The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos (Young Readers Edition)

In recent years, Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousafzai have shown the world the importance of youth, and especially young women in speaking truth to power and rejection of the status quo. Batalion sets out to make wider known the work of courageous young Jewish women who were dissatisfied with the lack of resistance that they saw by older residents of the Jewish ghettos where Hitler’s forces confined the Jews of Poland and Germany during the Second World War. They were drawn to various Jewish youth groups, notably “Freedom” and “The Young Guard”, and played significant roles in active resistance against the Nazis and their Jewish collaborators.

Batalion is an art historian and essayist who was born in Montreal but now resides in New York. Her facility with many languages (English, French, Hebrew, and Yiddish) helped her access historical resources, including memoirs, testimonials and oral histories, that were often available in the original languages, sometimes in translation, and even as translations of translations. In The Light of Days, she focuses upon approximately a dozen young women in their teens or early twenties who were active in the Polish ghettos. However, there are two women in particular who make recurring appearances as the narrative progresses in a roughly chronological fashion.

Renia Kukielka (1924-2014) became a courier for the Freedom group in the town of Bedzin in German-occupied south-western Poland. Her stories, first recorded in Underground Wanderings, her memoir written in Polish that was translated into Hebrew and published in 1945, provides first person accounts that Batalion incorporates into the text in English translation. This gives an immediacy to the narrative, and the use of source notes (endnotes) to identify the origin of the quotations is an invaluable aid to adult readers interested in further historical research. Unfortunately, the book suffers from uneven writing. The text can flow smoothly as in the quotation above, but other times it is choppy and even plodding. Here is a description from Renia’s interrogation by the Gestapo:

When she woke up, they started questioning her again. Why wouldn’t she confess?

A pistol in his hand, one Gestapo man said, “If you don’t want to talk, come with me. I’ll shoot you like a dog.”

Renia followed him down the stairs. She actually looked forward to it. She could not stand the suffering any longer.

Outside in the street, the Gestapo man asked her with genuine wonder, “Don’t you feel it’s a waste to die so young? How can you be so stupid? Why won’t you just tell the truth?”

Without thinking, Renia responded. “As long as there are people like you in the world, I don’t want to live. I told you the truth, and you’re trying to force a lie out of me. I will not lie! I’m content with being shot.”

He kicked her a few times, then took her back inside and handed her over to the others. Again, she was beaten until she lost consciousness.

The interrogators thought she was dead. When they found she still had a heartbeat, they laid her on a bench.

They called a taxi, and a Gestapo guard took her to another prison, this time in Myslowice (Miss-lo-VEET-za).

Another courier that figures prominently in the book is Zivia Lubetkin (1914-1978), a Freedom leader in the Jewish Fighting Organization and in the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Much of her story is drawn from the English translation of her memoir In the Days of Destruction and Revolt published in Tel Aviv in 1981. Zivia was older than most of the subjects in the book but an important leader in the resistance.

When many Polish place names are first mentioned, Batalion includes a guide to pronunciation for English speakers. A baker’s dozen definitions are included in a one-page glossary, and some other terms are explained in the text. It is unclear why the author thought it was necessary to explain the word circumcision yet gives minimal explanation of communal farms (kibbutzim) and also refers to the youth group’s main building as a kibbutz. The youth groups emphasized in the book were socialist and Zionist in their ideals and, in the years before the Nazi conquest of Poland, operated training camps and farms to prepare the members for eventual resettlement in Palestine. The extent to which the groups embraced communism is not really explored, perhaps to make the contents more palatable to an American readership. However, the fervent Zionism of the young Jewish women and their male counterparts is apparent. The two central subjects, Kukielka and Lubetkin, eventually made their way to Palestine and lived out their lives in the new state of Israel.

As noted previously, the source notes are very informative for advanced scholars reading the text. A list of 13 works for further reading, all published since 2002, consists of works written for children. Eight pages of plates are a valuable addition to the book. A map of the region is a reproduction in grey scale of a map that likely first appeared in a colour atlas. Unfortunately, this makes it difficult to read some of the place names when the background colours appear in dark grey. There is no index. Oddly, despite Winifred Conkling’s name on the title page, it is never clearly noted what her role was in shaping the book apart from Batalion’s appreciation for “her acumen and celerity” in the acknowledgements.

In our current society where Canadians are beginning to come to terms with the colonial heritage of settlement of northern North America, conversations and attempts at reconciliation with the truth of the country’s history and its treatment of the original peoples living here are difficult. It is unfortunate that nowhere does Batalion acknowledge that the colonial endeavour of making a Jewish homeland in Palestine seemed to many a way to address the genocidal Holocaust and Antisemitism in Europe yet created injustices and seemingly unending conflict between new settlers and the dispossessed residents. Batalion does strive to address the fact that some people may object to her references to the young women as “couriers” and “girls” in an effort to emphasize their functions and youth. She intends no belittlement in using these words. Yes words matter. What is left unsaid also matters.