Prologue: Flash Forward—Defense or Rescue?
From above, one might mistake the small town, with its glistening castle and pastel buildings, its streetscapes of candy colors, as a magical kingdom. A settlement since the ninth century, Będzin was first erected as a fortress city, guarding the ancient trade route between Kiev and the West. Like many of Poland’s medieval cities, especially those in this forest-filled area in the south of the country, Będzin’s landscape is glorious. The verdant vistas don’t suggest division and death, endless battles and decrees. Viewed at a distance, one would never guess that this royal town topped with a golden turret was an emblem of the near destruction of the Jewish people.
Będzin, located in the Polish region of Zaglembie, had been home to Jews for hundreds of years. Jews worked and flourished in the district since the 1200s AD. In the late sixteenth century, the king granted Będzin Jews the rights to own prayer houses, buy real estate, engage in unlimited trade, slaughter animals, and distribute alcohol. For more than two hundred years, as long as they paid taxes, Jews were protected and established strong trade relationships. In the eighteen hundreds, the town flipped to stringent Prussian and then Russian rule, but local groups opposed these foreign colonists and advocated Polish Jewish brotherhood. In the twentieth century, the economy boomed, modern schools were established, and Będzin became a center for novel philosophies, especially socialism. New waves of practice led to passionate and productive internal conflict: Jewish political parties, professorships, and press abounded. As in many towns across the country, Jews comprised a growing percentage of the population, intricately woven into the fabric of everyday life. The Yiddish-speaking residents formed an essential part of the area; in turn, Zaglembie became an integral part of their identity.
In 1921, when Będzin was referred to as “the Jerusalem of Zaglembie,” Jews owned 672 local factories and workshops. Nearly half of all Będziners were Jewish, and a good number were well-to-do: doctors, lawyers, merchants, and the owners of manufacturing plants. They were a liberal, secular, moderately socialist group who visited coffee shops, had summerhouses in the mountains, enjoyed tango nights, jazz and skiing, and felt European. The working class and religious Jews also thrived, with dozens of prayer houses and a wide selection of parties to vote for in the Jewish council. In the 1928 municipal election, twenty-two parties were represented, seventeen of them Jewish organizations. Będzin’s deputy mayor was a Jew. Of course, these Jews did not know that the dynamic world they had built would soon be utterly destroyed—or that they would have to fight for their legacy and their lives.
* * *
In September 1939 the invading German army overran Będzin. The Nazis burnt down the town’s grand, Romanesque synagogue—a centerpiece proudly built just downhill from the castle—then murdered dozens of Jews. Three years later, twenty thousand Jews wearing Star of David armbands were forced into a small neighborhood outside the town, with several families pushed together into shacks and single rooms. People who had enjoyed centuries of relative peace, prosperity, and social integration, centuries of culture, were squashed into a few disheveled blocks. The Będzin community had a new pocket. A dark and dank pocket. The ghetto.
The ghettos in Zaglembie were some of the last in Poland to be “liquidated,” Hitler’s army arriving there at a later stage to complete their “Final Solution.” Many of the ghetto inhabitants had work permits and were sent to forced labor in German weapons factories and workshops rather than immediately being hauled off to death camps. In Będzin, postal communication was still possible. These ghettos had contact with Russia, Slovakia, Turkey, Switzerland, and other non-Aryan lands. Even in these dark pockets, then, emerged cells of Jewish resistance.
Among the crammed houses, amidst an atmosphere of panic, restlessness, and terror, was a special building. An edifice that held strong, not just by its firm foundation (indeed, it would soon rest upon underground bunkers) but thanks to its inhabitants, their brains, their hearts, and their muscles. Here was a Będzin headquarters of the local Jewish resistance. A resistance born out of the philosophy of the Labor Zionist movement that cherished Jewish agency, the work of the land, socialism, and equality. The “comrades” were raised on a unique diet of physical work and female empowerment. This was a center for the Freedom youth movement.
* * *
In February 1943 the ghetto was gripped by cold, the air heavy as lead. The bustling commune building was unusually quiet. The old buzz of Freedom’s cultural programs—language courses, musical performances, seminars on the connection between the heart and the land—had vanished. No voices, no songs.
Renia Kukielka, an eighteen-year-old Jewish woman and an emerging warrior of the underground resistance movement, came up from the laundry room. She made her way to the meeting being held around the large table on the ground floor of the headquarters where their most important planning took place. It was a familiar spot.
“We’ve obtained a few papers,” Hershel announced.
Everyone gasped. These were golden tickets—out of Poland, to survival.
Frumka Płotnicka with her dark eyes and furrowed brow, stood at one end of the table. From a poor, religious family in Pinsk, Frumka had joined the movement as an introverted teenager and, given her inborn seriousness and analytic thinking, rose in its ranks. With the onset of war, she quickly became a leader in the underground.
Hershel Springer, her coleader of the Będzin “troop,” was at the other end of the table. Beloved by all, Hershel had “so much Jewish folk character in him” that he made frank conversation with anyone with shared roots, from a wagon driver to a butcher, dwelling in their most trivial matters. As always, his warm, goofy smile was a soothing force countering the destruction outside; the filthy ghetto that grew emptier each day, the echo of nothing.
Renia took her spot in between them at the table, along with the rest of the young Jews.
She often caught herself staggered in disbelief, jolted by her reality. In only a few years, she’d gone from being a fifteen-year-old girl with six siblings and loving parents, to an orphan, not even aware of how many of her brothers and sisters were still alive or where they might be. With her family, Renia had run though fields covered in corpses. Later, she’d fled through fields completely on her own. Just months earlier, she’d bolted from a moving train and disguised herself as a Polish peasant girl, taking up the post of housemaid for a part-German family. She’d insisted on going to church with them as a cover, but the first time, she shook with every movement, fearful she wouldn’t know when to stand, how to sit, what to cross. The teenager had become an actress, constantly performing. The head of the household liked her and commended her for being clean, industrious, even educated. “Of course,” Renia had semi-lied. “I’m from a cultured family. We were rich. Only when my parents died did I have to take on manual work.”
She was treated well, but as soon as she was able to secretly contact her sister Sarah, Renia knew she had to be with her, with what was left of her family. Sarah had arranged for Renia to be smuggled to Będzin, to this center for the Freedom youth group to which she’d belonged.
Renia was now an educated girl who did laundry, hidden in the back. She was an illegal here, an interloper among the interlopers. The Nazis had divided conquered Poland into distinct territories. Renia had papers only for the General Government, the area that was to serve as a “racial dumping ground,” with an endless supply of slave labor—and ultimately, as a site for the mass extermination of European Jewry. She did not have papers to be in Zaglembie, an area annexed by the Third Reich.
Now, to Renia’s right, sat Frumka’s sister and polar opposite, Hantze, her exuberant spirit and relentless optimism lighting the dark room. Hantze loved to tell the comrades how she tricked the Nazis by dressing as a Catholic woman, parading right in front of them, fooling them time and again. Sarah, her face chiseled with sharp cheekbones and dark, penetrating eyes, was present, along with Hershel’s girlfriend, Aliza Zitenfeld, who with Sarah cared for the ghetto’s orphaned children. Fresh-faced Chajka Klinger, an outspoken, feisty leader of a sister group, may also have been at the table, ready to fight for her ideals: truth, action, dignity.
“We’ve obtained a few papers,” Hershel repeated. Each one allowed a person entry into an internment camp; allowed one person to live. They were fake passports from allied countries where Germans were being held captive. The holders of these allied passports were to be kept by the Nazis in special camps and were intended to be exchanged for Germans in those countries—one of numerous passport schemes that they’d heard of in the past years. Perhaps, they hoped, this one was legit. It took months to organize and obtain these documents, a hugely expensive and dangerous process that involved sending secretly coded letters with photos to specialist counterfeiters. Who would get one?
Or should no one take them?
Defense or rescue? Fight or flight?
This was a debate they’d been waging since earlier in the war. A few Jews with even fewer guns were not going to topple the Nazis, so what was the point of resistance? Were they fighting to die with dignity, for revenge, for a legacy of honor for future generations? Or were they fighting to inflict damage, to rescue and save—and if so, whom? Individuals or the movement? Children or adults? Artists or leaders? Should Jews fight in ghettos or forests? As Jews or with Poles?
Now a real decision had to be made.
“Frumka!” Hershel called from across the table, staring right into her dark eyes.
She looked back at him, just as firmly, though keeping quiet.
Hershel explained that a directive had come in from their revered leader in Warsaw, Zivia Lubetkin. Frumka was to use a passport to leave Poland for The Hague, home to the UN’s International Court of Justice. She was to represent the Jewish people, tell the world what was happening. She would then travel to Palestine and serve as an official witness of Nazi atrocities.
“Leave?” Frumka replied.
Renia looked at Frumka, her heart racing. She could sense Frumka reeling too, almost see her sharp mind at work beneath her quiet face. Frumka was their leader, the rock supporting them all, both the men and the women. Who would be asked to go with her? What they would be without her?
“No,” Frumka declared in her firm but gentle way. “If we must die, let us all die together. But”—and here she paused—“let us strive for a heroic death.”
Hearing her words, her assurance, the whole room sighed audibly. As if the entire building had been resuscitated, the members began tapping feet, some actually smiling. Frumka placed her fist on the table, as simple and quick as a gavel. “It’s time. It’s time to get energized.”
And that’s how they had their unanimous answer: defense.
Renia, always ready, sprang from her seat.