THE GIRL BANDITS OF THE WARSAW GHETTO

Saying their names.

In this uncompromisingly terrifying work of historical recovery, historian Hyman writes of the lives of the young women who led Polish Jewry into a period of confident self-awareness and then, ultimately, to the great and self-annihilating resistance of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943. Hyman retells a history of the Holocaust in women’s voices. She illustrates how they were educated in the traditions of religious learning and Hebrew language. The Zionist impulses of the 1930s found some of their most vigorous leaders in the women born in Poland after World War I. They worked in the interstices of Polish Jewish life. Because they were not physically marked like Jewish men, and because they were largely ignored by occupying German authorities, they could move back and forth among the Jewish and non-Jewish spheres of Polish life. “It is in recognition of these women’s psychological impact on the Jews of Occupied Poland, and their roles in organizing and supporting the Polish Jewish underground, that they were dubbed the kashariyot; a word derived from the Hebrew kesher, or ‘connection.’” Zivia Lubetkin, the sisters Frumka and Hancia Plotnitzka, Lea Perlstein, and Tosia Altman—these are among heroines of the story. In a day-by-day chronicle of the ghetto uprising, women appear, trying to run their households, moving among the resistance, building communities of survival. They come alive in letters, memoirs, and reminiscences. Theirs is a story of friendship against hardship. As one of them, Feigele Peltel, writing under the assumed name of Vladka Kowalska, said, “We formed a close-knit group, almost a family, each looking after the other….In the warm atmosphere of camaraderie, we felt much more secure and at ease than even in the best hideout.” We have no statues to their courage. Instead, we have this book.

Women of the Jewish resistance come alive in this revisionary history of the Polish Holocaust.