Renia
JULY 1943
The Będzin ZOB heard Zivia’s pleas and made a plan. People who looked Aryan would travel to Warsaw by train. The others would be smuggled to Warsaw on a bus, to be arranged by Antek. Forged documents for the travelers came in via couriers from Warsaw—but only a few. The remaining visas would be ready to collect when Renia and Ina Gelbart came to town. By now, Renia and Ina had pulled off several trips together, carrying money, weapons, and instructions in their bras, bags, belts.
Ina left one evening, armed with addresses, money, and items for the counterfeiter. Renia left the next morning, with the same items as well as Rivka Moscovitch. The twenty-two-year-old Rivka, the last survivor of her Będziner working-class family and a committed Freedom girl, had fallen ill and needed to be sheltered while she recovered. Rivka had a Christian face, as well as a visa and a document for crossing the border. She’d wanted badly to stay and fight. But the group insisted that she heal and then help them find hiding spots in Warsaw. Finally, they convinced her that she was too sick to handle the coming days, and Rivka packed a valise of personal items.
Renia had told Ina to meet her at an assigned place in the city. She and Rivka traveled by train disguised as Wanda and Zosia, two Polish girls taking a trip to the big city. On the inside, two Jews on the brink of murder, risking their lives to help save others. The entire time, Renia kept chanting prayers in her head, in her heart, pleading that they would be able to cross the border peacefully.
They arrived at the border. “Document inspection!”
Renia had to brace herself, to stop herself from shaking, shivering, up and down her body. Could Rivka do it? Could she keep up the lies, the story, not tremble for an instant?
“Gut!”
Breathe.
There was no chance, however, for even a full exhalation, no moment of relief. The train car was packed, with hardly an inch of free space; there was no air. Rivka, already ill, felt sick rammed up against others. She looked like she was going to faint, which would cause a commotion. Renia glanced around furtively and spotted an empty seat in the middle wagon, a military carriage. Rivka felt better sitting down, but Renia, inside, felt absolutely sick. She had to smile and hold her head high, calm every single nerve, harness steel resolve, and pretend to be the opposite of every single thing she was feeling, while listening to soldiers talk about killing Jews with sick “bestial joy.”
“I was there,” said one. “I saw them take the Jews of Zaglembie to their deaths.”
The others laughed. “Nonsense! They’re not actually killing the Jews.”
Renia gleaned that they were traveling from the front, where people still did not know of the murder machine that was churning in Poland.
“A happy image!” she overheard the first one continue. “A feast for the eyes to see the Jews heading to their deaths like true sheep.”
Renia did not think about her murdered family, did not think about her dead friends, her little baby brother. Did not think.
Renia smiled. Watched Rivka. Smiled more.
A whole day’s journey. Trees, towns, stops, whistles. At last, exhausted from the trip, from the performance with no intermission, the girls arrived in Warsaw. They walked alone through quiet evening streets, determined to meet Ina at the agreed-upon time and location. There was no room for a mistake, not an inch. Renia noticed that down the street, two corners up ahead, police were checking all passersbys’ documents. She calculated quickly that though their fake passes had been adequate for the journey, the Warsaw gendarmes would recognize that the stamps were forgeries. Gesturing to Rivka, Renia began to walk quickly, turning corners, sliding into the crowd. The girls never looked back—not once—just forward, forward, part of the throng.
At last, they reached the meeting spot. Breathe.
But Ina was not there.
How long could they just stand there? How long should they wait?
It looked suspicious. Sometimes meeting spots were adjacent to storefronts; one could pretend to window-shop, skimming books on offer, fiction, romance, spy novels. But here, nothing.
Had Ina been arrested on the way?
Where was she? Nearby? Who could see them?
Renia had no other addresses. No operative ever carried too much information at once, in case she was caught, tortured.
She had enough money for only one more day.
A minute was a lifetime. Thoughts crashed through Renia’s mind as she tried to figure out the next steps. She had to take Rivka somewhere, had to find someone from the underground, someone she knew. But where? What to do if they didn’t connect with anyone? Take Rivka back to Będzin? She was too sick.
Renia decided to drop off Rivka at the inn where she had planned to stay. She’d venture out herself, try to find answers.
Then she had an idea. The sister of an acquaintance from Będzin lived in the Aryan quarter. Renia thought of Marek Folman—maybe he’d made it back here after the tragic partisan fiasco?
“Would you happen to know Marek’s address?” Renia asked as soon as she arrived.
The woman perused her little notebook for a long time as Renia waited, knots inside, and then finally: the address of Marek’s mother.
Every morsel of information was gold.
Still no Ina.
Renia returned to the inn and spent most of their money on their rooms.
The next morning, she took an ailing Rivka to the address. Marek’s mother, Rosalie, was there, as was his sister-in-law—now a widow after her husband had been killed in partisan battle. Marek’s sister, Havka, had been the Freedom courier who carried dynamite in her underwear; Renia had heard that she was in Auschwitz. Marek’s mother also helped the ZOB—a true fighter family. To Renia’s dismay, however, she knew nothing about Marek’s whereabouts; the last she’d heard, he was in Będzin with Renia. “I’m so sorry,” Rosalie said, shaking her head, “but I can’t keep Rivka in my home.” Sergeants and collaborators had been knocking on her door daily. In fact, she was planning on moving apartments as soon as possible.
But she had an idea. They brought Rivka to a Polish neighbor.
Renia bid the girl farewell, hoping she would be safe hidden there; another Jew stashed in the bowels of the city.
Now, alone, Renia walked through Warsaw, business as usual, crowded squares, shops open, despite the former ghetto’s devastation. Despite it all. She had just enough cash for one more night in the inn. The next morning, Marek’s mother put Renia in touch with Kazik, the ZOB fighter who’d led the sewage escape.
Renia went to meet him on a street corner, but before she could utter a sentence, they heard a gunshot. A policeman was after Kazik, and he fled, disappearing into traffic. Renia quickly headed off in the opposite direction, never running, never looking back.
Fortunately, Kazik arranged a rendezvous with Antek—the Antek whom Renia knew from letters and stories, the busy commandant of the Jews in the Aryan quarter who took meetings with the Polish underground, ran financial affairs, sent people to the partisans, smuggled weapons, and was connected with document forgers. A whole staff helped him, she’d heard.
Renia and Antek were supposed to meet on yet another street corner, this time in front a vocational school, or technikum. Renia wore a dress and new shoes that had been arranged for her. A bright red flower was fastened in her braided hair so that he would recognize her. Renia walked to the assigned spot, praying that all would go well, that she would find him there, that she would get what she needed and rush back to Będzin, to her friends, her sister Sarah. From afar, Renia spotted a man. He held a newspaper, folded under his arm—his sign.
She could not believe it. “He was a true Antek,” she wrote, referring to his Polish moniker. She tried not to stare too obviously at this tall, blond young man, “with a fine moustache like that of a rich lord.” He was dressed head to toe in a green outfit.
She passed by, making sure to slow down and show her flower.
But he didn’t budge.
What now?
She took a risk, turned around and paced back down the street.
Still nothing.
Why wasn’t he approaching? Was it the wrong man? A plant? Or did he know they were being watched? Being framed?
Her gut told her to take a chance. “Hello,” Renia offered in Polish. “Are you Antek?”
“Are you Wanda?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“You claim you’re Jewish?” he whispered, looking surprised. Then he genuflected. Her performance had been too good.
“You claim you’re Jewish?” Renia answered back in relief.
Antek walked next to Renia with assured steps, strong and propulsive on the Aryan concrete that somehow held them up, together. She could not believe that this “seeming nobleman with a confident gait” was really a Jew. She described him as being cunning and sure like a squirrel, alert as a rabbit, taking in everything around him. His eyes, she felt, looked at you, and he knew who you were.
When she began talking to him, however, she noticed his creaky Polish accent. She could hear it: a Jew from Vilna.
Antek and Renia spoke with sorrow about Ina’s sudden disappearance. “She must have stumbled at the border’s document control,” Renia said.
“We don’t know for sure,” Antek replied, trying to console her. “Maybe a mishap caused her to return home.” Later, Renia reflected that he treated her caringly, gently, like a daughter. In this world of premature orphans, his nine years on her felt like ninety.
Antek promised Renia that he would prepare the visas for the remainder of the group, as well as a bus for those who looked semitic, as quickly as possible. None of this was easy; it would take days to arrange. They parted, for now.
Until the comrades found a permanent apartment for Rivka, they decided to place her in hiding. Antek gave Renia the address and the 200 złotys per night, plus extra for food.
Renia waited in Warsaw for several days, sleeping in the entrance to a cellar. A Jewish boy who looked Polish lived in this basement corridor; Renia pretended to be his sister. They told the head of the household that Renia had escaped from Germany illegally to see her brother, which was why she didn’t want to register her pass. Renia promised she’d stay only for a few days. She spent her time trying to avoid the landlady; she could not stumble in front of her or the neighbors. Most “passing” Jews concocted stories about daytime activity (work, family), then left for eight hours, roaming town, acting as if they were on their way to something, anything.
Really, all Renia did was wait for the visas, for concrete information about the bus, her impatience growing exponentially. Each day, she met Antek, urging him to hurry. She simply couldn’t delay returning to Będzin. The general expulsion could come at any time. Is it better to leave with the documents that are ready and not wait any longer? she mulled over and over. In Renia’s heart, she felt—she knew—that each passing day was critical. The clock was ticking, the hands circling faster and faster toward murder.
The waiting dragged on, postponement after postponement. Finally, after a few days, the bus was prepared, and Renia arranged for a telegram to be sent to her informing her of when it would approach the Kamionka ghetto. Several of the visas were ready. She had not been able to obtain any more weapons. But she took what she could get. Renia told Antek that she simply could not stay in Warsaw any longer.
Renia traveled home with twenty-two false visas pasted onto her body and sewn into her skirt, as well as photographs and travel papers for each visa. From the moment she stepped onto the street, her heart pounded wildly. At each instant, she feared she’d stumble. What had happened to Ina?
On the train, regular inspections, but now an additional personal search. The gendarmes approached her.
Even just glancing at them, she later wrote, could make her become confused. But she dared not lose her straight spirit.
She looked sweetly into their eyes. She bravely opened her packs. “They searched inside them like chickens pecking in sand,” she recalled. Holding herself assuredly, smiling confidently, Renia kept chatting with them, maintaining eye contact, so they wouldn’t want to search her body. No sign of fear.
They left, without any suspicion.
Still, the act had to go on.
Renia decided to stop briefly in Częstochowa to see operative Rivka Glanz and share updates. Temperamental, sensitive, full of life, Rivka was well known in the underground as a leader, smuggler, and organizer. When the Nazis first invaded, she had been on a mission in the port city of Gdynia; she’d watched comrades flee, some by ship right out to sea. She stayed—until the Nazis expelled her. Rivka quickly packed a small suitcase, then suddenly noticed the kibbutz’s harmonica. She was overwhelmed by a feeling of attachment to the little mouth organ that had brought so much happiness to the comrades. She dropped her valise and grabbed the musical instrument. But she arrived in Łódź ashamed: here she was with no clothes, with nothing practical. She hid the harmonica next to the door of the kibbutz, entering empty-handed. “I couldn’t bring anything with me,” she announced. Later, she learned, the comrades had found the instrument. They understood her desire to save this object of joy. The harmonica became a movement legend.
Renia thought of the harmonica and wanted terribly to see Rivka, to connect with her kindness, her courage. But—this was no longer possible. To Renia’s absolute horror, she arrived in the border town to see that the entire ghetto had been razed, burnt down to the ground. Not one trace of her people anywhere. Extinguished.
“What happened?” She managed to find her words. Local Poles related that a few weeks earlier, there had been a battle in the ghetto. Young Jews, poorly armed with few guns and a few hundred Molotov cocktails, resisted by hiding and firing. Some managed to steal weapons from Nazis. Others had used vats from the ghetto kitchen to smuggle in aluminum, lead, carbide, mercury, dynamite and chemicals for explosives from ammunition factories. They’d dug several tunnels. They were easily outmanned and outgunned yet managed to sustain fighting for five full days. Many Jews ran into the forest; now they were living there like animals. The Germans, afraid of partisan activity in the woods, sent the local police to search for hidden Jews. They rooted them out one at a time—but not everyone.
All Renia could find out about Rivka Glanz was that she’d been killed in battle, commanding a unit, weapons in her hands. “How my heart cried over her!” Renia wrote. “She was like the mother of every Jew in Częstochowa.” She thought about how, when Rivka had wanted to leave, the remaining Jews in the town hadn’t allowed it. As long as Rivka was with them, they said, they felt secure.
Renia swiftly headed back to the train station, blinking back any emotion. She needed to get home, now. The train rumbled through the forested countryside the whole night. Her stinging eyes begged to shut, but no, no, no, she could not fall asleep. Renia had to maintain clear thinking the whole time. Awake and aware. Who knew when an inspection, a check of documents, anything would come? Who knew what would be?
Only later did Renia find out that Ina had been caught by a female Nazi guard at a checkpoint near the border. While the Gestapo drove her to Auschwitz, Ina jumped out of the car and ran. Exhausted, depressed, and beaten, she took refuge with a friend in a local ghetto. But the Nazis put a high price on her head (Ina or twenty Jews killed), and the Jewish militia handed her over. This time the Gestapo supervisor personally transported her to Auschwitz, commanding a dog to attack and bite her in the car. She spat in the officer’s face and died in transit.