The uprising lasted about a month – as merrymakers at the Easter fair outside the Ghetto looked on. The furious Germans called in reinforcements and completely destroyed the Ghetto with bombs and fire. Ala and most of the other resistance fighters were discovered in their hiding places and arrested. Ala was sent to the Poniatowa labour camp, but her resistance was not over: she set up a secret youth circle and medical clinic at the camp, and led an uprising of the prisoners in which she was killed. Ala fought, resisted, and helped people until the very end.
Irena’s network were being arrested and killed, but her list of rescued children continued to grow from several to dozens to hundreds to thousands of names. She was careful to maintain meticulous records, written in a fine pencil on cigarette paper, which she guarded with her life. These records included each child’s true identity and the address of the family that had taken them in. Irena needed this information in order to direct funds and clothing and other supplies to the children, but it was also necessary, Irena said, ‘so that we could find them after the war’. Only Irena knew the content of the lists and could connect the dots between the children’s old and new identities, but she knew that if she was captured and killed by the Gestapo – which could happen at any moment – this information was too precious to be lost with her. And so she wrote their names down and hid the papers in her apartment.
In the fall of 1943, the Gestapo did come and take Irena away on suspicion of her activities with the Polish resistance group Zegota. The group had been founded by two women in 1942, and had brought Irena’s network into their fold. When the Germans took Irena, however, they didn’t know how important a resistance leader they had captured – the Germans had been hunting for the mysterious woman codenamed ‘Jolanta’ for years, but didn’t know it was Irena. She was taken to the Pawiak Prison and tortured, but she never revealed her work saving children or any other facts about the resistance. She merely said she was a simple social worker. Ironically, it would be her lists of children that would save her: Zegota members on the outside knew that she had been taken, but not where those vital lists were hidden, and so they gathered funds to pay a huge bribe to secure Irena’s release. The task of delivering the bribe fell to a 14-year-old girl in the resistance, who carried the equivalent of nearly £80,000 in today’s money in her school backpack to meet a German guard in secret.
One morning at the prison, when Irena’s name was called for execution, the bribed German led her another way from the firing squad and allowed her to escape. First, though, he punched her in the face, lest anyone down the line be tempted to think of him fondly, or believe he was acting on the right side of history in letting Irena go. Nope, just a Nazi taking a bribe!
When the Gestapo realised Irena had not in fact been executed that morning as planned, she shot to the top of their most-wanted list. Knowing she could be captured at any moment, Irena took care to bury the precious lists in empty glass soda bottles under an apple tree in her friend’s garden. It was the winter of 1944. Irena had to miss her own mother’s funeral in order to avoid capture – but only after ingeniously smuggling her out of the window of the hospital where she was being treated so that they could be together when she died. Again and again Irena Sendler managed to outwit the Nazis.
Even in hiding, Irena continued to direct the resistance, handling huge sums of money on behalf of Zegota, and managing an incredibly complex network of supporters and social workers and medics and, of course, children in hiding. In 1944, a ‘Home Army’ of Polish resistance fighters included 300,000 fighters, men and women. The 40,000 fighters in Warsaw, including 4,000 women, rose up on August 1st of that year.
By this point, Himmler had ordered German troops to kill all the residents of Warsaw, Jewish or not. No one got to be normal in the end, watching someone else’s misery from the top of a ferris wheel. The Germans’ reaction to the uprising was to flatten the entire city. Even then, under bombs and vicious street fighting, Irena, Adam, and their friends set up a field hospital to treat the wounded. When their operation was discovered, they successfully bribed another German to spare them from deportation. But instead of fleeing, they set up another field hospital.
By the end of the war, the city was destroyed, and millions of civilians were dead. Irena’s lists were now buried deep under rubble, never to be found. Irena did manage to reconstruct them as best she could from memory, but for most of the children whose true identities were hidden on the lists, there were no families left to find them.
Irena and Adam, who survived when all odds say that they shouldn’t have, remained in Poland, got married and had children of their own, as well as taking in two Jewish foster daughters. (And then they got divorced, but hey, that’s life.)
After the war, Irena would be imprisoned again, this time by the new communist secret police, for her connection to the resistance movement and the Home Army, which was at odds with the communists. Because of this political tension, Irena’s story remained largely unknown until the 1990s, though she did receive recognition from Yad Vashem (the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem) in 1965. Before Irena died in 2008 at the ripe old age of 98, she received awards and recognition from around the world for her wartime bravery, including a Nobel Peace Prize nomination and a letter from the Pope.
Can we stop here, and just reflect on the fact that World War II was not that very long ago? Maybe your grandparents were alive when this happened. Maybe your parents were. Or maybe, if you’re old, you were alive for all of this. (Hello, older readers: I’m sorry about the swearing.)
What lesson can we take from Irena’s story? It seems impossible to try at all. Her courage was too superhuman. The forces she resisted too unfathomably evil. Irena said it was normal for her to do everything she did – and this short telling of her life misses out more examples from the seemingly infinite supply of stories about the bravery of Irena, her friends, and other Polish resistors. In later years, Irena would always stress that what she did was only possible thanks to a small number of people who agreed that it was normal to risk their lives to rescue children. ‘I want everyone to know,’ Irena said, ‘that, while I was coordinating our efforts, we were about twenty to twenty-five people. I did not do it alone.’ So there’s a lesson. To do good things, you need good people you can trust.
When you read about horrors, and especially the great horrors that cause people to say generations down the line that such horrors must never be forgotten or allowed to happen again, you may come to feel uneasy that the people who did those horrors, or who let those horrors happen while watching from the top of a ferris wheel, are not so different from people today. It can feel as though the only divide between a society which accepts and participates in great horrors, and one that rejects and resists them, is as fragile as a piece of cigarette paper.
Speaking of what’s normal, it’s normal to feel like garbage after reading all of this. Take a break, have a rest, and yes, feel like garbage, because history is terrible, and you mustn’t forget it. We can only hope that there are more Irenas than not-Irenas out there, and that we ourselves can be more Irena than not-Irena, always.
Your new revolutionary role models
92
Olympe de Gouges
1748–1793
On the 5th of October 1789, 6,000 angry French women marched on Versailles armed with knives, sticks, clubs, pikes, and cutlasses. The French Revolution was in full swing, the Bastille had been stormed, things were on fire in the countryside, and somewhere in the distance the revolutionary future Jacobins were cheerfully sharpening their guillotines.
It all began with a bit of a riot in the marketplace in Paris, due to the fact that there wasn’t any bread – and everyone knows that bread is pretty much the entire point of Paris. That and cheese. And looking bored in cafés.
At the end of their 12-mile march, King Louis XVI received six of the angry bread women, and promised them yes, there would be bread for Paris. Delicious, fluffy baguettes. (Or whatever type of bread
they used to eat in 1789. It was probably gross.)
Just for good measure, the marchers stuck around till morning, when they stormed the bit of the palace where Marie Antoinette herself lived, and ‘accompanied’ the King and Queen back to Paris to sort out the bread situation. The royals were likely not terribly keen on taking this journey, though it was arguably rather merry. Some women handed out blue, white, and red ribbons to onlookers, some rode the cannon they’d pilfered along the way like so many cowboys – and others carried the heads of Versailles guards on sticks. The French Revolution was a confusing time.
But was it good for women? Well, much of history is just people disagreeing about things, writing books about those things, and getting mad at other people who disagree with those books, and writing books about how the other books are bad. The argument about the role of women in the French Revolution, and how much they benefited or suffered because of it, is no different.
Simone de Beauvoir wrote in 1949 in The Second Sex that the Revolution was basically trash for women. But in prettier, French-ier words. Another historian, Joan Landes, sums it up thusly: ‘The Republic was constructed against women, not just with them.’ And one more hot take from another modern academic, Catherine Silver: ‘The women of France rioted, demonstrated and struggled in the cause. However … women received no substantial benefit from the redistribution of rights after the destruction of the aristocracy.’
Beyond rioting and marching with heads on pointy sticks, women took other direct actions as a means of engaging in politics. Women participated in something called the ‘grocery riots’ in 1793, which was a bit like shopping in a Sainsbury’s on a Sunday afternoon, if everyone shopping in a Sainsbury’s on a Sunday afternoon was angrily demanding price controls, an end to hoarding and profiteering off food, as well as social equality, democracy, and rights for women. And the ingredients for a nice Sunday roast.
Enter Olympe de Gouges, stage left. This is a great joke about her politics, and the fact that she was a playwright. Frankly, reader, I just nailed it. Anyway, Olympe de Gouges was born with the much less cool name, Marie Gouze, in 1748, in the south-west of France. She moved to Paris after the death of her underwhelming husband (RIP) and began building up her reputation as a femme de lettres, a lady-writer who did lady-writer things such as writing plays and pamphlets, corresponding with other fancy writerly types, hob-nobbing with important intellectuals in salons, getting in fights with troupes of actors for delaying the performance of her plays, and presumably staring wistfully out of Parisian windows, as the French are known to do.
She wrote her most famous play, Zamore et Mirza, a comedy about a shipwreck, in 1784, but by 1789 had reworked it into an anti-slavery play, L’Esclavage des Noirs. She began to build a reputation not only for her abolitionism, but for her revolutionary zeal, and as an advocate for women’s rights.
All of this culminated in her most important work, the 1791 pamphlet, Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Female Citizen, which she addressed to Marie Antoinette. ‘Woman is born free,’ the declaration begins, ‘and remains equal to man in rights.’
De Gouges wrote her Declaration in response to her great disappointment in the revolutionary constitution of 1791, which included a Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and had made women ‘passive’ citizens of France. This meant that while they were technically citizens they couldn’t vote or do other citizen-y things. Thanks boys!
The constitution drew from the Enlightenment ideals of reason, rationality, and objectivity – but only applied them to secure justice for dudes. De Gouges loved the revolution, and was super into reason and rationality, but alas, like many men, the revolutionary leaders had turned out to be trash in the end. Or a prettier, French-ier version of trash.
And so De Gouges wrote in her Declaration that women – whom she described as ‘the sex that is superior in beauty as in courage’ (a true statement) – deserved all the same rights as those offered to men in the constitution.
In a postscript to the declaration she added that ‘marriage is the tomb of confidence and love,’ which may also be true, I’ll get back to you in, say, 20 years’ time. De Gouges was in favour of sex outside marriage, and attached a sample marriage contract to her declaration. It wasn’t terribly romantic, but then again, marriages weren’t particularly romantic before the revolution, either. The contract called for the equal status of men and women in marriage, and also called for equal rights for legitimate and illegitimate children. (Olympe believed herself to be the illegitimate daughter of a fancy man.)
After the execution of Louis XVI in 1793 (RIP) the Jacobins churned out a few more constitutions extending the right to all men, but no women, which makes sense because if women tried to vote, their big poofy skirts would just get stuck in the voting booths and hold up the democratic process.
By the time France’s littlest fuckboy Napoleon turned up on the scene and enacted the Napoleonic law code of 1804, all the worst things about the pre-revolutionary old regime patriarchy were brought back and entrenched. Husbands could imprison wives for adultery but not the other way round (of course), women couldn’t make contracts or own property without their husband’s consent, and fathers could even imprison their children for disobedience. Which is all quite shit.
Olympe herself fell victim to the Terror, i.e. the bit of the Revolution from about 1792 to 1794 that was extra guillotine-y. She had opposed the execution of Louis XVI, and was a bit of a fan of Marie Antoinette despite her revolutionary ideals. In 1793, she proposed that the French people should have a plebiscite to decide what kind of government they wanted. For this, for her defence of the King, and for writing a play seen as too ‘sympathetic’ to royalists, (though she denied this), she was arrested and imprisoned for three months. The Jacobins sentenced her to death on November 3rd 1793 for supposed sedition and counter-revolutionary activity, and she was led to the scaffold the next day.
An anonymous witness at Olympe’s execution described the way ‘she approached the scaffold with a calm and serene expression on her face.’ How must it have felt to be killed by the same revolution of which you considered yourself a driving force, through your writings and your radicalism? Probably not great, to be honest.
In her Declaration, De Gouges wrote one of her most famous lines: ‘A woman has the right to mount the scaffold. She must possess equally the right to mount the speaker’s platform.’ If a woman can be executed, she also deserves the right to be heard. Perhaps to say, ‘Please don’t execute me, you absolute cunts.’
De Gouges has become something of a hero to those modern feminists who consider her the ‘first French feminist’. She now has a Place named for her in Paris, where people can go and contemplate Olympe and the 40,000 others killed in the French Revolution, while eating some delicious bread.
93
Policarpa Salavarrieta
1795–1817
Being underestimated is pretty central to many women’s lives in history (and also in an office where I once worked), but for Policarpa Salavarrieta, it was exactly what she needed to do her job. In the early 19th century, the Spanish King Ferdinand VII sought to reconquer those bits of South America that had got a bit too independent for Spanish tastes in the years when he had been distracted by Napoleon invading Iberia, which would be pretty distracting if you think about it. One of the places he sought to reassert control was New Granada, including what is now Colombia. Policarpa was one of those who wasn’t going to let him.
Policarpa, known as ‘La Pola’ to her buds, was a spy for revolutionary, pro-independence forces, and in 1817 snuck into Bogotá, which was loyal to old man Ferdinand, using a forged passport. Once in Bogotá, Policarpa became ‘Gregoria Apolinaria’, an innocent seamstress and housekeeper only interested in mending your socks, and definitely not listening in on your sensitive discussions, no siree, nothing to see here. Just a relaxed, simple girl who loves her sewing and definitely doesn’t care about finding out what you royalist fu
cks are up to and relaying that information directly to revolutionary forces, ha ha, no, girls hate stuff like that.
With her brothers and her gentleman friend fighting on the revolutionary side, Policarpa was ready to do her bit. Other than her totally innocent work as a seamstress for royalist families, Policarpa also recruited revolutionary sympathisers among the royalist troops, convincing them to defect with that golden combination of flirting and bribery. She also raised money and hid soldiers and weapons. She even sewed uniforms because, after all, she was merely an innocent seamstress.
Nobody suspected her until one day, some guys who clearly sucked at spying were captured with documents proving her association with the rebels. She was arrested and sentenced to death, but spent her 15 minutes of gallows fame wailing against the Spanish, cursing them with such wild abandon that they had to get their drummer to ramp it up a notch to try and drown her out, while a Spanish officer shouted, ‘SHE’S CRAZY, DON’T LISTEN!’ Yeah man, some girls are just crazy.
Policarpa’s last words, remembered by the 19-year-old future Colombian president José Hilario Lopez who was in the crowd, were: ‘Assassins! My death will soon be avenged!’ Well, everyone knows the best way to get vengeance on your enemies is to be put on currency, and until they replaced them all recently, Policarpa Salavarrieta appeared on a Colombian bill26, like a 10,000 peso ‘Fuck you’ to her executioners. That’s only worth about $3, or £2.50, but still, her executioners didn’t get to be on money, did they?
100 Nasty Women of History Page 27