; she begged Rivka Glanz to run to the partisans. But she also refused to leave her people, and so she stayed put in Warsaw.
Zivia began to work for Żegota, becoming a main administrator in charge of distributing money and fake documents. She corresponded, managed budgets, and once again dispatched “Zivia’s girls” on around-the-clock missions to connect, inform, and protect Jews. She also sent out girls to look for fighters who were in trouble and, once in a while, to locate couriers who’d mysteriously gone missing.