Female fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Masza fought to avoid being taken alive to her death

‘We wanted to live until that moment when we could defend ourselves, live to mitat kavod’, meaning to die with dignity. Did Masza Glajtman-Putermilch, one of the protagonists of your book ‘Ciągle po kole’ [‘Still in the Same Circle’], join those fighting in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising with this in mind?

Masza told me so, but did she feel the same way during the uprising...? We talked for the first time in 1988 in Israel, where she moved to after the war and in the next 40 years she soaked up the propaganda about the heroism of the insurgents and about a dignified death in opposition to a death a say in it, with the phrase ‘they went like lambs to the slaughter’.

Each year, in Lochame ha-Geta’ot kibutz (Heroes of the Ghettos), founded by ghetto survivors, a solemn tekes, a ceremony to honour them was held. When I was there in the late 1980s, I had the sense that I was participating in a Komsomol ceremony with a soldier’s drill: ‘attention, stand at ease, align’. Perhaps Masza, after years of living in Israel, may have thought that she went to the uprising to die with honour. But I strongly feel that she did not think like that in April 1943.

She also said that she was ‘burning for revenge’ because her mother had warned people in the ghetto in July 1942 that the transports were ‘taking them to Treblinka to death’ and that they should ‘not let themselves be taken alive’.

This is again an interpretation made years later. Her mother was a brave, strong woman; Masza recounted that she shouted in the ghetto yard that the Jews were being taken to Treblinka. I could see that she too was a irascible, energetic person. She came from a Bundist home and joined the Jewish Combat Organisation by chance. The Socialists did not have the pathos of action that we know from the Zionists. So I don’t think Masza had an elevated vision of the fight in her mind at the time.

She went to the uprising because she met her friend Leah Shifman on the street, who also belonged to Bundist circles, they knew each other from school. ‘There’s this militant organisation forming, maybe you’d like to join in’. Masza agreed, because that way she would be with the other young people and they would still fight! Marek Edelman accepted her into the Jewish Combat Organisation (JCO) and asked her everything – what she was doing, with whom, why, and then he told her about a group being set up in Zamenhofa Street and appointed Masza as one of the organisers. Her task was to look for flats suitable for fighting – they were to have front-facing windows so that she could shoot or throw grenades.

By January 1943 the ghetto had mostly been murdered, emptied of people, because between July and August 1942, 350 or even 360 thousand people were deported from it. There were only 60,000 left. Some were left to work, they had so-called life numbers and ‘were employed’ in the shops. There were also quite a few who did not have numbers. They were hiding, they were illegal in the ghetto. They were often the families of those working. More or less since January they started to build shelters, to prepare basements for living and hiding in them. In February there were already a lot of bunkers and hiding places in the ghetto.

I’m asking about mitat kavod, because I guess it was difficult to fight against Germans in a group of barely a few hundred people without feeling that it was a battle with no chance of winning?

I don’t have the authority to speak for them. What I present here is my image that has grown from talking and interacting with them, with the insurgents, with those who survived, and yet most of them died and no testimony remains of them. Someone had a stick, someone had an axe, another had a rock – and so they defended themselves. If there was a boy and a girl in a pair, he got a gun and she didn’t. The girl would shoot if the boy was injured or died.

In a sense, those 313 people from the Jewish Combat Organisation whose names appear in the list compiled after the ghetto uprising were condemned to die, to death. But it seems to me that a person believes until the last moment that they will succeed, giving themselves a chance. And after all, it was better to take the risk than to sit idly in the bunker and wait for the Germans to let in the gas through the holes in the wall. And you and I, if we had been there at the time, young and temperamental, would certainly have preferred to sit with a stick next to a boy who had a gun, instead of crouching in a bunker waiting to be killed. Together with this boy we could escape through the attics from burning tenement houses – because this is how the members of the JCO evacuated themselves: they punched holes in the walls on the last level of the buildings and went through the top, on the streets they would have been too easy a target. Sometimes they would sneak through the streets, then they would wrap rags around their legs to make their steps silent.

Participants in the uprising included: the Jewish Combat Organisation, the Jewish Military Union, and the so-called Wild Group. Many did not leave the ghetto, they defended themselves – that is, they lived there, they persisted, because life was a form of defence, of struggle – until September.

You’re the one who counted that there were 313 men and women who fought in the uprising in the JCO units?

That’s true. Marek Edelman and Icchak Cukierman lived in hiding in Komitetowa Street in July 1943 and there they wrote down the names of those who fought in the uprising. They forwarded this list to London, to the Polish government. It consisted of 220 names, which they wrote down from memory because, as Edelman said: ‘we all knew each other’. I have been verifying this list for several years – I have added names that the JCO commanders did not remember in 1943, and I have removed names of those who were already dead in 1943. Edelman authorised all my choices. On the London list there is a whole group of Dror members who died in Werbkowice in the summer of 1942. Edelman joked a little that Cukierman had added them due to organisational acquaintance.

This list is the starting point for the book ‘Odczytanie listy’ [‘Reading the List’], which has just come out in a third, revised edition.

Luba Gawisar recalled that in the ghetto she was accompanied by ‘such a quiet depression that did not leave even for a moment’, but ‘fortunately, something was constantly happening’. Could preparations for rebellion occupy your thoughts?

That’s one thing. But the first thing was to be with others. It’s like with a pandemic or the threat of war, as long as a person experiences it alone, they experience more intense anxiety states. It’s easier to be with people who are in the same situation. The proposal to enter the organisation was an offer to be with others, to be in fellowship, to share a bowl, a bed and fear. Somehow I can’t believe in pathos. The fact that these people could hug each other, hold hands, run together through the ruins, and it gave them a crumb of hope – yes, I can imagine that. Then the survivors carried the memory of their friends who were next to them, who died not alone in fear, but in human solidarity, in their friendships. Edelman talked about Staszek Brylantsztajn, about how a bullet tore his head off. I thought how good it was that Marek had seen him then, that this last moment of Staszek’s life had been preserved in Marek’s memory. It was a blessing in disguise that Marek told about Staszek.

How could one join the JCO? Pnina Grynszpan would come to the shop and just feel that ‘something was going on’.

It is not known when exactly the JCO was founded – in July or October 1942, but we know that this organisation was created based on activists from various political organisations that had their origins before the war. If you belonged to the Bund, or rather to the youth branch of the party, to Cukunft, you knew people from there, if you belonged to Akiba – you knew guys and girls from this religious-Zionist organisation because you met to read books together in the ghetto or you were at the Akiba camp before the war. So when the head of any organisation would join the JCO, they would bring others.

Pnina actually sensed that ‘something was going on’, and said: ‘I want to join’. She joined in the uprising with one Molotov bottle and one grenade. She was in the brushmaker territory. On the first day a mine in the gate at Wałowa Street killed several Germans. On the second day, the Germans returned with greater force and the insurgents had to retreat from the area. I first interviewed Pnina in 1988, so when she said then that she wanted to ‘attack and strangle’ the Germans guarding them in the shop, I also think that this militancy was a record of her emotions and thinking from the 1980s, not from 1943.

Did women fight as bravely as men?

I don’t know, how can I know that?! I don’t know their fear.

The gendered perspective is an interesting one. Pnina’s friends told her to dress in a better skirt to look good when she comes out of the sewer.

What should I say about it?

This is a women’s perspective that we forget about when talking about armed struggle. When Svetlana Alexievich described the Soviet soldiers at the front, we saw another face of war.

I don’t understand it. It is completely strange to me, you talk about femininity, I think about humanity. It is indifferent to me in the sense of: it is irrelevant whether Pnina was worried about how she would look and that she had a dirty skirt. Surely a lot of struggling boys could also be bothered by having their trousers ripped. Marek remembered wearing a red sweater in the uprising. I think we’re pretty similar in these boundary situations. In general, I think, we are more alike than different.

But the functions performed by female fighters in the ghetto uprising were different from those given to men?

If I may – I don’t like the term ‘female fighters’. Maybe it‘s because of my pro-Soviet education in which there were many fighters for very lofty causes. I prefer to talk about the boys and girls who came to defend themselves and others in the ghetto. But your question was about the role of girls in the organisation. Yeah, sure, it was different than the guys’ role. Weapons were mainly given to men, but it also depended on the political group. There were a lot of girls in the Polish Workers’ Party (PPR) and with them, as it was with the communists, everyone was supposed to be equal, so the girls had their 5 mm guns and they used them to learn to shoot, clean, and reload weapons. Women were liaison officers in the ghetto and outside the ghetto walls they were nurses and took care of the boys a bit too. But it’s probably a good thing that fate and cultural pattern spared them from being killed, isn’t it? One of the boys gave Masza some photos for safekeeping, not to a friend, but to her, because he was sure she would take good care of them as long as she lived.

Still, was liaising the most important thing?

This was in fact the primary role of girls on the so-called Aryan side. I use the phrase ‘so-called’ because the part of the city without Jews was called ‘Aryan’ by the Germans. Liaison officers were crucial, they were invaluable. It was easier for a girl to mask her Jewish appearance – with a headscarf, dyed hair and the confidence she had to learn. The men were often ‘more Jewish’, often spoke poorer Polish, and maybe they also felt more important, so they thought the girls should take care of them?

The girls on the so-called Aryan side organised contacts between the ghetto and the city behind the wall, and then took care of the survivors who left the ghetto through sewers after the uprising. Such liaison officers were Adina Blady-Szwajger, Alina Margolis, Luba Gawisar – they left the ghetto before the uprising, by the way, ordered by the JCO command. They contacted points, distributed money, food, medicine, and moved people to a new place if a Polish neighbour guessed who lived next door.

Leaving the canal did not mean safety at all. Was Pnina accused of espionage after the uprising?

After leaving the ghetto, Pnina was taken to the forest in Łomianki, together with several dozen others. They all wanted to go become part of the guerrillas. But it wasn’t easy. This is a separate story – how they lived in the forest for a few months, how they died there, often betrayed by a Pole, killed by Polish partisans.

She later returned to Warsaw, just before the Polish uprising. As it began, the owner of the flat threw out a group of several Jews who were sheltering with her. They went out into the street and were caught. Together with the Poles, the Germans led them to the Gestapo. At some point it became apparent that the Germans needed people to go with stretchers to the barricades to collect the bodies of the dead. Pnina got a white apron and a handkerchief with a red cross on it and off she went. She managed to get on the side of the Poles and when she told them that she was a Jew from the ghetto, they did not believe her, accused her of collaborating with the Gestapo and wanted to kill her. She was sitting in some basement, they interrogated her until luckily there was an officer who served in Modlin in September and knew Pnina’s name because her brother was a telephone operator there. Then they let her go.

A year ago, the New York Times published an article about ‘an unknown fighter in the ghetto uprising’, Niuta Tajtelbaum. Jacek Leociak admitted in the pages of the ‘Wyborcza’ daily that he does not know the story, and yet you wrote about it over 15 years ago. Does the fact that so many haven’t heard of Niuta Tajtelbaum prove anything?

I included her bio in the first edition of ‘Odczytanie listy’ in 2006. Niuta was an instructor, carrying a gun and training in the use of 5 mm guns. As Wanda Witwicka, she shot three Gestapo agents in Chmielna Street in early 1943. One survived and was taken to hospital, so Niuta, disguised as a doctor, entered the isolation room, shot the guarding policeman and the wounded agent. The Germans were looking for her for a long time. She was arrested in July 1943 in the gate of a house in Poznańska Street, and died in the Pawiak prison or in Szucha Avenue – we do not know.

There are so many of these: Dwora Baran, who heroically threw a grenade at the Germans’ feet while leaving the bunker, Halinka Rochman, who died because she covered Róźka Rozenfeld, Zocha Brzezinska who died in the bunker in Leszno Street when it was flooded with water, Tobcia Dawidowicz had a wounded leg and didn’t want to be a burden, so she stayed in the ghetto... Few of us remember them.

It doesn’t bother me that women are less known than men. In part, this is due to the fact that we talk more about insurgent commanders, because they were responsible for the others. Marek would say at times: ‘because I was in charge’, Pnina said: ‘I felt safe with Marek’.

Many of the women who fought in the uprising perished without a trace, and the deaths we know of were cruel, such as that of Tosia Altman.

Tosia was 25 years old, she had left the ghetto, but she was wounded in the head and leg, so she was not suitable for partisanship, although she was very much looking forward to it. She hid with other members of the JCO in the attic of a celluloid factory in Praga. It was a large, almost empty attic and they had to climb up a ladder and immediately hide her. There were about a dozen people living there, sitting on these bags of celluloid, and we don’t know why, but on 24 May a fire broke out there. Several people died on the spot, Tosia Altman and Szyfra Sokółka ran into the street with burns. Polish policemen stopped them and handed them over to the Germans because they guessed that they were Jewish. Both girls died in hospital because the Germans ordered that they be left without help.

Did suicides also occur?

Probably, but among the insurgents I have been able to identify few instances. It is likely that 17-year-old Frania Beatus, who looked like a girl, took her own life. As she spoke good Polish, she was considered excellent material for a liaison officer, so in January she moved from the ghetto to the other side. As of 19 April, she had not stopped crying and talking about suicide. She was Antek Cukierman’s liaison; it was she who answered night phone calls from the ghetto and ran to Antek to give him information. Frania was waiting for her boyfriend, I think it was Dawid Szulman. But Dawid never left the ghetto. On 10 May, she called Sara Biederman, who was hiding on the Polish side, and asked for someone to come and get her belongings and money. Frania left an accurate settlement, but she was no longer in the flat. We do not know how she died; her body was never found.

Were you the first one to talk to male and female members of the JCO about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising?

I think so. I have talked to them since 1985, those in Israel since 1988. They had not talked about the uprising before. They functioned there as heroes with medals on their chests, but no one was interested in their stories at the time. One of the values of these conversations is that they were reminiscing for the first time and for the first time in a language that was a language from that old world. After all, most of them spoke Polish in the ghetto, and later, from 1946 onwards in Israel, they lived in Hebrew. Later, as the topic became catchy in the 1990s and more journalists came to them, they often repeated what they had said before. In our conversations the interviewees bring out of their memory that time and that language.

And today, in the reissue, in addition to the beautiful portraits of those who spoke with Adam Rozenman, there are photos that have never been published before. Łukasz Biedka, a collector of Holocaust photographs, has agreed to make them available. It contains over 80 photographs from the Warsaw Ghetto and other ghettos in Mazowieckie Province. The photos were of course taken by the Germans and sent to their wives later. Such postcards of someone else’s dying.

 

Hanka Grupinska writes and teaches. She collaborated with underground magazines and co-founded Poznan’s ‘Czas Kultury’ quarterly. In the 1990s, she lived in Israel. She is the author of books including: ‘Najtrudniej jest spotkać Lilit’ [‘Meeting Lilith is the Most Difficult Thing’], ‘Dalekowysoko’ [Far and High] and ‘Ciągle po kole’ [‘Still in the Same the Circle’], ‘Odczytanie listy’ [‘Reading the List’] and ‘12 opowieści żydowskich’ [‘12 Jewish Stories’], all of which were reissued in March 2022 by the Wielka Litera publishing house

 

Author: Paula Szewczyk

Photo: pexels.com

The text was published in „Wolna Sobota” a magazine of „Gazeta Wyborcza” on 16 April 2022