women fighters and sho’a nightmares

Pub­lished April 19, 2021, the 78th anniver­sary (accord­ing to the Gre­go­ri­an cal­en­dar)
of the start of the War­saw Ghet­to Upris­ing.

With the pub­li­ca­tion of “The Light of Days” by Judy Batal­ion (April 6, two days before Yom haShoa v’hGe­vu­rah 57812021), our atten­tion is drawn to the many young women who fought the Nazis in occu­pied Poland. I’m very glad to see such focus renewed.

The book has received wel­come praise in:

Not only that, but:

soon to be a major motion picture

And, at the same time, I’m curi­ous about the book’s sub­ti­tle: “The Untold Sto­ry of Women Resis­tance Fight­ers in Hitler’s Ghet­tos”. It is almost as though each gen­er­a­tion needs to dis­cov­er these heroes anew (and at the same time, I’m sure there will long be more such heroes to recognize).

Hannah Szenes

While Han­nah Szenes did not fight in Poland, near­ly every Jew­ish child who has had even the most basic Jew­ish edu­ca­tion has been taught of her. Most of these know her poems. They sing “A Walk to Cae­sarea” (though they don’t know it by its offi­cial title). They may even iden­ti­fy with the text of her final poem “Ashrei Hagafrur” which has begun to appear in an increas­ing num­ber of Hag­gadot. Her words have even entered the reg­u­lar litur­gy of many con­gre­ga­tions as the intro­duc­tion to the Kad­dish. In this text, it is almost as though she writes to us about her­self and the oth­er women of whom Judy Batal­ion writes:

There are stars whose radi­ance is vis­i­ble on Earth though they have long been extinct. There are peo­ple whose bril­liance con­tin­ues to light the world even though they are no longer among the liv­ing. These lights are par­tic­u­lar­ly bright when the night is dark. They light the way for humankind.

In a moment shots will be fired

The Sum­mer 1971 issue of Davka on “The Jew­ish Woman” (Vol, 1, No. 4, when it was a jour­nal pro­duced by Jew­ish stu­dents cen­tered around UCLA) fea­tured a pho­to­graph of Rachela Wys­zogrodz­ka, Bluma Wys­zogrodz­ka, and Mal­ka Zdro­jew­icz, three fight­ers in the War­saw Ghet­to Upris­ing on its cov­er. We edi­tors did not know their names, but we did what we could to bring their exis­tence for­ward for a new generation.

The entire cov­er was also released as a poster and dis­trib­uted free in the Los Ange­les area at the time. Over the years, I’ve seen the poster in a num­ber of homes.

much less well known

…though impor­tant espe­cial­ly in this con­text espe­cial­ly (the anniver­sary of the War­saw Ghet­to Upris­ing) is Zivia Lubetkin who (accord­ing to her Wikipedia arti­cle) was one of the lead­ers of the Jew­ish under­ground in Nazi-occu­pied War­saw and the only woman on the High Com­mand of the resis­tance group Żydows­ka Orga­ni­za­c­ja Bojowa (ŻOB). She sur­vived the Holo­caust in Ger­man-occu­pied Poland and immi­grat­ed to Man­date Pales­tine in 1946, at the age of 32.

Zivia Lubetkin (1914 — 1978)

Quiet, the Night is Full of Stars

As chil­dren, my sib­lings and I knew of these women… even if, at the time, we knew none of their faces or names. Fri­day evenings as part of our fam­i­ly’s Shab­bat obser­vance we would sing a wide vari­ety of Jew­ish, most­ly Yid­dish, songs. At bed­time, our father sang Yid­dish lul­la­bies to us, per­son­al­ized for each one of us. Dad had recalled the words of his Shule teacher, Mr. Fin­klestein, in Cleve­land, OH where he grew up, who had said:

Any lan­guage that peo­ple did­n’t sing to their chil­dren in lul­la­bies would not live.

And so, we learned the words to these songs, even while we, by and large, did not know what they meant. Among the songs we sang before bed­time was one that was def­i­nite­ly not a lul­la­by, though its melody is soft and sooth­ing. It is more of a love song. When Mom made a record­ing of the many songs sung to us as chil­dren for Avi­gail in 1987, she includ­ed this one by Hirsch Glick (though it was usu­al­ly sung by Libbe):

שטיל די נאַכט

שטיל די נאַכט איז אויסגעשטערנט
און דער פֿראָסט האָט שטאַרק געברענט
צי געדענקסטו ווי איך האָב דיך געלערנט
האַלטן אַ שפּײַער אין די הענט

אַ מויד אַ פּעלצל און אַ בערעט
און האַלט אין האַנט פֿעסט אַ נאַגאַן
אַ מויד מיט אַ סאַמעטענעם פּנים
היט אָפּ דעם שׂונאס קאַראַוואַן

געצילט געשאָסן און געטראָפֿן
האָט איר קליינינקער פּיסטויל
אַן אויטאָ אַ פֿולינקן מיט וואָפֿן
פֿאַרהאַלטן האָט זי מיט איין קויל

פֿאַרטאָג פֿון וואַלד אַרויסגעקראָכן
מיט שנייגירלאַנדן אויף די האָר
געמוטיקט פֿון קליינינקן נצחון
פֿאַר אונדזער נײַעם פֿרײַען דור

Qui­et­ly the night is filled with stars
and the frost burned
Do you remem­ber how I taught you
how to hold a revolver in your hands?

A girl, a lit­tle fur coat and a beret
and she holds tight a Nagan pis­tol in her hand
A girl with a face of vel­vet
watch­es for the ene­my’s caravan.

Aimed, shot and met the tar­get
her lit­tle pis­tol did,
A car, nice and full with weapons,
she stopped it with one bullet.

Before day­light, she crawled out of the woods
with snow-gar­lands in her hair,
cheered on by the small, dear vic­to­ry
for our new, free generation.

Many artists have cov­ered the song some even in Eng­lish trans­la­tion. How­ev­er, to keep this more per­son­al, here is my moth­er intro­duc­ing and singing it to her grand­chil­dren from her 1987 tape:

Faye Hurvitz intro­duces “שטיל די נאַכט” by Hirsch Glick
Faye Hurvitz sings “שטיל די נאַכט” by Hirsch Glick


Sho’a Nightmares

Orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished June 2, 1999.

In April of 1997 I wrote (as an aside) to a forum of colleagues:

I think every teenage Jew­ish child ought to have a week of Sho’a relat­ed night­mares. If we can reen­act the Exo­dus and liv­ing in Sukkot, why not the Sho’a?

Only one per­son respond­ed. How­ev­er, that response was quite intense. I will not quote from that response but para­phrase some of the exchange that ensued

My cor­re­spon­dent strong­ly dis­agreed with my sug­ges­tion that we “impose” Sho’a night­mares on chil­dren. Sug­gest­ing that is one thing for an indi­vid­ual to make a con­scious deci­sion to engage in the par­tic­u­lar painful exer­cise, and quite anoth­er to impose it on some­one. My cor­re­spon­dent sug­gest­ed that (while cer­tain that I had not intend­ed to con­vey such an idea) none of us are put on earth to cre­ate new night­mares or forms of abuse.

And so, I respond­ed. Here is my thinking:

I decid­ed over 25 years ago [that would have been around 1972] that each Jew­ish child should have a week’s worth of night­mares. Of course, there is lit­tle that I can do to “enforce” this, but I can make expe­ri­ences avail­able that can enable them. I recall being at a Zion­ist youth move­ment camp in the mid-’60s and shown the movie “Night and Fog.” The film had graph­ic footage of the death camps. At home, I had books my par­ents had brought into the house with still pho­tos of the hor­rors. I had spent hours explor­ing these images.

I was old­er (approx­i­mate­ly 20 years old) when I tried to get into the life of the boy with his hands up being led from the Ghet­to. I spent months with him, I kept his image before me dai­ly, his image turn­ing a fiery red as the black closed in on him. [There are some who sug­gest that he may not have died in the Sho’a!]

I wore a yel­low star in identification.

Of course this was all self imposed and vol­un­tary. Did it scar me? I think not. Per­haps col­leagues who know me could respond better.

I have not changed my mind. I still find noth­ing abu­sive in this.

A week dur­ing a life­time is a brief span.

  • To imag­ine what it means or feels like to be a Jew­ish infant tossed into the ovens alive because the Nazis want­ed to save the 0.5 cents the pri­or gassing would have cost….
  • To imag­ine for a week what life was like for a teenag­er liv­ing through the Sho’a….

This is not a ter­ri­ble bur­den on a child. I know chil­dren who have night­mares from see­ing a pop­u­lar Hol­ly­wood movie, they all live through them. Do we pre­vent our teenagers from see­ing such films because they might have night­mares afterward?

If my chil­dren can iden­ti­fy with these chil­dren of the Sho’a, learn from them and rec­og­nize the holy spark that exists in each per­son, regard­less of age, gen­der, social stand­ing, loca­tion in the world, I don’t think I’ve ter­ror­ized them horribly.

Again, the point I made was in con­text of experiencing :

בְּכָל־דּוֹר וָדוֹר חַיָּב אָדָם לִרְאוֹת אֶת־עַצְמוֹ כְּאִלּוּ הוּא יָצָא מִמִּצְרַיִם
B’Chol Dor vaDor Chayav Adam Lirot et Atz­mo K’Eelu Hu Yatzah miMitzrayim

and I add:

בְּכָל־דּוֹר וָדוֹר חַיָּב אָדָם לִרְאוֹת אֶת־עַצְמוֹ כְּאִלּוּ הוּא יָצָא מאושוויץ
B’Chol Dor vaDor Chayav Adam Lirot et Atz­mo K’Eelu Hu Yatzah miAuschwitz

In order to K’Eelu Yotze miM­itzray­im we need to expe­ri­ence some of what Mitzray­im was.

On con­tin­u­al­ly retelling the Sho’a, I remem­ber an anec­dote from Isaac Deutscher’s book “The Non-Jew­ish Jew” in which he wrote of a Melamed with bright red hair who sat before them in ched­er. Every day all he did was tell of the cross­ing of the Red Sea. Each day the sto­ry was new as dif­fer­ent details emerged from his telling. Each day the Kinder expe­ri­enced the won­der of redemption.

Our cor­re­spon­dence con­tin­ued with an exam­i­na­tion of my quot­ed text.

Our rab­bis tell us that in order to qual­i­fy as a Chacham we must take on the respon­si­bil­i­ty of see­ing our­selves as if we had been lib­er­at­ed from Egypt and that if we delib­er­ate­ly exclude our­selves this makes one a rashah! My desire to have our teens expe­ri­ence the Sho’a in a sim­i­lar way sug­gests that if they do not, the are r’shaim.

In addi­tion we are not oblig­at­ed to expe­ri­ence the spe­cif­ic hor­rors of slav­ery in Egypt but rec­og­nize that we are free from ulti­mate oppression.

Yet, in the Seder itself we do a num­ber of things to remind us of what slav­ery must have been like. We dip karpas in salt water to remind us of the tears our ances­tors shed. We eat the maror to remind us of the bit­ter­ness of slavery.

I had not writ­ten about what I felt I had gained from my “exer­cise” and my cor­re­spon­dent found that unfor­tu­nate, sug­gest­ing that when we speak of our own per­son­al expe­ri­ence, we enable oth­ers to find a com­mon thread and build on our ideas, or not. On the oth­er hand, when we tell peo­ple what they should do, we encour­age sub­mis­sion to our “sug­ges­tion” or that they defy us.

We speak of Yitzi­at Mitzray­im as a metaphor for the process of rebirth. Yet (accord­ing to my cor­re­spon­dent) we are not suf­fi­cient­ly far from the Sho’a to appre­ci­ate its metaphor­ic val­ue. My cor­re­spon­dent sug­gests that we haven’t been able to metaphorize the Inqui­si­tion! (I’m not sure of that, I have read a vari­ety of accounts that sug­gest that the Kab­bal­ah of Tzfat is a metaphor­ic response to Grush Sfarad.)


It seems that I had got­ten dan­ger­ous­ly close to some very del­i­cate issues. My sug­ges­tion that chil­dren have night­mares raised ques­tions of why we have such con­cepts as harass­ment and abuse. Sug­gest­ing that some of us are more pow­er­ful than oth­ers and that when the more pow­er­ful tell the less pow­er­ful that they should do some­thing, they are impos­ing it.

OK, let’s take a step back and a deep breath.

I did­n’t have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to dis­cuss the Sho’a with the fam­i­ly. Too busy work­ing out math prob­lems, help­ing with prac­tic­ing La Bam­ba, catch­ing the last 20 or so min­utes of the cur­rent sit-com, you know, the nor­mal things of life. The things that the Sho’a prevented.

Can I impose? Yes: I impose a bed­time, I impose a dress code, I impose tak­ing vitamins….

But I wrote ini­tial­ly: “should” not “must”. Do I feel there is some kind of Mitz­vah to expe­ri­ence the Sho’a? Yes, but that is a metaphor. And here is where I did not make myself clear.

I was asked:

  • When we say they should expe­ri­ence some­thing, what do we mean?
  • Why should they expe­ri­ence these nightmares?
  • To be whole peo­ple? To be compassionate?
  • To be wor­thy of our attention?
  • To be good Jews?
  • To be an adult?
  • To be decent?
  • To be clones of us?

To which I respond:

Why do we say that every Jew should con­sid­er them­selves as hav­ing been freed from slav­ery in Egypt? So much of our texts harken back to the expe­ri­ence in Egypt as a source of lessons.

I don’t need clones. I often see aspects of myself in my chil­dren about which I feel uncom­fort­able… oth­er aspects I enjoy. I know and love the fact that they will devel­op into inde­pen­dent adults tak­ing the tools that my wife and I have made avail­able to them and rework their lives and their world. My task as parent/adult (even rab­bi in the greater sense as in with more than my chil­dren) is to make those tools avail­able to the next gen­er­a­tion (i.e. raise up many disciples).

I have nev­er described how I ben­e­fit­ed from my exer­cise of iden­ti­fy­ing with the boy in the photograph.

How have I ben­e­fit­ed? First, noth­ing appears here on this WWW site oth­er than attempts to cel­e­brate the lives of the com­mu­ni­ties destroyed by the Sho’a and litur­gies that height­en our aware­ness of the Sho’a in the hope that we might incor­po­rate this aspect of our peo­ple’s expe­ri­ence into our lives as we did the expe­ri­ence of Slav­ery in Egypt.

Beyond this I’m afraid I can­not point to any­thing tangible.

Per­haps some­one with keen­er insight into me as a per­son would know. It is hard for me to know. The only me I am is the one who has lived this way. What would I have been like had I not done these “exer­cis­es”?

how early?

Indeed, how ear­ly should Jew­ish chil­dren be intro­duced to the Sho’a? An arti­cle at the JTA (April 8, 2021) sug­gests very ear­ly is not a prob­lem: “Grow­ing up in Anne Frank’s shad­ow, my kids have known about the Holo­caust since before they could speak”.

When our chil­dren were young (at the time the orig­i­nal ver­sion of this post was writ­ten) I would pre­pare a “spe­cial” din­ner for Yom haSho’a v’hGe­vu­rah. I set the table with the usu­al white table cloth, as for Shab­bat, and put out the can­dle­sticks, but with­out can­dles along with a yahrzeit can­dle. The din­ner itself required more advanced plan­ning. I made sure we had bread in the house that had gone stale (at least stale) and the “main course” con­sist­ed of not much more than weak pota­to soup along with some wilt­ed veg­eta­bles. I see on the Web that there are now com­mu­ni­ties that hold seders for Yom haSho’a v’hGe­vu­rah. There is even a fair­ly elab­o­rate Hag­gadah (PDF down­load) for the event.

full circle

Also on April 6, an arti­cle about Batal­ion’s book appeared in Tablet. Inter­est­ing­ly enough its focus was not on the adult text to be pub­lished that day, but on a com­pan­ion text for “a young audi­ence”. It’s inter­est­ing to note that her young read­ers’ book is designed for pre‑, and ear­ly teens.

How is it pos­si­ble to adapt such a seri­ous adult book for a young audi­ence, ages 10–14, with­out los­ing its pow­er? For Batal­ion, who grew up in a fam­i­ly of Holo­caust sur­vivors, this involved remem­ber­ing what was impor­tant to her when she was that age. But it was also about how impor­tant she had come to believe it is for young Jews to learn about female resis­tance nar­ra­tives that, his­tor­i­cal­ly, had been occlud­ed or ignored.

In edit­ing the text, the non-Jew­ish edi­tor commented:

You don’t want to trau­ma­tize kids to the point that it clos­es them down and makes the sto­ry inac­ces­si­ble because they can’t process it,” said Con­kling. “So, you are try­ing to let them know what hap­pened in essence, with­out spelling it out in detail.” For exam­ple, in the adult ver­sion one par­tic­u­lar­ly graph­ic scene is described in which a Ger­man sol­dier grabs a baby from its mother’s arms and kills it in the most hor­rif­ic man­ner while the moth­er and oth­er chil­dren watched the atroc­i­ties, wail­ing uncon­trol­lably. In the young read­er edi­tion, the scene is delet­ed, and the text instead explains more gen­er­al­ly that peo­ple of all ages were tak­en away by the Ger­mans and sent to Auschwitz to die. 

I imag­ine that old­er teens can han­dle more graph­ic material. 

Date:1981
Size:5.6
Pin Form:clasp
Print Method:cel­lu­loid
TextNATIONAL COMMEMORATION

זכור
געדענק
Remem­ber
6,000,000

WARSAW GHETTO UPRISING

your lapel buttons

Many peo­ple have lapel but­tons. They may be attached to a favorite hat or jack­et you no longer wear or poked into a cork-board on your wall. If you have any lying around that you do not feel emo­tion­al­ly attached to, please let me know. I pre­serve these for the Jew­ish peo­ple. At some point, they will all go to an appro­pri­ate muse­um. You can see all the but­tons shared to date.

The image at the top is part of what remains of the wall of the War­saw Ghet­to.
The pho­to was tak­en on April 16 (East­er Sun­day), 2006.

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