The defiance of the ‘ghetto girls’ who resisted the Nazis

‘Jewish Resistance in Poland: Women Trample Nazi Soldiers,’ ran a New York headline in late 1942. That autumn, the Nazi occupying forces in the ancient town of Lubliniec, in southern Poland, had forced the Jewish community to assemble in the square. As men, women, the elderly and children were ordered to strip, a dozen women suddenly attacked their persecutors, scratching, biting and hurling stones. Stunned by this unexpected defiance, the Nazi soldiers fled. The influence of such courageous acts of resistance was tremendous. Galvanised by largely left-wing youth activists and connected by mainly female couriers, Jewish defence groups were soon staging armed attacks and operations across occupied Poland.

Judy Batalion’s powerful book refutes one of the abiding misconceptions about the second world war — that the Jews of Europe went passively to their deaths. In fact there was fierce and sustained armed resistance operating from many of the ghettos, culminating in uprisings, as well as revolts in concentration and forced labour camps and a significant, if sometimes covert, Jewish presence in partisan armies. Furthermore, much of this resistance was enabled, organised and led by women.

Fuelled by a well-founded sense of injustice and anger, determined young Polish Jewish women taped handguns to their bodies, hid grenades inside menstrual pads and baked pistols into loaves of bread. They wrote underground press articles, bribed executioners, undertook sabotage, cared for orphans and assassinated select Nazi targets before making their escapes through guarded exits, over rooftops and from moving trains. Slowly they also built up support among the wider Jewish community, and connected with both the Polish communist party and the official Polish underground.

Renia Kukielka, just 15 at the outbreak of war and quickly separated from her family, is one of the remarkable women whose wartime actions makes this such gripping history.