Resistance

by Tec, Nechama

  Comparing the life Leah had in the ghetto kibbutz to that of her family provides a startling contrast. Her father came to the ghetto in October 1940; by the following March he had died from starvation. Leah notes that once he was forced into the ghetto he had no possibility of earning a living. “Terrible hunger settled in my father’s house. Sometimes I would run from the kibbutz to see how he was. And it was a sight which I will never forget. I would also run to see my grandmother, whom I loved, because she was my mother substitute.”

  Occasionally Leah would save a slice of bread or a boiled potato and bring it to her father. She knew that this would not change much, but it was all she could do. She herself was hungry.

  It’s not a big deal to share food with others when you have plenty, but it’s very difficult to share with others when you are yourself hungry. Very hungry! Gradually my health deteriorated to a point where I fainted and I was taken to a clinic. And, of course, the doctor said that I needed better nutrition, that I should not work so hard. But I could not follow any of these recommendations.

  The sight of my father and of my grandmother dying from starvation and the deplorable hygienic conditions are pictures which haunt me till this day. These things happened over half a century ago but they torment me through terrible nightmares to this very day. . . . I would find my grandmother lying in a soiled bed because she had been unable to move from her bed. I remember she said to me in Yiddish, “Look what state I am in.” And I stood there, a young girl, with tears running down my cheeks. I couldn’t help it.

  Throughout the ghetto, there was widespread starvation. But it takes months before death relieves the sufferings of the starving individuals. Leah remembers how it happened with her father: “One day a girl came to tell me that my father was dead. So, I ran over there, and there he was in that basement apartment . . . you can’t even call it an apartment. He was on the floor in a pool of his excrement. And the stepmother stood next to him. Well, I didn’t have much sympathy for her, but that’s how it was.”

  In 1940, those in the ghetto could still have a burial if they paid the Jewish council fifteen zlotys. For this sum, they would provide a hearse and carry away the dead person. Leah had no money, however. The day after her father’s death, in the hope of finding his body, she went to the cemetery. There a huge pile of dead bodies confronted her. They were in different stages of decay. She searched for her father, but did not find him. Horrified, defeated, she turned around and went back to her kibbutz. When she came close to her living quarters, she understood that she could not even share her experiences with her comrades. Many of them had lost different family members to starvation. Others expected to lose more still. She, too, was just as unfortunate with the fate of the rest of her family. They all perished without a trace.

  Sometime in 1941, through the efforts of Joseph Kaplan, a member of the Hashomer Hatzair, a group of young members were sent to the Zarki farm, located close to Czestochowa. As a group, they moved to Zarki to farm the land.

  Some members of the Hashomer Hatzair moved to Zarki legally, others illegally. Leah was one of those who had welcomed the opportunity to exchange her ghetto existence for farm work. To her and to some of her comrades this experience promised more and better food and possibly preparation for a future life in Palestine. The Zionists viewed farm work as a preliminary step in the preparations for future jobs on farms in Palestine. Sadly, the long-range hopes that emanated from Zarki never happened. Eventually this entire experiment was dissolved, and its Jewish participants were scattered into a variety of directions.

  Before this happened, however, at Zarki Leah fell in love with Jurek (Arieh) Wilner, a bright and tragic star of the Jewish underground. Leah tried to recollect how their lives touched at Zarki:

  I don’t want to claim that I was his fiancée. It was not official at all. . . . In those days everything was temporary. We didn’t know what the next day would bring. Arieh (Jurek) came to Zarki in the spring of 1942. I met him and fell in love. Maybe we were ten days or two weeks, together. I don’t know. In those days two weeks was a lifetime. . . . Now from a distance . . . I ruminate . . . about those times. . . . I search for images of those who were close to me, boyfriends and girlfriends . . . the face of Jurek Wilner stands out vividly among them. I see him as young, handsome, with light hair . . . when we met, Jurek was on his way to Bendzin and he stopped at Zarki for a few days. My enchantment was instantaneous. For me, he expressed all that was beautiful, energetic, and pulsating with life.

  I can say this today that I still smell the grass on which we rested, close to each other, in the vegetable garden. I see how he chewed on a blade of grass, smiled, lightly absorbed in an examination of the sky, sprinkled with scattered clouds. I patted his blond hair, enraptured by the youthful magic of love. He spoke little, probably determined to unwind from the many burdens he carried. His eyes contained an overall weariness. With a full open mouth he breathed the country air. This was followed by the incredible sweetness of his kisses. How I longed to stay with him forever. His smile and caresses meant life which, for me, pressed so tightly to him, took on a happy glow, despite the raging war.10

  At the start of 1943, the Gestapo arrested Wilner. This happened on the Aryan side, where he acted as a courier and had passed for a Christian Pole. Leah received a letter from her friend Tosia Altman, also a courier, who wrote about Wilner’s arrest, insisting that for safety Leah had to change her living quarters and switch jobs. One could never be sure if and when, under torture, Jurek would break down and divulge secrets, which could lead to Leah’s arrest. Leah followed Tosia’s suggestions.

  Later on, through underground sources, they learned that Wilner, although severely tortured, had divulged no secrets. His close friend Henryk Gradowski, a member of the Polish Scouts organization, miraculously saved him. Gradowski not only risked his life to save Wilner, he insisted on bringing him to his home on the Aryan side. But Wilner refused this friend’s generous offer. Instead, he was determined to join his comrades in the Warsaw ghetto. With them he wanted to fight. With them he wanted to die fighting. As we saw in chapter 2, preparations for an uprising began in earnest in Warsaw after the massive summer deportations of 1942. At that point, the Jewish resistance groups knew about the mass shootings of Jews in Ponary and the mass gassings in Treblinka, Auschwitz, and Chelmno.

  Leah managed to reach the Warsaw ghetto a week before the start of the uprising. Her first stop brought her to Wilner’s dwelling. Here she found a totally changed man. Wilner seemed half asleep. Worse still, he gave the impression of having neither the will nor the strength to talk or to communicate in any way. Unable to recapture even a glimmer of their past closeness, Leah left his place without uttering a word. She was, however, eager to stay and fight in the ghetto. But her underground comrades wanted her to return to the forbidden Christian world. They argued that the ghetto underground lacked arms and would not be able to supply her with a gun. Besides, as a courier who spent most of her time in the forbidden Christian world, she lacked the training of a guerrilla fighter. She could be more useful to them from the outside, by procuring guns.

  Disappointed, Leah returned to the Aryan side, where she tried to reconnect with the few underground contacts she had. On April 19, 1943, a week after Leah’s departure, the Warsaw ghetto uprising began. It was the first urban, armed rebellion initiated and executed by the Jews and it unexpectedly grew into a fierce struggle. For some on the outside, the fighting ghetto turned into a growing spectacle. Large crowds of onlookers surrounded the ghetto as it burned, and Leah became a part of this curious crowd. “On the outside I stood there with a smile on my face. Yet I continued to cry on the inside. I went there . . . every day. I was driven to this place by a force.” What drove her repeatedly to the ghetto was fear for her friends and for the man she had fallen in love with, and continued to love.

  Jewish underground members and specifically couriers such as Leah would slip in and out of the ghettos. As long as they could r
eturn to it, they retained a sense of belonging. But with the Warsaw ghetto transformed into a heap of ruins, all that came to an end. Leah, for whom the Warsaw ghetto was home, described how she felt when this happened and she had to live alone in the Aryan world: “With nobody to console you, with nobody to tell you it’s okay, it will be better, hold on, you are in total isolation. Total loneliness. You know you are among people, and yet you are like an island. You have to make life-and-death decisions all by yourself . . . you never know whether your choices would be successful or not. It is like playing Russian roulette with your own life. And it is not one incident; it [was] this way from the moment I came to the Aryan side. Day after day.”11

  FIGURE 5.2 Many couriers carried false identification cards. This one, issued in the name of Stanislawa Wachalska, was used by Vladka Meed during her work as a courier for the underground. Her tasks included obtaining arms for the ŻOB, finding hiding places for Jewish women and children, and assisting Jews already in hiding with food, clothing, documentation, and medical care. (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Benjamin Miedzyrzecki Meed)

  Fortunately for Leah, her past periods of isolation were mixed with interruptions during which she was reconnected with some of her underground contacts. The fall of 1942 had been one of these lonely times on the Aryan side. She found employment as a kitchen helper in a rehabilitation hospital that specialized in tending to German soldiers wounded at the various fronts. The place was called Soldatenheimat, a home for soldiers.

  Passing for a Polish Catholic, Leah’s document identified her as Leokadia Bukowska.12 She shared a modest room with a stranger, who turned out to be a professional prostitute. Leah’s job was demanding and dull. All day long she had to wash and peel vegetables, clean pots, and contribute continuously to the spotless appearance of the kitchen. Leah showed an overall willingness to do favors for her Polish coworkers. She had hoped to win their support through her accommodating attitudes and extensive work.

  One day on her way home, she met Tuwia Szengut, whom she remembered from their prewar participation in Hashomer Hatzair, the leftist Zionist organization. Currently he was known under the Polish name Tadek. He explained that through underground channels he had heard about her living and working in Warsaw and had decided to reconnect. He told Leah that he belonged to an underground in Tarnow, made up of young people eager to fight the Germans. They needed guns. Then, almost casually, Tadek suggested that perhaps here Leah would steal a gun for them. The German hospital in which she worked had offered her such opportunities.

  Leah remembered that at this point she began to shake. Was it Tadek’s request that she should steal a gun? Was it the strong wind? Or was it simply the fact that she was not wearing a coat? Tadek noticed this and decided it was because of the lack of a coat. He would find her one. Indeed, when they met several days later, a coat was hanging on his arm. Although it was too big, it was warm. Leah was grateful and touched.

  At their next meeting, Tadek did not even mention the gun. But by now Leah was preoccupied with the idea of appropriating one for Tadek’s group. She knew enough to understand that possession of one gun could lead to the acquisition of more. She also realized that this could end as a suicidal gesture. At the same time, she could not help but see that getting them a gun could make a huge difference in the lives of these young Jews. She continued to vacillate between her desire to steal a gun and fear for her life. Leah was well aware that with the many military men around her, there were ample opportunities, but she had no idea how to do it. “Yes gun” and “no gun” became Leah’s obsessions. They inevitably translated into sleepless nights. The brief walks between Leah and Tadek continued, and though Tadek did not refer to the gun again, Leah was hardly able to think about anything else. Yet she did not dare to mention it to Tadek nor to anyone else.

  Then one morning at work, as Leah was moving from the kitchen to the bathroom, she passed next to a few empty rooms. Some of these rooms were being used by recovering German soldiers, others by some German guards. The place was silent. Without thinking, Leah entered an unoccupied room and walked over to a closet. When she opened the door of the closet, she saw a pistol. It was as if it had been waiting for her. She took it and placed it under her dress, and then quickly moved into the bathroom. When she locked the door behind her, she was both happy and miserable. What should she do now? She looked around. By standing on the toilet seat, she found she could look through a small window in front of her. The window opened with a gentle push out onto a roof. She took off her underwear, wrapped the gun into it, and placed it on the roof.

  Leah left the bathroom, forcing herself to act normally. She resumed her place and work in the kitchen. She was silent, but she usually was. She knew that she had to remove the pistol from the roof. When it was her turn to dispose of potato peels, she went outside. Assuring herself that no one was around, she retrieved the gun. She knew that she had to act quickly. In the back of the hospital was a door that led to the hospital grounds. The door, rarely used, was surrounded by all kinds of tall weeds and thick grass. Leah pushed it open and put the gun, still wrapped in her panties, into the thick growth, where it was lost next to the tall weeds and grass. Leah returned to the kitchen.

  After half an hour she became aware of a commotion. An announcement came that there had been sabotage and that all employees would be searched. She knew that no one would suspect her; and even if they did, they would find nothing. The gun was under the grass and weeds close to the back door. Then the search began. A German who knew her and seemed to like her looked into her bag and declared that she was free to go. Slowly she moved in the direction of the unused gate. No one was around her. When she doubly reassured herself that no one was around, she reached quickly for the gun and put it into her bag, then opened the gate and left. Slowly she moved in the direction of her house. The next morning, when she came to work she heard that the German soldier to whom the gun belonged had been accused of stealing and selling it.

  Tadek was delighted when Leah presented him with the gun. He promised to treat it with due respect. Soon Leah heard that they had used it in an attack on a police station that yielded more guns and ammunition. Eventually, according to rumors, this gun played important roles in several subsequent actions. When Tadek and Leah met, they would invariably touch on how helpful getting this first gun was.

  I asked Leah whether she had considered keeping the gun for herself. She was taken aback by my question. No, she never once thought about keeping the gun. After all, she had no use for it. When I suggested that it might have made have her feel more secure, her “No” was very definite. Again she said that she would not have known what to do with it. Also, because Tadek initiated the stealing of the gun, it was proper that his group should benefit from it.

  Between March and August 1944, the date of the Polish uprising, Leah was actively working as a courier. “I was delivering money, and documents, and I was going to Skarzysko Kamienna [an important railroad town located 90 miles south of Warsaw]. I would go to Starachowice [another town south of Warsaw], and I was helping families in Warsaw who were in hiding. My reason for going there was to deliver documents in case people had an opportunity to run away, that they should have Polish papers to do it with.”13

  Leah had limited contact with other couriers during the war because it was potentially so dangerous. “At one point I returned to the Aryan side of Warsaw and reconnected with my friend, Julcia. She was also a courier. Actually as couriers we tried to keep our contacts to a minimum because knowing other couriers had a potential of discovery. The less information we had about each other, the safer we were in case of an arrest.” One of these couriers, whom she met only after the war and admired greatly, was Hela Schupper (figure 5.3).

  Hela Schupper was born in Krakow and was eighteen when the Germans invaded Poland. She had finished her schooling with a business degree. She was popular and her friends valued her honesty and her independent spirit. For some time, she had been i
nvolved in Zionist activities and hoped eventually to settle in Palestine. Schupper’s looks, manners of speech, and courage made her a perfect candidate for becoming an underground courier. Her devotion to her Jewishness, together with her membership in Akiva, a moderate Zionist organization, offered her special opportunities to cooperate with Jewish youths who were similarly inclined. On one of her visits to Warsaw, she met Lutek Rotman, a young leader of the Warsaw ghetto underground; they fell in love. Often separated by their underground duties, to those around them Hela and Lutek seemed like a perfect couple.

  FIGURE 5.3 Jewish youth on a train taking them from Germany to Belgium. In the middle is Hela Schupper, a daring female courier. (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Dola Kogan and Josef Horowitz)

  Hela was ready to take on any underground assignment. By August 1942, she was constantly on the move between Krakow and Warsaw. She was in effect a full-time courier. Indeed, playing the part of a Christian Pole, Hela would accompany Jews who, for a variety of reasons, had to move between Warsaw and Krakow. Hela’s Aryan looks and relaxed manner offered invaluable protection to those whose underground duties required frequent relocations. In addition to transferring people, she also smuggled false documents, money, and arms.

  She considered herself fortunate that she happened to be in Warsaw during the ghetto uprising. As Lutek’s girlfriend, Hela stayed in the bunker, which served as the headquarters for the ŻOB underground. Lutek also brought to this bunker his mother, known to others as Mrs. Maria. Maria, a widow, was closely attached to her only son. Other underground leaders also brought those who were close to them to this bunker.

  By May 1943, the Germans had intensified their search for bunkers. They were particularly eager to locate the one that served as ŻOB’s headquarters. At one point, with many of its fighters engaged elsewhere, the ŻOB fighters left in the bunker sensed a nearby fire. This could spell the destruction of all those inside. After discovering a bunker, the Germans would pump gas into it, suffocating those who hid within. The Germans counted on burning the Jews out of their shelters. As those inside the ŻOB headquarters contemplated their next move, they suddenly realized that the German soldiers were getting ready to depart. The soldiers started singing, generally proof that they were done for the day. Finally, from their hiding place, the Jews could see the Germans leaving—yet they still smelled fire.