The Light of Days

How do you recover the buried story of women whose courage shaped history yet whose names vanished from public memory? In The Light of Days, Judy Batalion reconstructs a narrative long eclipsed by conventional Holocaust accounts. She began in London’s British Library, where a 1946 Yiddish anthology, Freuen in di Ghettos, revealed dozens of Jewish women couriers, saboteurs, smugglers, and underground leaders. Their stories would change how you think about resistance, gender, and survival under Nazi oppression.

Batalion’s central claim is that the history of Jewish resistance has been structurally incomplete. Female fighters—couriers, teachers, mothers, engineers—were moral, logistical, and strategic agents, yet erased by silence, politics, and postwar mythmaking. This rediscovery is not a marginal footnote but a transformation in how we understand agency during catastrophe.

How Memory Was Rewritten

The story begins with silence. Some survivors remained mute because pain was too fresh; others found their narratives unpalatable in societies that preferred martyrdom to defiance. Early Israeli discourse elevated male fighters into myth, while postwar literature reduced women to symbols of endurance or motherhood. Batalion excavates the missing decades when female heroism was archived but untranslated, preserved in Yiddish periodicals, or forgotten behind linguistic walls. Renia Kukiełka’s memoir, for example, lay dormant for half a century before Batalion found and translated it—making visible an entire network of armed couriers and moral courage.

From Discovery to Historical Reframe

Once you follow the chain of women named in Freuen in di Ghettos, you see a continent-wide web of youth movements, couriers, teachers, and insurgents whose stories never reached standard curricula. Emanuel Ringelblum’s diaries had already hinted at their contributions—“The story of the Jewish woman will be a glorious page”—but no mainstream history had treated it as such. By chronicling figures like Zivia Lubetkin, Frumka Płotnicka, Tosia Altman, Renia, and scores of others, Batalion argues that resistance was not male-coded heroism but communal innovation built on women’s relational intelligence, adaptability, and courage under fire.

Why Gender Matters in Reconstructing Agency

Understanding these women demands attention to gendered reality: their ability to disguise, nurture, and improvise became tactical assets. They used femininity where men could not—passing under Aryan appearance, attending church undetected, and hiding explosives in handbags or under dresses. Their everyday care, teaching, and cooking concealed radical subterfuge. Recognizing this double life forces you to redefine “resistance.” It includes the mother rationing food, the girl smuggling coal, and the teacher running secret schools—all acts that sustained the moral backbone of defiance.

Memory and the Personal Turn

Batalion’s project is also personal. Growing up in a family of Holocaust survivors, she inherited a narrative of escape and endurance, not armed revolt. Uncovering the Yiddish texts reoriented her understanding of Jewish identity: these women did not just endure—they acted. For Batalion, rediscovery becomes an act of moral justice, restoring women’s deeds to the language of courage. You are urged to recognize that history’s omissions shape collective self-understanding—and that remembrance itself is a feminist and ethical labor.

A Core Lesson

History is not merely what happened—it is what survives translation, institutional endorsement, and cultural permission. Batalion’s reconstruction of women’s resistance shows how recovering marginalized archives is itself a form of historic resistance.

Across the book, you watch Batalion weave recovery into storytelling, connecting the hidden past to modern questions of moral responsibility, trauma, and remembrance. By combining research discipline with narrative compassion, she shows that the light of days still burns strongest where ordinary people—often women—chose risk over compliance and action over silence.

Before the first bullet or courier mission, resistance was already incubating in the Jewish youth organizations of interwar Poland. Groups like Hashomer Hatzair, Dror, Akiva, and The Young Guard cultivated self-discipline, communal loyalty, and egalitarian leadership that became the social DNA of later undergrounds. You see that these were not after-school clubs but ideological laboratories blending socialism, Zionism, and education.

Communal houses such as Dzielna 34 in Warsaw functioned as dormitory, school, and planning headquarters. Both genders shared leadership: men taught tactics and ideology; women nurtured morale and organization. This parity ensured that when war came, women like Zivia Lubetkin and Frumka Płotnicka already possessed management and command experience.

Practical Skills, Political Maturity

The movements prized hands-on work. Farming, sewing, construction, and printmaking trained young Jews to adapt under scarcity. They practiced self-defense, anti-fascist discussion, and informal democracy, which later became templates for underground governance. When ghettos formed, this training converted seamlessly into resistance infrastructure—bunkers, workshops, courier networks, and education circles all stemmed from this ethos of communal competence.

Gender Balance as Strategic Innovation

Unlike in many contemporary movements, women’s leadership was normalized here, not symbolic. The 'intimate group' model demanded emotional and logistical co-leadership, creating female commanders trained in decision-making long before the war. This prewar gender egalitarianism explains why, under occupation, women seamlessly assumed high-risk roles—as organizers, armed fighters, and spies. What might look like spontaneous heroism was the mature fruit of ideological education.

Dzielna 34: A Microcosm of the Underground

At Dzielna 34, you encounter a convergence of intellectual and manual resistance: lectures by Yitzhak Katzenelson alongside clandestine printing and laundry work. This combination of labor, study, and communal governance forged not just unity but pragmatism. When deportations began, the same people who ran soup kitchens built bunkers and issued forged IDs. Youth culture became wartime infrastructure—an understated but decisive weapon.

If resistance movements are organisms, couriers are their circulatory system. The kashariyot—mostly young women—carried information, ammunition, and hope through occupied Poland. Gender and linguistic fluency enabled them to pass for Polish civilians. A peasant blouse and confident stride could mean the difference between life and discovery.

Disguise and Improvisation

Couriers learned Catholic prayers and Polish slang; they altered hairstyles and mannerisms. Weapons were hidden in marmalade jars, teddy bears, loaves of bread, or taped to flesh. They flirted, bribed, and bluffed their way through checkpoints. Irena Adamowicz, a Catholic ally, ferried money and documents using official permits, proving that cooperation across faiths was vital. Each border crossing became a theatrical performance guided by nerve and adaptability.

Examples of Tactical Courage

• Renia Kukiełka repeatedly crossed occupied borders using names from forged identification cards and survived interrogation by leaping from a train.
• Tosia Altman served as a regular link between Warsaw and Vilna, smuggling intelligence under sacks of food.
• Hela Schüpper carried grenades in her purse and attended a Gestapo party while armed.

Networks as Weaponry

These women constituted an informal infrastructure of communication that allowed political coordination between isolated ghettos. Their missions sustained morale and strategy, linking underground press, rescue funds, and fighters. Their anonymity kept them alive, but it also meant history nearly forgot them. Understanding their work makes you see resistance not only as combat but as logistics—the daily courage of motion through terror.

Initially, Jewish underground activity focused on social welfare: food distribution, educational continuity, and spiritual defense. But as deportations intensified, idealism evolved into armed determination. The formation of the ŻOB (Jewish Fighting Organization) in 1942 marked that turning point—from aid to arms.

Youth Leadership Against Paralysis

Adult leadership hesitated, fearful of reprisals. Youth movement members like Zivia Lubetkin and Yitzhak Zuckerman crossed ideological lines to act. For them, dying with dignity was preferable to compliant annihilation. The early sabotage of German warehouses and collaborators became schools of rebellion preparing for larger uprisings.

Improvisation Under Scarcity

Weapons were scarce and often self-made: pipe bombs, petrol cocktails, retooled ammunition. Women like Frumka Płotnicka organized munitions workshops, pooling stolen materials from factories. Bunkers and tunnels were designed with electricity and airflow, combining survival architecture with combat strategy. Militants taxed local elites to fund supplies, enacting a micro-society of wartime socialism.

Warsaw and Beyond

The January and April 1943 uprisings in Warsaw revealed the limits and possibilities of defiance. Fighters, many female, used rooftops and sewers as battlefields. Even when crushed, they transformed narrative: Jews were not only victims but combatants. For Batalion, this reimagining of Jewish resistance recovers a moral victory that defied the Nazis’ dehumanizing logic.

Even before weapons fired, survival itself functioned as subversion. Women turned household labor into underground resilience. In ghettos, they rationed food, hid children, and ran clinics or classrooms, preserving cultural identity under impossible surveillance.

Domestic Resistance

By operating soup kitchens, daycare spaces, and informal schools, women enacted moral resistance that kept human dignity alive. Sponsoring secret classes or maintaining the Oneg Shabbat archive became acts of preservation against erasure. Work was weaponized into hope.

Vulnerability and Inversion of Roles

With men often deported early, women became breadwinners, smugglers, and protectors. They endured forced labor and sexual coercion by guards and blackmailers. Despite marginalization, their involvement in smuggling food or documents frequently bridged ghettos to outside networks, feeding underground communication.

Moral Labor and Psychological Cost

The dual demand—to comfort others while confronting death—created intense emotional labor. Maternal decisions about hiding or surrendering children exemplified wrenching ethical calculus. Recognizing these moments reframes survival as an active, ethical choice rather than passive endurance.

Few episodes encapsulate the extremes of danger like Renia Kukiełka’s arrest, torture, and escape. Her experience exposes the machinery of repression and the ingenuity of survival in motion. When captured at a Gestapo checkpoint with forged documents, Renia faced interrogation designed to break body and identity alike. Yet she maintained her cover under beatings and sleep deprivation.

Life Inside the Prison

Mysłowice prison reveals a female network of compassion amid horror: nurses, midwives, and prisoners traded stories like smuggled oxygen. Waiting itself became torture—weeks of uncertainty intensified mental collapse more than physical pain. The solidarity formed there mirrored underground sisterhood outside.

The Great Escape

With help from local allies and forged bribes, Renia swapped places with a peasant woman and slipped through barbed-wire fences under drunken guard watch. Her flight through villages and eventually the Tatra Mountains exemplifies coordination, luck, and endurance. Each ally—a guard, smuggler, or villager—illustrated the nuanced moral topography of occupied Europe, where complicity and courage coexisted.

Lesson in Covert Logistics

Renia’s story teaches that escape is never spontaneous—it demands networks, money, timing, and relentless nerve. Her survival foreshadows many postwar tales of women who carried these operational skills into new lives in Palestine or postwar Europe, channeling war trauma into reconstruction.

Outside the cities, the forests promised refuge, but also danger. Jewish partisans lived among Soviet or Polish detachments that alternated between alliance and antisemitism. Women fought here too, though conditions reshaped freedom into moral complexity.

Life and Exploitation in the Woods

Joining partisans did not guarantee dignity. Sexual coercion, starvation, and suspicion were common. Women sometimes exchanged intimacy for shelter or protection, blurring consent and survival. The 'freedom of woods' thus exposed gender hierarchies anew, mirroring wartime society within the struggle for justice.

Leadership and Sabotage

In Jewish-led detachments—like Abba Kovner’s FPO or the Bielski group—women achieved true leadership. Vitka Kempner destroyed railways, Ruzka Korczak commanded ambushes, and Faye Schulman photographed covert operations. Here, Jewish agency flourished fully, but Batalion also confronts ethical shadows: vengeance missions, such as postwar poisonings of German prisoners, challenge moral boundaries.

Freedom’s Double Edge

For many partisans, the end of war didn’t end violence within. Reconstruction required shifting from weapon to plowshare—a psychological leap few achieved easily. The forest granted survival but also trauma that persisted long after liberation. The lesson: freedom without healing remains unfinished resistance.

Postwar life introduced another frontier: rebuilding meaning. In the new Israel, survivors like Zivia Lubetkin and Antek Zuckerman founded the Ghetto Fighters’ House Kibbutz—an experiment combining labor, education, and memorial. Work became therapy, and commemoration became civic duty.

Labor as Healing Discipline

Manual work—farming, hosting guests, building walls—anchored traumatized survivors in tangible purpose. Yet, the echoes of destruction lingered as nightmares, hypervigilance, or panic at thunder. Public stoicism coexisted with private collapse: Zivia’s pragmatism, Antek’s post-bereavement alcoholism, and Chajka Klinger’s suicide reveal the costs of 'surviving survival.'

Silence and Family Legacy

Many survivors shielded children from trauma by silence. Zivia refused to narrate her pain, cultivating modesty as virtue. Her children felt burdened by mythic parenthood, struggling between reverence and incomprehension. Only grandchildren began to ask questions, uncovering buried family histories. Thus, trauma traveled between generations disguised as restraint and work ethic.

Contesting Public Memory

Institutions like GFH, Yad Vashem, and POLIN became arenas where narrative politics unfolded. Which heroes, which resistances, which silences? Batalion underscores that remembrance is constructed—each museum or archive chooses its moral script. Her own archival detective work mirrors the fighters she writes about: persistence under threat of oblivion. Ultimately, remembering these women completes the circle of resistance—they fought fascism then, and their recovery fights forgetting now.