The one who survives will be like a leaf cast about by a gale, a leaf that doesn’t belong to anyone and has lost its mother tree, which has died. . . . The leaf will fly with the wind and won’t find a place for itself, neither finding the old leaves it used to know, nor a patch of the old sky. It’s impossible to accrete to a new tree. And the poor leaf will wander, recalling the old, though very sad, days, and ever longing to return, but it won’t find its place.
—Chajka Klinger, I Am Writing These Words to You
March 1944
Renia made it to the homeland, foggy, elated. She had left Poland a fugitive, wanted by the Gestapo, and was now in her dreamland. After a rehabilitating stay at Kibbutz Givat Brenner’s sanatorium, where Renia continued writing her memoirs, she settled with comrade Chawka at the verdant Kibbutz Dafna, in the Galilee region. (The same kibbutz is described in Leon Uris’s novel Exodus.) Here, at last, with her fellow six hundred kibbutzniks, she felt comfort, “as if I’d arrived at the home of my parents.” Many Zionist movement survivors came to Israel, finally joining the kibbutzim for which they’d prepared. Even non-Zionist survivors were attracted to the kibbutzim, not for their ideology but for providing work, pride and, structure to their lives.
And yet. There were still differences, difficulties. As relieved as she was to end her wandering and be free to sing the songs she’d suppressed for years, Renia was still weighed down by torment and the memories of those lost. “We feel like we’re smaller and weaker than the people around us,” she wrote shortly after arriving. “Like we don’t have the same right to life as they do.”
Like many survivors, Renia did not always feel understood. She traveled through Palestine, giving talks about her experience in the war, speaking at venues ranging from the Haifa amphitheater to the dining rooms of local kibbutzim, telling the world about the extermination of Polish Jewry. In a testimony for the National Library of Israel given in the 1980s, Renia recalled that she’d once been asked to speak at Kibbutz Alonim. She began to tell her story in Polish and Yiddish, when her speech was interrupted by a commotion. The moment she stopped talking, the audience members moved the chairs and tables. What was going on? It turned out, they were preparing for a dance. The music blared. Renia felt so offended, she rushed out, not sure if they simply didn’t understand her language or didn’t care.
* * *
There are many reasons the stories of Jewish women in the resistance went underground. The majority of fighters and couriers were killed—Tosia, Frumka, Hantze, Rivka, Leah, Lonka—and did not live to tell their tales. But even for survivors, female narratives were silenced for both political and personal reasons, which differed across countries and communities.
The politics of Israel’s earliest years, as it developed into a nation, influenced how Holocaust stories came to be known. When Holocaust survivors arrived to the Yishuv (the Jewish settlement in Palestine) in the mid and late 1940s, tales of ghetto fighters were compelling to the left-wing political parties. Not only was anti-Nazi activity more palatable than horrific torture, these fighting stories helped bolster the party image and the call to fight for a new country. Like Renia, several women ghetto fighters were given a platform to speak—and they did so prolifically—but, at times, their words were edited to toe party lines. Some survivors accused the Yishuv of being passive and not supporting the Jews in Poland. This is when Hannah Senesh was made a symbol. Though she never carried out her mission, aside from boosting morale, her story of leaving Palestine to fight in Hungary proved that the Yishuv took an active role in helping the European Jews.
Soon after, scholars explain, early Israeli politicians tried to create a dichotomy between European Jews and Israeli Jews. European Jews, the Israelis said, were physically weak, naïve, and passive. Some sabras, or native-born Israelis, referred to the new arrivals as “soaps,” from the rumor that the Nazis made soap out of murdered Jewish bodies. Israeli Jews, on the other hand, saw themselves as the strong next wave. Israel was the future; Europe, for more than a thousand years a cradle of Jewish civilization, was the past. The memory of resistance fighters—the Jews of Europe who were anything but feeble—was erased in order to reinforce the negative stereotype.
The resistance tale fell into further oblivion. A decade after the war, people were ready to hear about concentration camps, and trauma became the public interest. In the 1970s, the political landscape shifted, and tales of individual rebels were replaced by stories of “everyday resistance.” In the early 2000s, Warsaw ghetto fighter Pnina Grinshpan (Frimer) was invited to Poland to receive an award. She stood on the stage, pained, apathetic. “Why do I need to come to Poland to receive a prize?” she asked in a documentary, reflecting that she escaped from that country. “Here [in Israel] we are so tiny.”
Controversies continue today. Mordechai Paldiel, the former director of the Righteous Gentiles Department at Yad Vashem, Israel’s largest Holocaust memorial, was troubled that Jewish rescuers never received the same recognition as their Gentile counterparts. In 2017 he authored Saving One’s Own: Jewish Rescuers During the Holocaust, a tome about Jews who organized large-scale rescue efforts across Europe. Some Jews are critical that the underground activity of the Revisionist youth (Betar’s ZZW) has gone largely unappreciated. This could be because so few survived; others say it’s because historians tend to be left wing and only commemorate their own kind. Still, others point out that Menachem Begin, the early leader of the Israeli right wing and the country’s sixth prime minister, escaped to Russia and did not fight in the Warsaw ghetto; he downplayed the uprising altogether. The Bund (based mainly outside Israel), the Zionists, and the Revisionists continue to disagree on who was responsible for initiating the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Even among left-wing Zionists, Freedom, The Young Guard, and the Zionist Youth each has its own Holocaust-based archives, galleries, and publishing houses in Israel.
History is different in the United States. In popular conception, the story goes that American Jews did not discuss the Holocaust in the 1940s and 1950s—presumably out of fear, guilt, and because they were busy becoming suburban and wanted to fit in with their middle-class non-Jewish neighbors. But as Hasia Diner shows in her groundbreaking book We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence After the Holocaust, 1945–1962, this narrative is unfounded. If anything, there was a proliferation of writing and discussion about the Holocaust in the postwar years. One Jewish leader worried that there was too much focus on the war, even citing Renia’s book as an example. As Diner points out, American Jews—in their new identity as the main Jewish community in the world—struggled with how to talk about the genocide, not whether they should.
Over time, the stories changed. Nechama Tec, author of Resistance: Jews and Christians Who Defied the Nazi Terror and Defiance: The Bielski Partisans (later the film), claims that there was a trend in American academia in the early 1960s to espouse Jewish submissiveness and even blame the victim. This “myth of passivity,” spurred in part by political philosopher Hannah Arendt, was biased, and not grounded in fact. Diner claims that by the late 1960s, the American Jewish community had become public and established; an explosion of later Holocaust publications drowned out earlier work, which perhaps is partly why Renia’s book disappeared from our collective memory.
Even today there are ethical complications in presenting this material in the United States. Writing about fighters might give the impression that the Holocaust was “not that bad”—a risk in a context where the genocide is fading from memory. Many writers fear that glorifying resisters places too much focus on agency, implying that survival was more than luck, judging those who did not take up arms, and ultimately blaming the victim. Further, this is a story that grays the victim-aggressor trope and unveils nuanced complications, foregrounding the intense discord within the Jewish community about how to deal with Nazi occupation. This tale inevitably includes Jewish Nazi collaborators and Jewish rebels who stole money to buy weapons—shaky ethics at every turn. The rage and violent rhetoric in these Jewish women’s memoirs are halting. So is the fact that many of these resisters were middle class and urban, more modern and sophisticated, more like “us,” than is comfortable. All these factors dissuade discussion.
And then there is gender. Women are routinely dropped from stories in which they played key roles, their experiences blotted out of history. Here, too, women’s stories were particularly silenced. According to Chajka’s Klinger’s son, the Holocaust scholar Avihu Ronen, this has partly to do with women’s roles in the youth movement. Women were usually the ones directed to escape with “the mission to tell.” They were the appointed documenters and firsthand historians. Many of the earliest chronicles of the resistance were written by women. As authors, Ronen argues, they reported on others’ activities—usually the men’s—rather than their own. Their personal experiences fell into the background.
Lenore Weitzman, a foundational scholar of women and the Holocaust, explains that soon after these women’s works were published, the major histories were written by men, who focused on men, not on courier girls who themselves downplayed their own activity. She suggests that only physical combat—which was public and organized—was held in esteem, while other undercover tasks were considered trivial. (Even so, many Jewish women did fight in the uprisings and engaged in armed combat, and should not be dropped from that tale either.)
Even when women tried to tell their stories, they were often deliberately silenced. Some women’s writings were censored to fit political motivations, some women faced blatant indifference, and others were treated with disbelief, accused of making it all up. After liberation, an American army reporter warned Bielski partisans Fruma and Motke Berger not to repeat their story, because people would think they were liars, or insane. Many women faced scorn—accused by relatives of having fled to fight instead of staying to look after their parents; others were charged with “sleeping their way to safety.” Women felt judged according to a lingering belief that while the pure souls perished, the conniving ones survived. So often, when their vulnerable outpourings were not received with empathy or comprehension, women turned inward and repressed their experiences, pushing them deep under the surface.
Then there was coping. Women self-silenced. Many felt like it was their “sacred duty” of “cosmic significance” to grow a new generation of Jews, and kept their pasts to themselves out of a desperate desire to create a “normal” life for their children—and for themselves. Many of these women were in their midtwenties when the war ended; they had everything ahead of them and had to find ways to move forward. They did not all want to be “professional survivors.” Family members also hushed women, worried that facing their memories would be too difficult, that lancing old wounds would cause them to unravel entirely.
Many women suffered from an oppressive survivor’s guilt. By the time Białystok courier Chasia felt ready to share her past of weapon stealing and sabotage, Jews were opening up about their experiences in concentration camps. Compared with what they went through, she’d “had it easy.” Her narrative seemed too “selfish.” Others have spoken about the hierarchy of suffering in the survivor community. Fruma Berger’s son once felt shunned at a second-generation event because his parents had been partisans. Some fighters and their families felt estranged from close-knit survivor communities—and turned away.
And then there are the narrative tropes that have reigned for women over the decades. Hannah Senesh may have been a good role model because she showed the Yishuv’s involvement. But scholars mention that Hannah became famous over her fellow parachutist Haviva Reich—who convinced an American pilot to blind-drop her in Slovakia, where she organized food and shelter for thousands of refugees, rescued Allied servicemen, and helped children escape—because Hannah was young, beautiful, single, wealthy, and a poet. Haviva was a thirtysomething, brown-haired divorcee with a checkered romantic past.
For North American Jews, this is all distant past, and, still, the stakes are high. In Poland, where people continue to reel from years of Soviet rule, the women’s collaboration with the Red Army takes on a different meaning. Poland’s senate recently passed a law (later revised) dictating that Poland could not be blamed for any crimes committed in the Holocaust. The memory of the Polish resistance is wildly popular in Poland today, its anchor symbol graffitied on buildings. One is held in esteem if there was a Home Army fighter in your family. The narrative remains under construction, the resistance and its role tenuous. How the war is presented—to ourselves and to the outside world—can explain who we are, why we act as we do.
* * *
It was not just the silencing of their life stories that was immediately difficult for survivors and fighters, but also freedom.
This cohort of young women were homeless twentysomething adults who had lost their childhoods, who had not had the chance to study or train for a career, who did not have normal family networks, and whose sexual development had often been skipped over, traumatized, or deeply intensified. Many of these women—especially those who did not ascribe to strong political philosophies—simply did not know where to go, what to do, who to be, how to love.
Faye Schulman, the partisan who spent years wandering the forest, blowing up trains, performing outdoor surgeries, and photographing soldiers, wrote that liberation was not the epitome of joy but “the lowest point in my life. . . . Never in my life had I felt so lonely, so sad; never had I felt such yearning for the parents, family, and friends whom I would never see again.” After the brutal murders of her family members, and all her losses, the rigor, duty, and social cohesion of partisan life had kept her sane, focused, and with purpose: survival and revenge. Now she was absolutely alone in the world, with nothing, not even a nationality. While fellow partisans sat around the campfire contemplating the end of war, dreaming of reunions and celebrations, she felt otherwise:
When the war was over, would I have a place where I belonged? Who would wait at the station to meet me? Who would celebrate freedom with me? There would be no homecoming parades for me, no time to even mourn the dead. If I did survive, where would I return? My home and my town had been razed to the ground, its people killed. I was not in the same situation as the colleagues surrounding me. I was a Jew and a woman.
Faye received a medal from the Soviet government but had to return her weapons. Without a sense of protection or identity, she decided to enlist in the Soviet army and continue to fight in Yugoslavia. On her way to the military bureau, she met a Jewish-looking officer who convinced her to stop risking her life. Faye became a government photographer in Pinsk. She was able to track down her surviving brothers, her access to trains and officials made possible by showing her medal. Through one brother, she met Morris Schulman, a partisan commander whom she’d encountered once in the forest and who knew her family from before the war. Some surviving women idealized dead fathers and struggled to form intimate bonds, but Faye’s and Morris’s feelings for each other were immediate, and Faye refused many other proposals for him. “We felt an urgency to proceed quickly with whatever love was left in us,” she reflected.
Though they were a relatively wealthy, successful Soviet couple, the Judenrein city of Pinsk was too depressing. In numerous difficult and dangerous trips, they crisscrossed Europe, one couple among millions of displaced people who roamed the Continent; they were forced into an awful refugee camp that reminded Faye of the ghetto. Soon after, they joined the Bricha, an underground organization that illegally smuggled Jews to Palestine, where immigration quotas remained enforced. But Faye had a baby and craved safety. She and Morris changed course and spent the rest of their lives in Toronto, growing careers and a family. Faye spoke publicly about her war experience for decades. “Sometimes [the] bygone world feels almost more real to me than the present,” she wrote. A part of her always remained rooted in her lost universe.
* * *
Another lifelong issue for survivors was guilt.
In the summer of 1944, from the window of her hiding place in Warsaw, Zivia could see weary horses pulling farmers’ carts full of Germans fleeing for their lives. The Polish underground, controlled mainly by the Home Army, decided it was time to fight—to push away the weakened Nazis and to defend Poland from the encroaching Soviets. Though Zivia, the ZOB, and the Communist Poles did not agree with all these politics, they decided to join in—any effort to destroy the Nazis was worthwhile. Zivia put out word through the Polish underground press that all Jews should fight, no matter what affiliation, for a “free, independent, strong, and just Poland.” The uprising began on August 1. Jews, including women, from all political factions participated. During this revolt, Rivka Moscovitch was killed when a Nazi drove by and machine-gunned her on the street.
The Home Army would not fight alongside Jews, but the People’s Army welcomed the ZOB’s collaboration. Worried about Jewish casualties, they offered them behind-the-scenes roles, but Zivia and her group insisted on active combat. She defended an important and isolated post, nearly forgotten in action. The twenty-two Jews’ roles were minor, but it meant everything to Zivia that the ZOB remained alive and kicking, and working alongside Poles. The Home Army had been prepared to fight for a few days, but the Soviets held out on their involvement, and the gruesome battle lasted for two months. The magnificent city of Warsaw was razed, turned into a heap of rubble three stories high; nearly 90 percent of its buildings had now been destroyed. Eventually the Poles surrendered. The Germans drove out everyone. But what were Jews—especially those who looked it—to do?
Once again, the fighters escaped via sewage canals. This time Zivia was exhausted and nearly drowned. Antek carried her on his back while she slept.
Even with the Red Army drawing near, Zivia remained realistic, or pessimistic, warning her comrades not to get too excited. After struggling through a number of melinas, the hiding Jews’ situation was dire. Six weeks of life-threatening Soviet bombardment, of scarce food and water, of smoking leaves they picked off trees, of near suffocation in the tiny cellar where they hid—they were doomed. Especially when the Germans began digging trenches on their street, and then, in their very building.
The Nazis were breaking down the walls right near Zivia’s shelter. The Jews could hear every shovel scoop. But, as always, the Germans stopped for their routine lunch break at noon. Five minutes later, a rescue group from the Polish Red Cross arrived. Bundist couriers had contacted a leftist Polish doctor at a nearby hospital, and he’d sent a team to retrieve them under the auspices of collecting typhoid patients—which he knew would keep away the Germans. The two most Jewish looking had their faces bandaged and were carried out on stretchers. The others put on Red Cross armbands and feigned being rescuers. Zivia pretended to be an old peasant scrambling through houses. The group wandered through the demolished city and, despite several altercations, managed to escape—even convincing a Nazi who had lost an eye “to those Jewish bandits” to pull them with his horse and carriage. From the hospital, Zivia went into hiding in the suburbs.
When the Russians liberated Warsaw in January 1945, thirty-year-old Zivia felt empty. She described the day when the Soviet tanks rolled in. “A mob of people exuberantly rushed out to greet them in the town marketplace,” she wrote. “The people rejoiced and embraced their liberators. We stood by crushed and dejected, lone remnants of our people.” This was the saddest day of Zivia’s life: the world she’d known officially ceased to exist. Like many survivors who coped through hyperactivity, Zivia threw herself into helping others.
Approximately three hundred thousand Polish Jews remained alive: just 10 percent of the prewar population. These included survivors of camps, “passers,” people in hiding, forest partisans, and—the majority—the two hundred thousand Jews who had lived out the war in Soviet territory, many incarcerated in Siberian Gulags. (The “Asians,” they were called.) These Jews were returning to nothing—no family, no home. Postwar Poland was a “Wild West” with rampant antisemitism. In small towns, especially where people feared Jews would reclaim their property, Jews could be killed on the streets. Zivia worked to bring the Jews aid; she also planned escape routes. In Lublin, she connected with Abba Kovner, and though they set out to collaborate, they fell out. Zivia prioritized community building; Kovner, immediate exit from Poland—and revenge.
The movements tried harder than ever to renew their Polish base, even sending emissaries to train stations to convince “Asians” to join their ranks. Zivia returned to Warsaw to work with survivors, setting up safe communes and attracting Jews to Freedom. As always, she was the mother figure whom everyone looked up to, yet she kept her own feelings private.
Suffering from exhaustion, in 1945 Zivia finally requested to make aliyah. The socialist Zionist from Byten arrived in Palestine—her long-delayed dream. It was as if she’d been miraculously resurrected from the dead, especially after so many obituaries had been published, but life was not easy. She lived in a hut on a kibbutz from which the British carried out raids on Yishuv leaders—episodes that reminded her of ghetto Aktions. The kibbutzim, she felt, did not do enough to welcome survivors. Though her sister was there, she didn’t have time to see family and friends due to movement work, and she missed Antek, apparently fearing that his flirtatious nature was embroiling him in affairs with other women. Her depression and guilt soared. She was supposed to have been in Mila 18. She was supposed to have died.
Zivia was immediately sent on a speaking tour—“a circus,” she called it. She received invitations from countless groups and felt she could not turn down any; too many organizations wanted her support, craved the glow of her heroism.
In June 1946 six thousand people gathered at Kibbutz Yagur to hear Zivia deliver an eloquent, firm, eight-hour testimony in Hebrew, orating without notes, articulate thoughts streaming from her head and heart. Everyone was riveted, stunned. “She stood there like a queen,” an audience member observed later, noting that she gave off a feeling of holiness. Her lectures were about the war, the movement, the ZOB, and never about her feelings or personal life. Zivia defended the Jewish masses in the ghettos and called for empathizing with survivors, but most listeners wanted to hear about the uprising. Her ghetto fighting history was used by some left-wing politicians to further their agendas; Zivia’s fighter stance echoed the militant philosophies of the burgeoning state. As requested, apparently, she toned down her criticism of the Yishuv for not sending more support to Warsaw. Appealing to women, promoting the importance of weapons and heroism, she was adored and helped the party gain support, but this exposure and its politics exhausted her. Each speech ripped open wounds, reawakening her suffering and guilt. She wanted to be alone, to breathe.
The following year, Zivia was selected for a major role at the Zionist Congress in Basel. She and Antek met up in Switzerland, where they were secretly married by a rabbi. She returned to Israel pregnant—in the same dress that she wore at Yagur, but now it was snug. Antek followed a few months later. However, despite the heroic reputation of this power couple—they were the last remaining Zionists of the Warsaw ghetto uprising command—they never achieved high political positions in Israel, possibly because the Yishuv politicians felt threatened by their mythic status. Antek worked in the fields; Zivia, in the chicken coop. She shunned the public eye. According to those close to her, she did not think of herself as special, just as someone who did what had to be done.
In Zivia’s writings, she emphasizes that she’d been trained for this. Most Jews simply did not know what to do, but the Jewish youth was educated to make goals for themselves and carry them through. When Chasia’s daughter was asked what factors led to her mother’s wartime behavior, her immediate response was that Chasia got her tolerance from her father and her strength from The Young Guard. As Chasia herself reflected six decades later, “We knew how to share, to work together, to defer to one another, to surmount obstacles, to outdo ourselves. We did not realize then how badly we would need [these skills] in the years to come.” The youth movements had emerged in a context of Jews feeling threatened. They taught participants to deal with existential problems as well as to live and work together, to collaborate at all levels.
Now, feeling the need for a community that understood them and to memorialize their past, Zivia and Antek decided to found their own kibbutz—no easy feat. The movement feared that this kibbutz would focus on the traumas of yesterday; the ghetto fighters had to continually prove that they wouldn’t break down mentally. After some struggle, they successfully established the Ghetto Fighters’ House kibbutz, composed mainly of survivors. Zivia relied on work and motherhood—a constant balancing act—to mute her past and forge forward. Like many survivors who lived with the sense that “catastrophe could hit with no notice,” fearing thunder and lightning (which reminded them of bombings), people on the kibbutz suffered from post-traumatic stress and night terrors. Overall, however, they worked hard to become a productive entity. Later, Antek opened Israel’s first Holocaust memorial museum and archive there, in an elegant brutalist building with curved high ceilings. Controversies arose surrounding the nature of the narrative they presented, even among the kibbutz members. Discords with The Young Guard and Yad Vashem have faded with time, but one can still sense them just under the surface.
Zivia remained principled, restrained, and driven by movement ideals. She was tight with money, fiercely against German reconciliation and reparations (except when her practical side set in), and had to be forced by Leon Uris to buy a new dress for an important event. She allowed her children to receive only books for gifts; they were the last ones on the kibbutz to get bicycles. (Antek, the romantic visionary and bon vivant, enjoyed more material things.) When she wanted a new front porch, Zivia collected rocks and hammers and built it. Quotidian actions, she always felt, were the mark of value. She did not dwell on issues but believed that a person had to make a decision and carry it through. “Give yourself a slap on the ass!” was her motto.
Zivia worked, traveled, managed kibbutz finances, avidly read new books, hosted guests, and mothered two children. Like a majority of Holocaust survivors, she and Antek were overprotective and nurturing. Many survivor parents kept their pasts from their children, desperately wanting their offspring’s lives to be normal, but this inadvertently caused rifts. On kibbutzim all over Israel, children lived in separate communal quarters and spent only the afternoons with their parents, creating further distance and troubles with developing physical intimacy. At GFH, the children had particular issues with nightmares and bed-wetting, and Zivia agreed to hire a psychologist—a lavish expense on outsider work she normally would not condone. She too was haunted by the fact that her son was crying, and she had to leave him screaming because parents’ hours in the children’s wing were over.
Zivia remained in the periphery of the public eye. In 1961 she testified at the trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann, and on a few occasions, agreed reluctantly to be on the Labor ticket for the Israeli parliament. She wanted to support the party, and went along with it only because she knew she’d lose. She was assigned a political position in government, but resigned, wanting to work on the kibbutz, to be with her family. She preferred cooking and poultry farming to the tiresome charades of being a figurehead. When, in the 1970s, intellectuals focused on the everyday resistance rather than singling out heroic fighters, and due to Zivia’s evasion of the limelight, her name faded from Israelis’ consciousness. Her book about the war was based on her lectures, and edited by Antek. Though she insisted her writings be published posthumously, they contain no personal revelations. “You can tell a lot about a person,” she said, “by the amount of times they say ‘I’ in a sentence.”
Even in heroic Zivia and Antek’s home, the past was secret. As was common with children of survivors who sensed it was not safe to probe, Zivia’s children made few inquiries into their parents’ history. Her daughter, Yael, a psychologist, wondered, How could I not have sat them down and asked them? As a child, she’d wanted younger, Hebrew-speaking, sabra parents. Their son, Shimon, felt pressure being the child of legends, unable to live up to expectations: “What am I supposed to do, throw a Molotov cocktail, kill a German, what?”
Many children of survivors felt the opposite pressure: to achieve what their parents couldn’t and to accomplish goals for their entire extended family, while also being constantly happy, justifying their parents’ survival. Others felt pressured simply to be “normal”—and rebelled by not marrying. Still others felt pushed to pursue particular careers, such as medicine. (“A philosopher [is] useless in the forest,” a surviving partisan told his Californian children.) Many became mental health and social workers.
Just before Zivia died, her daughter-in-law bore her a granddaughter: Eyal, which happens to be the Hebrew name for the ZOB. Zivia held the baby and cried in public, the first time since the forests of Poland. Eyal speaks publically about her family history, attributing her chattiness to her grandfather, with whom she was close as a child. Though she wishes she’d known more about her grandmother’s inner life, Eyal looks to Zivia’s book—the tale of a carer, a doer, someone who put others first, who held extremely high standards for everyone, including herself—as a source of strength.
Eyal also exhibits a frank self-criticism; a legacy of the Freedom philosophy. In an Israeli documentary about the family, she questions whether she would have had the strength to fight as Zivia did. When others criticizes the Poles who stood by, she remarks that she too has sat in restaurants bordering war zones, enjoying herself.
While Eyal works in human resources, organizing people just like her grandmother did, her sister Roni followed in Zivia’s fighting footsteps. Roni was the first female fighter pilot in the Israeli army, standing out in formation with a long braid dangling down her back. Roni rarely speaks publicly—partly because of her military status but largely because she inherited her grandmother’s reserve. With her own “hypermorality,” she lives for her grandmother, whom she never met but whose “quiet leadership” she finds beautiful. The Zuckerman way, the sisters joked, was to keep everything close to your chest; to answer any question with one word. Most of all: “Zuckermans don’t cry.” What she learned most from her grandparents, Eyal said, was that “you never have full control over circumstances, but you have control over how you respond. You need to trust yourself to get through life.”
“All I did was try to die, but I survived,” was Zivia’s refrain. “Fate determined that I should survive, and I am left with no other way.” Despite her victorious life, Zivia was plagued by guilt. She could have saved more, done more, done things earlier. The remorse that began in Warsaw—the sense of missed opportunity, the fighters she lost—never subsided, but instead grew with survival. Why did I make it through? was a constant presence.
Another constant for Zivia was her cigarette habit. In her sixties, her smoking and remorse eating away at her, she developed lung cancer, and despite all her attempts to keep on working as usual, she died in 1978 at the age of sixty-three. As per Antek’s request, only her first name appears on her tombstone. “Zivia is an institution,” her son explained. No further words were necessary.
Without her, the fragile existence that Antek had rebuilt shattered. He did not want to live in a world without Zivia. Against doctor’s orders, he drank. “He worked on dying,” Eyal said. Despite his charm and happy nature, Antek was deeply haunted, unable to let go of the past, reproaching himself for not having saved his family, and plagued by decisions he’d made during wartime. He never stopped considering the murder of a potential informer. What if the man had been innocent? Antek’s regret only sharpened with time, “like lava gushing out of the ground and sprouting up” he said, reflecting on how his past and present became entwined. To lead the Warsaw ghetto uprising and then pick fruit on a kibbutz was a difficult life course. Many fighters never truly found themselves after their traumatic and hyperdramatic twenties. Antek died three years after Zivia, in a taxi on the way to a ceremony in her honor.
“Zivia was the branch, and Antek was the stem,” Yael said. “If the branch bends, the stem falls, no matter how strong it looks.”
* * *
Israel was a hard environment, but it was not easy for Polish resistance fighters in postwar Poland, either, which was governed by the USSR for decades. In a climate of surveillance and fear, anyone who had shown allegiances to the Home Army during the war could have been considered a “Polish nationalist” and therefore a rebel against the Soviet regime—and in mortal danger. Many Poles who’d helped Jews hid their heroic actions for fear they’d be accused of being on the wrong side of the state. One Polish woman who had sheltered a family that moved to Israel had to ask them to stop sending thank-you gifts with Israeli flags because the presents made the neighbors suspicious.
Even some Jews in Poland repressed their pasts and cut off contact. “Halina,” who helped save Renia from prison, was actually Irena Gelblum. After the war, she and Kazik, her boyfriend, went to Israel. But she soon left, studied medicine, worked as a journalist, and became a famous poet in Italy, where she changed her name to Irena Conti. Eventually she settled back in Poland, but constantly changed her identity and friends, her past a deeper and deeper secret.
Others lived their lives more openly. Irena Adamowicz, the Catholic Scout, worked at the Polish National Library. She never married but cared for her mother and spent her time with friends she made during the war. Irena kept up written correspondence with the Jewish women she had worked with and visited Israel in 1958—a highlight of her life. She lived with a terrific fear of dying alone, and yet, as she aged, became reclusive. One day in 1973 she suddenly expired on the street at age sixty-three. In 1985 she was named a Righteous Among the Nations at Yad Vashem.
* * *
For others, the suffering of survival was simply too unbearable. Chajka Klinger made it to Palestine, arriving on the same train as Renia, but with growing depression. She and Benito moved to The Young Guard’s Kibbutz Gal On, where they attempted to integrate into the communal life. Chajka spoke at numerous assemblies and conferences. But conflict with the movement erupted. Excerpts from her diaries were published by The Young Guard—but they were heavily edited, omitting and even reversing her criticism of the Yishuv (which she accused of not doing enough) and deleting her doubts that the resistance would ever really work. Chajka hadn’t been silenced, but censored. Her words and thoughts—for an intellectual like her, her identity—had been tampered with by the very movement for which she had given her life.
The morbid thoughts that had begun when she was in hiding would ebb and flow, but they never left her permanently. She and Benito moved to a new kibbutz, Ha’Ogen, with fewer friends from the past. They lived in a room made of orange crates, but Chajka focused on enjoying family life. She began editing her diaries into a book, and finally felt happy, even though she felt guilty about her happiness. It was hard for her to get a permanent job on the kibbutz—especially her preferred work in the children’s home—since she had no seniority. After all she’d been through, she had to start from scratch. “She who led a movement during the war, who stood up to the Gestapo,” her son Avihu wrote, “was now just Chajka R.” (Benito’s surname, which she had taken, was Ronen, formerly Rosenberg.) Then Chajka became pregnant. During this pregnancy, she woke up during the nights with delusions, and Benito began to understand that these episodes were “mental illness,” the all-encompassing term that was then used. Neither PTSD nor collective trauma was yet understood. At Ha’Ogen, survivors were not treated any differently and did not discuss their pasts. The kibbutz rules, the member’s role in the labor force, the present, were all that counted.
She named her son Zvi, after Zvi Brandes.
Chajka did not have a survivor community who understood her, with whom she could reminisce or even fantasize about revenge. She did not make many friends. (Most of her fellow kibbutzniks spoke Hungarian.) Plus, Benito’s ex-girlfriend also lived there. Chajka was sent for training to work in the chicken coop, not to study for an advanced degree, as she’d wanted. The important jobs went to men. Her career goals—the goals of an unabashed intellect—became dashed dreams.
Chajka found out that one of her sisters was alive, which gave her some hope and stability. But then the head of The Young Guard decided that Benito, who still worked in refugee aid, would return to Europe. Chajka was asked to give up all the comforts she’d made for herself and go back to the blood-soaked continent from which she narrowly escaped.
She did not stay long and returned to Israel to give birth to her second son, Avihu, the scholar. She suffered from severe postpartum depression, unable to get out of bed for weeks, afraid of taking medicine for fear she was being poisoned. She was hospitalized against her will. Afterward, no one discussed her illness—it was taboo.
Back on the kibbutz, Chajka grew distant from Będzin friends, and found no outlet for her talents. Then, during her third pregnancy, her diaries were used without her permission in an article that critiqued The Young Guard’s leadership, placing her at the center of a heated controversy that again forced her to grapple with the conflict between her own truth and her loyalty to the movement. Again she suffered from postpartum depression and was hospitalized. As part of Chajka’s treatment she was made to talk about the Gestapo torture. Traumatized by this intervention, she refused further medical help.
Avihu recalled happy memories of his mother but also remembered episodes where she sat in silence with a towel wrapped over her head. She had survived and wanted to fulfill The Young Guard’s role for her: to tell the people what she’d witnessed. But ultimately she felt she was “condemned to live.” At last, after deeper depressive episodes, Chajka, aged forty-two, agreed to return to the hospital. One evening she arrived at the children’s home wearing a long coat; she’d come to say good-bye.
The next morning, in April 1958, on the fifteenth anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, Chajka Klinger hung herself from a tree, not too far from the kibbutz nursery where her three sons played.