Holocaust Book Review
Judy Batalion. The Light of Days: Women Fighters of the
Jewish Resistance, Their Untold Story. London: Virago Press, 2021. New
York: William Morrow/HarperCollins, 2020. xvi + 556 + 16 plates of black and
white photographs. + 1 map.
Reviewed by
Norman Simms
This is a very well-written, powerful, important and
sad book. It is about young women, usually between seventeen and thirty, who
give themselves to the fight against the Nazi Holocaust with everything they
have. These young women play more than the role of cooks, nursemaids or aides
in the precarious shelters where Jews attempt to ide from the murderous bands
that hunt them down and more than as couriers bringing messages between different
groups of resisters and escapees. They are often the organizers, the spies who
work to manipulate the systematic cruelty in Poland, and who give encouragement
and courage to those whose lives are being crushed. The name for these women is
kashariyot.
When
a kasharit arrived with news about
families and politics, it was a sign that they hadn’t been forgotten, that life
went on outside their confined tortures that not everyone was depressed. These
women were lifelines, “human radios,” trusted contacts, supply dispatchers, and sources of inspiration.
(p. 176)
Though many of these stories have already appeared,
some in collections made near the end of the war and after the defeat of the
Nazi regime, written in Yiddish or Polish or other East Europrsn languages, the
author is able to develop the narratives and the characters into a moving text.
The book also provides background to the persons, events and ideologies that
are at work. Some of the scnes of horror are
more vivid—and harrowing in their starkness— than in most
autobiographies and professional histories and novels of the type, giving a
sense of reality that is too often missed.
But it is above all the moral, emotional and psychological struggles
within the lives of the women themselves that’s its persuasive power rests. It
was Batalion says, “A constant pageant of deception.”
Coming from many walks of life, religious and secular,
wealthy and poor and sometimes already affiliated to Jewish and Zionist causes
or until the beginning of the round-ups
and killings indifferent to politics, these women have an almost
instinctive commitment to fight the Nazis and to be active in helping
others. Throughout the book their stories
show them facing with grim determination the need to hide their emotions, play
various role to achieve their goals—smuggling guns, assisting families escape,
ferreting out secrets from soldiers and policemen—and never to let their guard
down, cautious before trusting anyone, and keeping themselves alert in the most
trying of circumstances.
Sometimes, too, they used their weapons and a few
fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but most they did their part in smaller
towns and smaller groups. Those girls who looked Aryans could do certain tasks,
others who had the faces of Polish peasants other things, but all, no matter
what, did their best to keep strong in mind and body so that they could
whatever was needed. If possible, they cheered each other on with songs and
speeches; or they lay silently in dark cellars and waited for the time to
act. They watched each other suffer and
die. There was no time to be young or to have private emotions.
Many of these women did not live to the end of the
war, victims of disease, betrayal and starvation. Few of their names or
backgrounds are known, although Judy Batalion does her best to give them a
place in Jewish history as true martyrs. For those young women resisters who
did survive, the aftermath of their ordeal was neither pleasant nor easy. Many
of the men’s associations formed to memorialize the activity of Jewish resistance
could not bring themselves to hear about what the women did, if they believed them
at all. Ideological differences also kept the survivors from speaking out. That
is why it is important, even at this late date, a lifetime and more after the
events it recounts, for such as book as The
Light of Days to take an honourable place in the library of books on the
Holocaust.
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