Ep. 81- Girl Bandits of the Warsaw Ghetto with Elizabeth Hyman

In Holocaust history much like history in general, women's voices and experiences have often been overlooked or ignored.  In this episode, I talk with an author who has focused on bringing those experiences to light.

We talk about the actions of a number of young Jewish women in the Warsaw Ghetto resistance, both during the uprising itself but also before.  From traveling in disguise across occupied Poland to smuggling weapons to leading fighting groups. Elizabeth Hyman documents their remarkable contributions to resisting the Nazis.

Elizabeth Hyman is a writer, historian, and archivist.

Hyman, Elizabeth. The Girl Bandits of the Warsaw Ghetto: The True Story of Five Courageous Young Women Who Sparked an Uprising (2025)

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Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com

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You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

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Waitman Beorn (00:24)
You may have heard a lot about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the resistance, even Jewish resistance. but I guarantee you haven't heard the amazing stories of some of the women that were involved in all levels of the Jewish resistance in Warsaw. And that's what we're talking about on today's episode of the Holocaust History Podcast.

Waitman Beorn (01:17)
Hello everybody, welcome back to the Holocaust History Podcast. I'm your host, Waitman Bourne, and today we're going to talk about resistance, Jewish resistance in particular, with a focus on Warsaw, but also other places that are connected to it. But we're gonna look at it at an angle that you may not be as aware of. you may be fairly aware of some of the more famous people involved in things like the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

But our guest today is Elizabeth Hyman, and she's gonna talk about the role of women, Jewish women. And it's it's fascinating. she's written a new book on this called The Girl Bandits of the Warsaw Ghetto. and it really sheds really new light and and a in a really well-written, exciting narrative about what these women did. And it's it's it's really quite amazing. And it's something that I

kind of knew some of the broad outlines of, but some of things she she explores in this book, I didn't know about and I found really, really fascinating. So Elizabeth, thanks so much for coming on.

Elizabeth (02:17)
Thank you so much for having me.

Waitman Beorn (02:20)
c can you just start by telling us how you got interested in this particular topic and and why you wanted to explore these these women?

Elizabeth (02:29)
Course.

So it must have been back in 2013. I was in my second year of graduate school, and I was taking a course at the University of Maryland College Park about how to read Jewish women's writings as primary sources within the modern era. And we were assigned to read an excerpt from the memoir of a woman named Vladka Mead. And in her memoir, Vladka describes smuggling dynamite into the war saghetto. And in that moment, I remember being very

Very

righteously indignant. Like I've been in the Jewish community my whole life. In my second year of graduate studies, I'm a Holocaust historian, and no one told me that there were women involved in arming the war saw ghetto. At that time, and still now, I have a history blog. And at that point, I had a series of blog posts about historical women who I just thought were interesting or underknown or underappreciated, or who I just thought were really cool. So I thought, okay, when I finish grad school, I'm gonna write a blog post about.

This flock of meat. That blog post took

Let's just say it didn't actually took about five years. Five years. It became an eleven part series that I finally ended up posting in April of 2018 to align with the 75th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. And the research I did to write this blog post opened my eyes very quickly to the fact that Vladka was not acting alone. She was part of a cohort of incredible young Polish Jewish women who were doing the most dangerous

resistance work during the Holocaust and I never heard of any of them. So I was actually chatting with my mother about this blog post series. And I said, as much as I loved writing it, I feel like I've barely scratched the surface of r the story really is. And she said, well maybe that's your book. And I said, How do I how do I write a book? How do I get published? fairly early on in the process I actually had a notion that I wanted to write about all of these women, all the women within this larger

cohort known as the Kashariot, the smuggler women, the courier women, that sort of an umbrella term coined by Lenora Weitzmann to describe this cohort of women. And at first I wanted to write about as many as I could. But then fairly early on in the process, a literary agent said to me, You have to pick four, maybe five. You can't write about all of them. So I picked the five women who ended up being featured in the book. That's Vladka Mead, Sivia Lubetkin, Tulsiya Utman, Tama Schneiderman, and Dr. Edina Blade Schweiger.

and went from there. But yeah, it it was birthed from that righteous indignation that I had no idea about these women and their work.

Waitman Beorn (05:14)
I mean i and it is it is amazing because and we'll we'll talk about this as well as we move forward, but just the the diversity of things that tasks that they did, right? which would which I I found really really fascinating. maybe we can start by taking a step a step back, right? with maybe maybe what kind of is a collective biography of of some of these women and kind of like w where do they come from? Because it

Elizabeth (05:26)
Mm-hmm. Absolutely.

Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (05:44)
you know, i in your in your book it it seems that some of them have some some common background, some common experiences that then lend themselves later on to being, you know, as kind of as a Liam Neeson sort of a particular set of skills, right, that that are that are then useful you know, during during the Holocaust.

Elizabeth (05:59)
Yeah.

Hmm. Right. And so that commonality is the generation they were all a part of.

originally this book was going to actually feature Rachel Auerbach as the fifth woman. for listeners who don't know who Rachel Auerbach was, she was a member of Dr. Emmanuel Ringelbloom's underground archival project of the Borsa Ghetto, and she was key to making sure those archives were excavated in 1946, and she spent the last of her life working for Yad Vashem, dealing with testimony methodology. I ended up not including her in the book because she's a bit older than the rest.

Of the woman. And if this book has an argument, which it does, but because it's for a trade press, I'm sneaky about it. What this book argues is that the unique way in which interwar Jewish youth came of age between the two world wars informed their political and resistance work during World War II.

So and I can go much more in depth on that when let you direct that conversation. So by virtue of this unique interwar socialization, this cohort of young people who are between the ages of let's say 18 and 25 during the Holocaust had already learned how to do politics and how to do community organizing.

in the context of a hostile state long before the war began. So when the war did begin, the women who had come of age in those movements and who were already leaders in those movements were perfectly poised to jump in and spearhead this work.

Waitman Beorn (07:36)
Yeah, I I think I think it's worth it's worth going a little more detail, you know, about what these youth movements were because you know, many of them, I mean maybe not all, were were aimed at preparing people essentially to go to to what is now Israel, right? I mean, so there was there was sort of a life skills kind of, you know, training in some of these groups, right?

Elizabeth (07:58)
Sivia, Tosia, and Tima were members of various socialist Zionist youth groups. What I mean by socialist Zionist is that they were training to relocate to mandatory Palestine and live on self-sustaining agricultural communes or kibbutzes there. However, Vlad Kamid and Dr. Schweiger were Bundists, which was a working-class Jewish nationalist movement which rejected Zionism as a product of the Middle Age.

and ruling classes and embrace working class politics. the purpose of it was to say the Jews are here and this is where we're going to build our nation in concert with the Polish working classes.

And pioneering Zionism was just one of the many strands of Zionism, which was very popular with youth. There was the far-right wing revisionist Zionism and their youth group Batar. There was the Left Poalit Zion, which was quite radically far left, in that it asked, What do the Arabs who are living in Palestine think of these movements? How do we do Zionism without creating a permanent underclass? So it was a wide, wide variety of movements, and they were all represented in the larger ranks of the country.

Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (09:14)
And you know, obviously, y you know, everybody is a is a product of their time and everybody is is, you know, operating in in the the time in which they're in which they're born. And so when we're thinking about things like misogyny and and women in leadership groups, was there something a bit progressive about the way that women participated in these youth groups? perhaps compared to to other

Elizabeth (09:30)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (09:44)
organizations or were they you know, was there kind of still s some of the same challenges that that you might have i in other groups?

Elizabeth (09:55)
Of the five women I feature in the book, they're all in groups that are left-leaning, that do embrace socialism and do have these liberation-esque ideologies. And in their thinking, the ideologies approach men and women fairly equally. But as we find in a lot of left-wing movements, that's not the reality on the ground. In fact, contemporary Bundist writers wrote that for all the politics male Bundists had when they were out at party meetings, they dropped those.

They got home, and especially their Bundest wives to drop everything to do household and child rearing labor. And that pattern is fairly consistent. So even though I would not classify the young men who became the center of the Jewish resistance in occupied Poland, I would not classify them as misogynistic. They and the women they worked with were not immune to gender roles. They operated under very strict gender roles. In fact, I comment on that in the title of the book by calling them the.

girl bandits. Because when the Jews realized that the Holocaust was happening, that the Jews were s set to be exterminated and realized okay we we need to actually get guns and fight back

The women fought back too. The women organized too. They learn hand-to-hand urban combat, learn how to use the guns, but they were also expected to do gendered labor. So a resistant cell could have been learning how to shoot with looted rushing pistols. Then they were done. And it was the girls' turn to go make dinner and do the cleaning and do the laundry and look after anyone. So the fact that women were both resisting with them, but also doing all the housework didn't present a contradiction.

And if you read the memoir to some of these men, who again were not misogynistic, but they were unquestioning in their adherence to gender norms, they would write things like, after target process, the girls went and made dinner.

Or in Vlad Comute's memoir, she described dropping off some explosives at headquarters. And then one of the young women who was in headquarters learning how to throw his explosives had to go and make dinner. And her brother started nagging at her to hurry up with the dinner. So there's a lot of simple the unquestioned gender roles where in other movements, for example, in the revisionist Zionist movement, there was straight-up misogyny.

Waitman Beorn (12:24)
I mean and and of course this this is interesting too because it fits into as we move forward, you know, into sort of the the Holocaust period, which we will in a minute, but I want to talk about the children's corners as well, because I thought that was really just a fascinating element. but you know, one of the things that the Holocaust does in a certain sense is upend some of those traditional gender roles. you know, be examples, you know, I'm thinking of Marion Kaplan's work, right?

Elizabeth (12:35)
Yes.

Waitman Beorn (12:53)
You know, where she talks about how, for example, you know, Jewish men are often, you know, kicked out of their jobs, they're they're fired from their jobs, and then they become sort of stuck at home and they sort of lose their normative sort of role as head of household and earner and that kind of thing.

Elizabeth (13:09)
I'm smirking

right now because he totally just scooped my answer to my favorite Holocaust book question. It's between dignity and despair. That book changed my life. But and that's and for the re for the very same reasons what you're saying, that book really dramatically shows how gender can change everything and these innocuous behaviors and patterns, upend behaviors and centers of power.

Waitman Beorn (13:15)
Sorry.

We'll come back to that. so I I'll I won I I don't I don't scoop too much. I'll we'll let you come back to it. can we talk really really quickly 'cause I I just children's corners was something that was new to me and I I wasn't familiar with it and I think it just deserves some some some shout out from you.

Elizabeth (13:36)
Yeah.

Okay. Yes. Yes.

Wonderful. So in the first couple of years of existence in the Warsaw Ghetto, resistance wasn't about fighting the Nazis or having guns. It was about living. Because the Warsaw Ghetto and the Jewish ghettos of Eastern Europe, these were situations set up to I call them spaces of passive murder. Nazis weren't necessarily going in every day and shooting people for fun, although they did that. But the very nature of life in the ghetto was set

Up to

increase the chances of death. That is by not allowing in anything more than starvation rations, not letting in medical supplies, etc. etc. So in these, so when the youth groups decided that they had to resist this dehumanization, pot dehumanizing policies, I'm going to say, that form of resistance was about culture and education. In her memoir, Tsivy Lubetkin said, We saw the Nazis were doing their best to corrupt our

youth. The young people had no school, they had no routine, they had nowhere to go. So we started creating underground high schools in order to save them and make sure they maintained their humanity. And so those were the high schools. Now the students who were attending those underground gymnasia, teenage girls usually, were the ones who are teaching in these children's corners. And these children's corners were I'm gonna say makeshift kindergartens or even pre K's. So you had your

15, 16, 17-year-old female teacher who was leading a class of three to five year olds in the corner of a soup kitchen or the corner of a filthy courtyard. You'd see these teenage girls just singing with kids and dancing with them and teaching them the basics of reading as much as they could without books or chalkboards or heating or fuel. So these were very makeshift schools by teenager church for children to make

maintain a semblance of normality in the lives of children, Jewish children.

Waitman Beorn (15:55)
I mean and you know, it's it those of you that listen to the podcast, you probably have heard me talk about him before, but you know, Yanis Korshak is like one of my one of my sort of heroes of the Holocaust if there's something if that's a thing, you know, and and he he was essentially among other things, an educator. He ran orphanage, he he worked with children. you know, and and you know, it's it's a testament sort of how far Holocaust research has come.

you know, in that we recognize that resistance takes a variety of different forms, you know, and it doesn't have to be limited to, you know, punching a Nazi in the face, that's great. you know, it can be it can be things like like these children's corners, you know, of of just trying to provide some sense of normality and also normal sort of progression in life, you know, like you go to s you go to school, you know, and and and it it's the the the way you describe in the book it's it's it

Elizabeth (16:42)
Yes.

Exactly.

Waitman Beorn (16:52)
it's just striking to me as, you know, we're we're both educators, you know, and and I think about, you know, teaching during COVID, and like, that was so hard, you know, but it it's nothing compared to like doing something in this context and I and I I mean, by the way, teaching three to five year olds just would would wear me out in a minute anyway. I mean like I would I would but but doing it in this context,

Elizabeth (17:10)
it would break me.

Waitman Beorn (17:15)
with your own worries, with your own studies even, right? Because these these people were these girls with when we were going to school and then coming after and and doing that. You know, it it's a it's just a great insight, I think, for for listeners and people that may not be as familiar with all these details of just if you if you think about as you rightly put it, you that the the ghetto is essentially a place of exclusion where, you know, the Nazis are attempting to not only sort of separate Jews from

the rest of of the world, but also just to deprive them of every sort of normal aspect of of life and existence. And so, you know, I suspect that, you know, all the things that we take for granted, you know, as educators, materials, as you say, books, pencils, paper, you know, all this stuff, you know, it all requires an extraordinary effort to round up, you know,

Elizabeth (18:03)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yes.

Waitman Beorn (18:09)
these things. you know, even before

you get to the the act of teaching, the act of caring for children and that kind of stuff. And so like it it's Yeah, no, go ahead, go ahead. Please. Please, this is about you anyway. Go ahead.

Elizabeth (18:14)
And to build on that. I'm so sorry, finish talking. we're all Holocaust educators here.

You know, some of the teach teachers and the children more often than not were actively starving.

Waitman Beorn (18:26)
Yes.

Elizabeth (18:26)
During this process. Some of the women, the girls, especially, if you read women's memoirs, a lot of them know that they stopped menstruating because they were not getting enough food. These weren't just teenage students teaching three to five year olds out supplies. They were actively starving while teaching children who were actively starving. So it I think it was beyond it should be beyond any of our comprehension, what they were able to do in the name of normality, in the name of resisting this dehumanizing process.

Waitman Beorn (18:56)
But I mean, but I guess part of you know, the the reason you bring this up, you know, is that some of the women that you were then l later are writing about as resistors, y you know, this is kind of y you know, step one, you know, of their sort of beginning to think of themselves as resisting or or or taking intentional steps to resist, right?

Elizabeth (19:06)
Absolutely.

Yes, very much so. And Tosia Altman before the war, she worked almost exclusively with training children and adolescents in becoming part of the larger party and learning the ideology of socialist Zionism. Vladka was a lecturer at some of the underground cultural groups. She taught in these children's corners. Sivia Lubetkin organized the underground gymnasium. And so all of these aspects, educating the youth, arranging groups, just community organizations.

organizing in general was part of what they had learned in the youth groups before the war began. So really they were just bringing those skill sets forward into these new circumstances.

Waitman Beorn (20:01)
And so maybe that moves us into sort of into this period, right? and before we're talking about planning for armed resistance, right, in the Warsaw Ghetto specifically. because one of the things that I find fascinating about about the book and about the story of these women, and something that I think is is very much counterintuitive to sort of the conventional wisdom of the Holocaust that that general people that are interested may understand, is

the work of them as couriers moving between places. because I feel like very often we have an understanding of the Holocaust that is focused around confinement and you know, people being either in a concentration camp or they're in a ghetto, or whatever, and and so that the the or they're hi they're in hiding, they're in a they're in Anne Frank, you know, Anne Frank in an annex, you know, this kind of thing. but

Elizabeth (20:43)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (20:58)
one of the things that these women do, which is kind of amazing, particularly after the ghetto is established, is they're literally traveling not just in the ghetto, out of the ghetto in Warsaw, but between different cities. and I wonder if you can talk s talk about some of that and and and what they're doing because you know, one of them ends up you know, hearing Abokovner's speech in in Vilnia, which is which is amazing. I mean, you know, that's a long way from Vilna to to Warsaw. I mean again and

Elizabeth (21:10)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (21:26)
and all of the fraught you know, dangers between those two places.

Elizabeth (21:32)
So

I'm gonna start off in September 1939. a lot of the youth groups based in Warsaw fled to the east when the bombs started coming down. And so those earliest youth groups, first they relocated to Vilna, then Lavav. And in while relocating, they sat down and sort of took everything's temperature and realized that they didn't know how the rest of their membership had been faring during the invasion. So they started off just sending.

messengers, couriers between isolated Jewish communities in occupied Poland. And the people they tended to choose for these missions were young women.

For firstly, because if they were caught on the road and told to drop their pants, they would not show a circumcised penis. Jewish men and young men in general were being actively impressed for labor at this point. Second of all, these Jewish women knew how to behave around Gentiles. One fascinating aspect of their upbringing and their socialization is that they attended Polish public schools because Jewish boys were sent to be Shiva, and so the girls went to public schools. And at these Polish

Polish public schools, they learned how Polish Catholicism worked, how Polish anti-Semitism worked, how to speak the Polish language without a Yiddish inflection, how to perform and and really blend in around Poles. So these young Jewish women ran those missions partially because their bodies couldn't betray them, and partially because they already had

socialization and how to act around polls. So that's the very beginning of this courier system. Then we have the ghettos and we have the official isolation of each Jewish community from one another. So the courier's missions sort of take on a new edge. Now not only do they have to sort of pass and blend in, but they have to do that officially, right? They have to have false papers.

And when they had false papers, it wasn't simply as easy as like writing a forgery and stealing a stamp from a Gestapo office. Your name had meaning. You had to be able to explain which saint you are named for. You had to understand baptismal days and saints' days and

Very esoteric aspects of Catholicism. Because someone might say, your name's Emma. Is that the Saints Day or the Baptism Day? And you had to know the answer to that. A lot of the women would wear crosses when they were on their missions and carry Bibles with them so they could learn Polish prayers better. So they had to have false documents, right? And then they had to know how to behave as Pauls. But they also had to know how to behave as not Jews. So during this period of ghettoization, as we move into the Holocaust period.

Pulse were really good identifying Jews.

because they looked sad or distracted. a very well known

sort of a conversation from this time was for a Paul to go up to a Jew and basically indicate that this person was Jewish and it would be because of their eyes, because of this deep sadness in their eyes they couldn't act their way out of. So they had to be constantly performing and constantly aware of Catholic expectations and etiquette. And yeah.

Waitman Beorn (24:57)
And this is something just I I wanna jump in really quickly because like

this is literally like I was literally going to ask you about that exact thing because that's one of the things that I found so evocative, you know, is the 'cause the in in in the book you have a someone giving a a quite long discussion about all the different tells, if you will, of like someone a Jew passing, right? Like slumped shoulders and like just just feeling, you know, as you say, like

Elizabeth (25:03)
Ha ha.

Waitman Beorn (25:27)
worried, like like halting, like tiny, like halting steps, you know, not starting all of these like physical manifestations that someone, you know, who is c going through trauma, right, would would would would would demonstrate. And then the idea that that you have to like literally fake the opposite of everything that you're feeling. Like you like the example you give in the book is is there were two women that would go out

Elizabeth (25:32)
Exactly.

Yes.

Waitman Beorn (25:55)
together because they could remind each other like to like don't look don't look like you're you know like you're sad like we need to be laughing and like having fun and like and there's almost this kind of as you put as you portray it kind of this this this over the top confidence that you have to portray which then which then gets you out of a lot situations.

Elizabeth (26:00)
Mm-hmm.

Yes. You had to do the

Yeah. You had to walk around like you owned the place. You had to take into account what they were trying to make Jews into and be the opposite of that.

I believe I'm not sure if it's current slang or not, but I believe this was called big dick energy. That's how I would refer to it. You really had to walk around like you owned the place, like you were above reproach. there's one woman named Lonko Kazibrodska, and she was very beautiful, and she liked to take risks. And there was one instance when she was smuggling a suitcase full of guns onto a train.

And she avo she very ostentatiously dodged the Polis Polish police and went right to the German guards. And so she goes up to them, like a pretty blonde peasant girl, and says, Excuse me, I I need to get on this train, but I'm afraid of having my suitcase searched. You see, I I'm I'm smuggling forbidden goods. Now those forbidden goods she led them to think were like eggs and cream and butter and rationed foods.

The Nazis took her at Face Valley. They're like, okay, this pretty Polish girl doesn't want to get in trouble for smuggling eggs. Not a big deal. She looks Aryan anyway. Let's help her. And so they did. They helped her load that suitcase with guns onto the train. a lot of time times on the trains, these Jewish women would have to sort of enter into these flirtatious exchanges with Wehrmacht soldiers and Gestapo soldiers and Polish officers. For example, one person started a conversation.

With Heike Grossman about the Nazis. And these were polls, and someone commented, about the poor Jews. Another person said, the poor Jews, I'm glad the Nazis are taking them with them. And Heika had to join in that conversation and say anti-Semitic stuff. Another one, Havka Folman, said that she joined in these anti-Semitic conversations with such enthusiasm that she feared that she had sinned. Really, she was just maintaining her cover. So

It was so many levels of performance. And to speak to sort of having to work together and the emotional intelligence side of it. One of my very favorite anecdotes involves Tama Schneiderman. In 1942, she was in hiding on the Aryan side of Warsaw with Kafka Fullman and a few others. And they had a suitcase full of weapons, grenades specifically, under the bed, and it was time to smuggle them into the ghetto.

And Tima had the idea they should hide the grenades in their underwear. So these women, all in their late teens, early twenties, put grenades into their underwear and got onto a streetcar. And looking around, Tima noticed that they looked scared. They didn't look like carefree young things out on a day in war, so they looked frightened. So she leaned over and whispered, What would happen if a gentleman asked us to sit next to him? And they all started giggling.

And just like that, they were no longer frightened Jews. They were just girls on the streetcar for a day out on the town. And they got those grenades into the ghetto. So they looked out for each other and made sure that they were all putting up the best performance possible. but looks were certainly a big part of

So you had to pass or use makeup to ensure that you could pass, or you just had to have a lot of chutzpah. All of those three had to come together. So these women had to sort of tow a very delicate line between flirtation and letting non-Jewish men think things could happen without actually committing to anything or getting involved. I'm sure some Jewish women did actually

engage in sexual intercourse with men for resistance reasons, but in this cohort of women, none of them did. They felt that it was far too dangerous to allow that to happen.

Waitman Beorn (30:04)
And and and I'm curious, moving moving a little bit a little bit on with this, you know, what I mention I'm so I mentioned, you know, Vilna, right? And and and Abokovner, right? Because he has a very sort of he's like one of the hardest core, you know, early kind of like we n we have to fight the Nazis, you know, and he gives the famous sort of we we should you know, lambs to the slaughter kind of kind of speech. I I'm I'm curious, you know

Elizabeth (30:13)
Mm-hmm.

Yes.

Waitman Beorn (30:32)
What do you think these women got or understood about the Holocaust as it unfolded as a result of the fact that they were able to travel? Because most Jews, once ghettoization happens, are are are not able to travel. They're not and they're very much limited to to the the geographic space in which they occupy. And then they're they're they're relying on rumors and stories and people but they're not

They're not getting a first hand so I in some ways these women have a much better understanding of the general situation, perhaps, than others. And I'm curious what what you what did they what did they get and and what was the impact on them of of that experience?

Elizabeth (31:15)
Some of these women were witnesses to the first outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence along the Eastern Front. A lot of them were implanted in communities that were reacting to these massacres and these mass sudden losses of people. These young people saw the massacres and the news they were hearing as they traveled the country. These young people took the stories at their word because they'd seen it happening.

They'd heard stories of thousands taken away overnight. and they were the ones who bought news of those massacres to the male leadership in the ghettos. Women like Tosia Altman and Tima Schneiderman were the ones who bought the news to leaders like Abakovner and Mordechai Inielevich. But people didn't want to believe them. So outside of these nascent youth resistance groups,

People

Actively did not want to hear what they were saying. the Judenrat of various Jewish ghettos, the Jewish council of rulers put in place by the Nazis, but not necessarily collaborators. They would tell the Judenrat, and the Judenrat, usually men in their 50s and 60s who had high had fairly high status before the war, would say things like, You know what, you're hysterical, this is ridiculous. You're trying to cause mass panic, you're trying to cause mass hysteria, you're gonna bring violence on all of us. You need to get out now. Even some of their own.

Parents didn't believe them. And even now I'm not sure if they genuinely didn't believe these women or they wouldn't allow themselves to believe these women. So in this cohort of young resistance

organizers and actors, they knew what was going on. In Warsaw, they understood that what they were seeing on the Eastern Front wasn't just, you know, crazy wartime anti-Jewish demonstrations. It was part of a concerted strategy. They noticed that early. And so by winter of 41 and 42, these young people understand this is a can't this is a genocidal campaign, not a series of happenstance massacres which are going to die down. And

Even those members of the Jewish community who understood that these massacres were directed towards the Jew Jews couldn't or wouldn't understand that they were part of a concerted extermination effort. So it was the women who bought that news to the resistance groups.

Waitman Beorn (33:49)
And I think that's fascinating because it it adds a whole nother dimension to to this phenomenon, you know, which is one that, you know, we've we've seen before where people just you know, it they don't they don't believe it, you know, because you know, Jews have experienced persecutions and anti Semitisms, you know, literally for thousands of years, and have developed a a a variety of of responses, coping mechanisms, modes of resistance, but they've never faced

They've never faced someone trying to kill all of them. Okay, as as a it it's it's been it's been localized. Usually the response was something to the, you know, let's kind of keep our heads down and this will eventually blow over and things will get better. you know, and and you know, there there's kind of an arc of progress in in Jewish non Jewish relations. But of course, the Holocaust, the Nazis is is not that. And so all of those strategies don't don't work anymore.

Elizabeth (34:22)
Right.

Mm-hmm.

Right.

And I think it's

easy from the vantage point of now to look back and say, how could they not have known? How could they not have listened? But I'd actually say, how could they have believed that after going through modern Jewish history and seeing massacres and pundits go off and murder them time after time again, only to see it, you know, cool down. So why should they have believed this was different?

Waitman Beorn (35:10)
Well, and it's also, I mean, i there is a sort of science fiction, you know, aspect to initial you know, like people like really I don't think that they're they're putting us all on trains and taking us to a place f full of gas chambers, because that's just crazy. Like w we unfortunately live in a time now, a post-Holocaust time, where genocide is a thing that we're all aware of and we're fully aware that it's that's something that could happen that 'cause it's happened multiple times even in in our lifetimes. And so but but they are in many ways not.

Elizabeth (35:22)
Great.

Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (35:40)
that that's just it's not in the realm of of possibility. You know, it it almost be if you're trying to explain the internet. I mean, it's just you know, it's not something they they can imagine. but and one of the things you do point out, you know, there are people, even from Tripolinka, you know, which is which is most relevant in this conversation because Trim Tripolinka is is the dedicated extermination center for Warsaw, there are people that that come back. And and and and then here you have

Elizabeth (35:44)
Although exactly

Yes.

Waitman Beorn (36:10)
Here it becomes I think maybe more what you were alluding to in kind of the psychological aspect of it because here you have somebody who is literally saying, Look, I was I was there and this is the thing that's happening and you still will have sometimes have people that don't that don't believe what's going on.

so maybe you can talk a little bit about you know what what these women are now doing as it becomes more and more clear that

the Holocaust as as as we know it, you know, is is is the so-called final solution, is an attempt to not just isolate, you know, remove, deport Jews, but to actually murder them. What how do they sort of transition from this role of of courier to, you know, preparing for something else?

Elizabeth (37:05)
It was actually quite natural that transition, because they were already resisting. So now they simply had to add

Guns and dynamite into their list of things they were smuggling that day. You know, some of them stopped traveling between ghettos and focused on acquiring weapons and getting them into specific ghettos, but a lot of them were still riding the trains, except now. Instead of just smuggling letters and money and medicine, they also had guns. They also had dynamite. As for the resistance leadership itself, you know, when these young women were bringing back news of these massacres, the men took them seriously.

Seriously, the men who were the leaders of these youth groups, they had no reason to doubt these women because there was no misogyny, as I mentioned. Gender roles and sexism, yes, but they trusted these women implicitly. They trusted with their lives. So when Tema came back to Warsaw and said this amount of Jews were just murdered outside of Vilna, they listened to her. So it was because of this news that these youth groups began to shift.

approaches. They're th they were thinking, okay, underground high schools and cultural nights are not enough right now because they're trying to exterminate us. So we need to do our best to arm ourselves, organize, and get the word out this is happening. And initially with a real focus was was on just getting am I kicked off the internet again? Jesus Christ.

Waitman Beorn (38:44)
you're back.

Elizabeth (38:45)
This is gonna be the death of me. My god.

Waitman Beorn (38:48)
No problem. No problem. I I I noted down the time. So just you were talking about you were just saying that you children's groups and teaching was not enough. So just start with that.

Elizabeth (39:02)
They realized that these underground high schools and teaching groups and culture and this weren't enough anymore. So they shifted their focus from cultural resistance to active resistance. So their focuses became arming themselves, getting the word out as best they could without putting themselves or others in danger, and smuggling children out of the ghettos to safe houses on the area inside of the city.

Waitman Beorn (39:30)
Go ahead, no, go ahead, go ahead.

Elizabeth (39:33)
and so this progression happened slowly. It took time for each youth group to

transition from a youth group to resistance cell and then realized they had to put aside their internocene differences and work together as a joint collective Jewish resistance group. And this shift happened after Operation Barbarossa commenced. So we have that winter of 41 and 42 moving further into winter and spring of 1942.

Waitman Beorn (40:04)
I was gonna say th that I I was gonna ask, I guess, w where are they getting this stuff? Where are they getting grenades and guns and and dynamite? Because it it's th there's I think there's again, like the like the getting school supplies piece, it's not just it's not just smuggling the stuff. Like you have to like yeah, you have to get the stuff.

Elizabeth (40:13)
Mm-hmm.

It's acquiring it.

Sure.

So, as I mentioned, you know, the Nazis did not let enough supplies into the Warsaw ghetto in order for it to sustain life. So almost immediately a black market rose up, both inside and outside the ghetto. So black marketeers out of the ghetto and inside the ghetto realized there was a huge amount of money to be made off of this misery. And immediately these smuggling rings and their roots started rising up all over the place. yeah, the Warsaw Ghetto was sealed and guarded, but there were still houses that had.

Entrances on the Aryan side and exits into the ghetto. There were sewers that the main Polish resistance group had maps of. There were guards who could very easily be bribed. So an entire infrastructure of smuggling rose up along with the Warsaw ghetto. And people weren't just smuggling vodka and duck and painkillers.

These Poles on the side of the ghetto had access to guns. the Armia Krajowa, which was the Polish Home Army, was the official representation of the Polish government in exile. And so they had connections to London, to the special operations executive, so they had access to weapons. However, they weren't exactly keen on helping the Jews. There were many anti-Semitic elements within that Polish resistance group.

So the Jews got weapons from their allies in the Polish resistance groups and from general smugglers who didn't care who they were selling to as long as they were selling. And these smugglers could have looted guns from soldiers killed in the course of action. They could have stolen them from police officers, from Polish guards. There are a myriad of ways that smugglers initially got their hands on these guns. And that's why when the Jews were actively fighting the Nazis, they there was no

No one gun. They all had different kinds of rifles. Some of them had weird Russian ones, some had great German ones. There was just a mishmash of weapons. But they also understood that these smuggling networks were not super reliable. So they also started to make their own compounds. For example, Michael Klebfisch got his hands on a chemistry textbook.

and found in it a formula for homemade explosives. And he took that to Vladka Mead and they looked it over. And she and the couriers got to work traveling all around the city and its suburbs, collecting all these chemical components.

They bribed a landlord to let them test these explosives in a lime kiln factory on the Aryan side and then smuggled the explosives into the ghetto. Some of those explosives, therefore, were homemade and not the products of smuggling. There were a lot of different networks they used to acquire the guns, and they had to build their own networks on the Aryan side.

Waitman Beorn (43:26)
I mean and and this this is the point, you know, that that that and and you talk about in the book in this example on the example of the woman that was delivering dynamite and she had to bribe a bribe a warehouse guard to like let her in and then he had to take her upstairs and show her where the window was that she could throw the wind throw the dynamite through and then afterwards he's like, Wait a second, like what what did you actually deliver? So I mean like again, like these are and these are all fraught moments. Every one of these moments is a moment where you could

Elizabeth (43:38)
Mm-hmm.

Downstairs. Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (43:55)
things could go badly. And maybe maybe this is the point to to talk about about that. You know, and what what are the risks? Because unfortunately, and this but this bears commenting on it bears it bears discussion. Unfortunately the main risk wasn't always the Nazis. It wasn't always the Germans. It was quite often Poles themselves. And so maybe we can talk a little about the about these the the the risks that that these women were taking and and who who was sort of out was out there to get them.

Elizabeth (43:56)
And they can go badly.

Right. So as I mentioned, Poles were just very, very good at identifying Jews, even ones with Aryan looks and blonde hair.

Now it's very easy to say, well, the Poles hated Jews and they were all complicit in the Holocaust. No. A lot of them were, a lot of them put everything on the line to aid Jews. However, within the Army of Krajava, there was a very big anti-Semitic streak to the point at which they would often, if even the choice between killing Jews and killing Nazis, they would choose to kill the Jews. Moreover, there were a lot of very impoverished Polish individuals who understood that if they could

find a high hidden Jew or underground Jew and turn that Jew over to the Gestapo, they can make a lot of money. So what these blackmailers would do is they would identify a Jew, right? Say, okay, well you need to give me, you know, your watch, your outfit, your money, your food, or I'll turn you into the Gestapo.

And so they would just keep extorting that Jew until they literally had nothing. And then they would turn that Jew over to the Gestapo. So they had to not simply dodge Gestapo informants, but they had to keep an eye out for these blackmailers who were responsible for the loss of a lot of resistance workers and leaders. Now, if they were caught and if the Gestapo was able to realize that person was in res Jewish resistance movements.

y you would not be executed right away. It would be a lot nastier than that.

Two two of the women who I mentioned in the book, they're not a feature, but two of them ended up in Paviak prison, where they describe being beaten, being attacked by dogs daily. Both women were eventually shipped to Auschwitz, where they where one of them survived undercover as a poll. there was a lot at stake, and it wasn't just about life and death. there are some things that

Waitman Beorn (46:24)
Well, I mean, and there's a great there's a great a great

amusing scare quotes. you know, there's a there's a great story that you tell of of one of these women who was who was caught and she was literally smuggling guns. You know, and and and for her the biggest thing was to make sure that they didn't think she was Jewish. And and the and so she said, like, Yeah, you got me. Like I'm smuggling guns, I'm in the resistance or whatever and that was enough to give her time to kind of escape. Yeah, there go.

Elizabeth (46:36)
Mm-hmm.

Yep, that was Bella Khazan. And

they caught her with guns. And the biggest thing she was panicking about was that she had a new Yiddish newsletter braided into her hair. And she knew that if they saw it and saw the Hebrew lettering, they would know that she was Jewish.

So she managed to escape to the toilet and just frantically was pulling the newspapers out of her hair and putting them into the lavatory so that no matter what happened, they wouldn't know that she was Jew. And she survived in Auschwitz under cover as a pole for the entire war. She also took a job undercover at a Gestapo headquarters, so she she was in she she was she was a she was amazing. I don't even have words. Yeah, yeah.

Waitman Beorn (47:34)
like doing on an expert level. mean

so so maybe as as we move forward then you know we have maybe we can give a a very brief overview of of kind of the way that the Warsaw ghetto uprising develops, right? Because you know, you know the the eventually you know the leadership I mean Adam Adam Chanyakov eventually commits suicide before this point because he's he realizes that he can't he can't he doesn't want to be a part of it anymore basically. He can't he can't

He can't save these people. He doesn't want to be part of presiding over them being murdered. and yep.

Elizabeth (48:09)
I think in his suicide

note he said, They want me to kill my own children. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (48:12)
Yeah, I mean he

he he ba yeah, he he just removes himself. you know, and and and a a lot of a lot of G's in Warsaw totally were supportive and then a lot of them were not, and that's just the way things are. but once we get sort of to the where the realization is is pretty widespread that it's only a matter of time before the Nazis come for you, and that that everyone's being murdered, we begin to have preparations for

an armed response. essentially after the great action in nineteen forty two, essentially th it's it's like the next time. Like the next time the Nazis come in, we're gonna be ready. Can you can you talk a little about sort of w what these preparations are and what the what these women are doing to prepare and then once once it sort of kicks off.

Elizabeth (49:01)
Okay, so I'm gonna start with the Gross Action. that's the summer of 1942 when the Nazis come into the Warsaw ghetto and honestly liquidate the vast majority of its inhabitants. They put them on deportation trains to Triplinka where they're murdered. So by the time the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is being planned, the vast majority of Warsaw Jews are already dead. So the ones who are left in the ghetto have no illusions about what the Nazis have in store for them. They understand that they are alive on borrowed time.

And the majority of them, the ones left alive, are left alive because they were young and strong and could provide labor for the German war effort. So you had these young, strong people who were often the last member of all of their families. So in a very real way, they felt they had nothing left to lose except to take down as many Nazis as they could while doing it. So after the Gross Action of 1942, you see the Bund and the Zionists joining forces.

You see real creation of an organizational structure, see the creation of fighting groups and fighting cells. This is when the quarriers really have their missions set out for them and start leaving the ghetto to acquire weapons and smuggle children out. In January of 1943, the Nazis re-entered the Warsaw ghetto to attempt to complete the liquidation. And the fighting groups were ready.

And because and the Germans had hadn't had any idea that there were armed, organized Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. So they were confronted by Jews with weapons and Jews who could fight and Jews who were ready. And so they pulled out of the ghetto after about five days of fighting. And that is when the rest of the ghetto, the rest of the civilians in the ghetto

fully embraced the resistance, the Jewish fighting organization, because now they understood what was coming to them.

So after that abortive January fighting, you see the vast majority of the Warsaw Ghetto beyond the resistance groups treating the Jewish fighting organization, which is the amalgamation of the socialist Zionists of the Bund and all of their resistance cells. You saw them treating the ZOB like the true government of the Warsaw Ghetto. At one point, someone even tried to file a permit to get permission to open a casino from the Jewish fighting organization. So

huge amount of infrastructure is created during this time, not just organizational infrastructure, but the very character of the Warsaw Ghetto was altered to make it most amenable for urban warfare against the Nazis.

Waitman Beorn (51:46)
And one of these things really quickly, I mean one of the things that that that I found I didn't know is that they they began to sort of demand that everybody pay up and to to support this. You know, and and it that was a really interesting that was a really interesting thing that I didn't know that I learned from the book of of you know that there were that the the Jewish fight the f Jewish fighting organizations basically went to, you know, the wealthier inhabitants of the ghetto and were like, Look, you we need money for stuff to support this

Elizabeth (51:59)
Yes, yes.

We need money for guns

and explosives. Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (52:16)
And you need to help us. And if you don't,

we're we're gonna put you in jail and we're gonna make you do it.

Elizabeth (52:20)
We're

Yeah, we're gonna take it from you. at various points they had female fighters who had to perform cavity searches on a wealthy Jewish woman because i it was the revolutionary taxation they had to pay up. And a lot of them in their memoirs are pretty ambivalent about having to do this with other Jews and they said we hated it. We felt like we were extorting from our own people. But it was the price we had to pay to be able to fight back.

there's one interesting part.

Aware a young man is carrying out one of these exercises. And he has to take a very pretty young woman and put her in jail so that her father will play ransom. And as he's escorting her, he realizes that she's terrified that he's going to rape her. And so he has to say, No, no, no, nothing like that. We're just gonna lock you in this room until your father gives us the money. So even when they had to do things which they felt were unethical, they still did their best to treat their fellow Jews with kindness and warmth and humanity. And I thought his experience.

Acknowledgement of those fears was very progressive even. So they carried out these exercises. They called them the X's, I extortion. I'm not quite sure. I have to re-reread back up on that one. So by the time we're in April 1943, the resistance is expecting the Nazis to return.

Any day. They're monitoring the situation. They have agents outside the ghetto. Everyone is on alert and waiting. So on the morning of April 19, 1943, scouts told them there are columns of Nazis marching towards the ghetto and they look like they're going to war. So they were alerted ahead of time. This wasn't just, you know, a sudden uprising of youth. It was very deliberately planned and carried out.

And I've been talking about the Z O B and the resistance leadership, sort of as though it's you know n

As an entity, but I want to be clear that the Jewish fighting organization had a command structure. And there's only one woman in this command structure, and that was Suvia Lubetkin. So I'm talking about the ZOB command. I'm not talking about hardened soldiers. I'm still talking about people in their early 20s, community organizers and educators who were administrating this mass, I'm not gonna say militarization.

this mass militarized resistance movement. It's not just young men throwing grenades and having ideas and stealing from the ghetto. There are young men and young women who are administering this process.

Waitman Beorn (54:59)
Well and and Zivia is is a is an amazing example of this because, you know, she is she has not transitioned into sort of full resistance fighter mode and isn't is in charge of her own group of essentially fighters, right? yeah.

Elizabeth (55:08)
Absolutely.

fighters. And one

really interesting aspect of Sevilla is that of the Warsa Ghetto fighters, the most famous name is Mordechai Anyelovich, as the commander of the Warsa Ghetto Uprising. But Mordechai Anyelovich relied on Sevilla. So

In the days leading up to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Mordechai Anielevich was freaking out. He was terrified. He was having meltdowns. I'm not gonna judge him for that, I'd be terrified too. And Sevia, who was a fellow commander and a fighter and was doing housework, sat with him in the command bunker and comforted him. So she was doing emotional labor for this man on the very eve of the uprising. And this is the man who was then credited for the organization and the planning of the

Uprising. He became known as the hero of the uprising if there was a singular hero. But no one remembers Sivia, but she was right there next to him, holding him and comforting him through this moment of panic, which I just think is a profound meditation on women and memory.

Waitman Beorn (56:21)
Well,

and and it's it's great because y you know, the image that we all get of of Murkai Anyelevich is like essentially is Mila eighteen, right? It's it's it's it's when he sort of goes down with the ship as a brave a brave fighter, right? And the image we get is someone w of you know, so of solid, unshakable conviction, you know, who doesn't who doesn't have exactly what you just mentioned, which is y very human worries and responses, you know, but i

Elizabeth (56:49)
He was a yep. He

was just a guy doing his best for a group of people he loved and and and hoped that maybe he'd make a difference. He wasn't this biblical hero or biblical leader. And in fact, if there was a person who was leading, you know, it was in May when CVL Lubutkin led surviv surviving fighters out of the ghetto.

She was behind the scenes doing this unglamorous but important leadership work. And I still can't quite get over the fact that her name isn't better known and that she doesn't have her own movie like Defiance or her own legend.

Waitman Beorn (57:29)
Well and this isn't a

this is a part of the story that also I think, you know, in some ways the the older I get and the more I I, you know, work in this topic, you know, y y the more you realize that a lot of the stories we have of the Holocausts end too soon. You know, like like writ large, for a long time, the story of the Holocaust just ends in eighteen forty five.

With the end of the war. And of course we know that like there's all kinds of things that that carry on afterwards. And I feel like the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is one of those as well, because you know, I I feel like a lot of the comp the the popular conceptions of it is you everything we've just talked about. You know, there's the preparation, there's the brave fighting, and then there's, you know, the sacrifice, and everyone's killed. but actually, you know, as you point out and and with the through the women in this book, there are these

really amazing and heroic efforts af so-called after their uprising to to get these people out, you know, through the through the sewers and and then to the forest. you know, one of the things I've mentioned this before, but it it's worth mentioning for everybody, both sort of people that are professionally interested in this topic and and and and generally, you know, is is the the the movement of people,

Elizabeth (58:33)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (58:48)
i is quite remarkable that you see in in the story that you tell in the book because it's it's again we took we see the the couriers moving between cities, between ghettos, we see people moving in and out of the ghetto, but then we see people moving out of the ghetto to the Aryan side, to the forest, and then sometimes back to Warsaw. I mean, there there's just an awful lot of movement in a way that we might not have expected to see.

Elizabeth (59:16)
Great. And I think what's key there is that the war subghetto uprising didn't

ever necessarily end. It was never over, so to speak. It was just that the Germans kept destroying the ghetto piece by piece and people were filtering out. There were fighters and Jews actively fighting back, actively throwing grenades up through the aut the winter and the fall of 1943. And then it continued on the Aryan side. It's just that when they continued after the uprising, what they were doing was

large term aid work for Jewish survivors. So the uprising left the Warsaw ghetto, but it never ended. That's what I would say.

Waitman Beorn (1:00:02)
Yeah, I mean and and and again one of the things that you show, and and maybe you can talk a little about this as well, you know, is that that after the ghetto is sort of formally destroyed slash abolished, then you have essentially an entire population such as it is in hiding. And and and and again, a a really remarkable piece of resistance work that I think doesn't get a lot of attention is essentially

Elizabeth (1:00:19)
Exactly.

Waitman Beorn (1:00:30)
as I understand it from from from what you've presented, is kind of a central organization that is in some way, shape, or form keeping track of where people are in hiding that they can write to and say, I need help for I need money to pay my person hiding me, or I'm, you know, I need this, that, and other thing. And and and many of these women who could move relatively freely through Warsaw were the ones that were sort of

Essentially in some ways acting as kind of social workers for for all these people in hiding.

Elizabeth (1:01:01)
absolutely.

so

You know, Tima and Tosia were both killed in the line of fighting in nineteen forty-three. So we have of the five women featured in the book, we have Sivia, Vladka, and Dr. Adina Bleedy Schweiger, who in the book I refer to by her codename of Inca, left on the Aryan side. Sivia couldn't necessarily be out and about doing aid work because she had very strong ostrich Jewish looks. So she was the one administrating the entire aid process from her hideout in Warsaw. Vladka and

Inca were the ones on the ground taking that aid to Jews in hiding in Warsaw and in the Polish countryside. They would sometimes have to walk 20, 30 miles into the forest to find a group of partisans or to very specific outhouse on a Polish peasant's land to find people in hiding. Inca wrote, you know, very in in great detail about.

how she and the other female couriers would acquire and distribute money to Jews in hiding. So the resistance sort of transformed from this very i in historical memory terms masculine coded resistance into a feminine coded resistance where they're no longer murdering Nazis but carrying aid to Jews in hiding, which is just as terrifying as the fighting. It's just a different kind of resistance.

Waitman Beorn (1:02:30)
Well, and there are there are some some great examples in the book of of kind of this reversal, right? Where one of them you mentioned, I don't remember the address, but essentially it it was a it was a place right outside right outside the ghetto where some of the sort of ghetto fighters end up but now they're in hiding. And now they need and now they need you know, the women essentially to provide food and this kind of stuff. And then when they

When they can't do this, they literally have to move someplace else, you know, because they they they end up not being able to to supply it anymore. And again, it it's so you have this kind of who's who's in charge and duty of care sort of changes, right, as the you know, it th there's no longer the opportunity in in a in a large sense for sort of physical, you know, violence against Nazis. And so everyone is now trying to just

just survive. And this goes all the way through, you know, the Warsaw Uprising of nineteen forty four, which is, you know, like another I mean, and the the story of the sewers i in both examples is amazing, you know, of of you know, people trying to be led out of the out of the ghetto or what was left of the ghetto through the sewers. But then you have to arrange transportation because once the people pop up in in the street, you know, they have to get out of there really quickly because they can't hang around, you know, because of the Nazis and

some of the local pol poles might turn them in. So there's there's all this kind of logistical work that needs to be done in a time when the fighting can't be done anymore.

Elizabeth (1:04:01)
And that logistical work, yeah.

And that logistical work is is not sexy or exciting the way throwing mild cocktails at Nazis is, but it's how these histories came to us. We wouldn't know that any of this happened, or we wouldn't have survivor eyewitness accounts of how this happened unless these men and women had been doing all of this very unglamorous logistical work in the background.

Waitman Beorn (1:04:26)
Well and this is the part that I that I wanted to kinda come to as as we excuse me, kinda come to the end a little bit, which is the sources that you used for this. May maybe you can talk a little bit about about the sources and and how you read them, you know, with each other and against each other and and what they can tell us and maybe what they don't tell us about about this history.

Elizabeth (1:04:34)
Mm-hmm.

Right. So I started off with just

The easily accessible memoirs, the ones that are published. I didn't want to use Nalti documents or newspapers because this is a very personal, intimate set of histories. So memoirs, diaries, and autobiographies were the main sources I worked with. Now, when I'm not writing books and podcasting, I have worked as an archivist in Jewish historical institutions. I worked for the Center for Jewish History, which houses the American Jewish Historical Society, the Leobeck Institute, and the Yvo Institute.

So I was no longer working there while writing this book, but I still had friends who worked there and friends who work in university libraries. I write a blog that has international readership. So I had a fairly strong network. So I could text my friend at Evo and say, Hey, do you have XYZ's collections of letters? And she'd say yes, and I we'd make some copies happen. So, and there were a lot of documents, document collections that are out of print or the only movie to

To exist at two libraries in the entire world. So I leaned quite strongly on my network of historians and archivists and getting my hands on some of these rare texts. Now, right now I'm writing a book about the refugee community which formed in Shanghai during World War II, German, Austrian, and Polish Jews. And that was my master's thesis topic as well. And so that was when I learned that if you take, let's say, 20 memoirs written by a group of people who

were all experiencing the same general thing at the same general time, what emerges is a pretty distinct picture of what was going on, even if details vary. So for this cohort of young people that were resisting in Warsaw during the Holocaust,

You'll often find contradictions between between how they wrote about events, the date on which things happened, how someone met somebody else, how many people were

But actually, if you take into account the impact time and trauma has on memory, those differences make a whole lot of sense. Now, before we started recording, we were talking about my use of footnotes in the book. So sometimes I'd be in situations where the various accounts differed so much that I wasn't really sure what had actually happened. So I chose what felt right or what

was easiest to write about in the context of a narrative history. Then in the footnotes I would explain

Different sources say X, Y, and Z. The version I've presented here takes into account blah, blah, and blah. So there was a lot of accounting for differences between sources, which I think is part of what makes Holocaust history such an interesting field. So much of the primary material we're working with is deeply impacted by time and trauma. And so that's where you just really have to interrogate the sources against one another.

there's another instance where it seemed like Tim Tima Schneiderman was in two places at the same exact time. So I had to determine, okay, in my narrative, where do I put her? Where do we think she was at this point? And I had to make that decision and then I explained it in a footnote.

Waitman Beorn (1:07:59)
Yeah, I mean an and that's that's a a a good lesson in in general for for the doing of history that you know the the the these these are I mean for example the the knowing what happened this is the first time I've I've sort of been exposed to what happened in detail in Mila eighteen at the end, right?

with this topic in particular.

y you know, th the Nazi sort of obsession with documentation doesn't really help anyway because they're not perfect to any of this information, right? you know, and so like again it's it's a great as I I was suggesting earlier, you know, th this is a a good a good example of how to try to piece together a narrative based on people's imperfect memories.

Elizabeth (1:08:48)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (1:08:48)
y you know, many of which are written down at different times, you know, in in in in distance from the historical event, right? I suspect that, you know, some of the memoirs are I mean, I suspect that there are some sort of contemporary documentation. y you know, Ringle Bloom for example, but then there's also like memoirs and when are they written and maybe even, you know, oral testimonies which which come usually

Elizabeth (1:09:00)
Absolutely.

Much later.

Waitman Beorn (1:09:18)
quite a bit later

unless they're sort of David Boder and those kind of folks. And so again, it's it's an exercise in you know, literally reading all of these sources with and against each other to try to figure out what's the most what's the most likely, you know, outcome. Right. And

Elizabeth (1:09:31)
Mm-hmm. Absolutely. And I

had to do that in a sort of very large scale with Tulsi Algman and Tama Schneiderman. Because of the five women, they're the two who didn't leave diaries or memoirs or letters. So I had to reconstruct their lived experiences and their personalities through the writings of others. Which, you know, as a his speaking as a historian was a really fascinating kind of fun process.

Waitman Beorn (1:09:58)
Yeah, I and I I wonder, you know, as as we come to the end here, you know, I always find it interesting, and I found this with with the book that I just finished, you know, on Yunovska, which I did did not, you know, I'm not one of those people that's like, I discovered this, you know, I did not discover this. There were people had written Yeah, people had written memoirs about this. Leon Wells had written a memoir about this. and yet it is it is

Elizabeth (1:10:18)
Secret history of

Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (1:10:27)
by and large, for the general public and most and most of the people, an unknown kind of historical event. And and I wonder I wonder why that is for the women in this in this instance in in your work. Because, you know, they are writing memoirs. you know, why is their story or has their story why has their story not been not been told in the same way that everybody else is, you know, I mean like what what how how do you understand that? Because again,

The information is out there if you wanted you know, the memoirs are out there. People it's not like these are in locked away in behind some secret archive that you just discovered.

Elizabeth (1:11:04)
Right.

So

I'm still trying to figure out the precise answer for that. There is one umbrella answer and then a lot of little answers. So the big umbrella answer is patriarchy. Okay. The hardcore post-World War II push to return to the extremes of gender roles. in the United States, in Western Europe, in Israel, the vibe was very: well, well done. You built airplanes, you were in the SOE, you smuggled guns, good job. Go back to

To the kitchen now. You're done. The men are home. And when you couple that with the fact that many, many survivors felt that they had no right to be public about the Holocaust, to talk about what had happened. It wasn't something you're supposed to talk about. It was done, just put it behind you and move forward.

So a combination of this sort of return to extreme gender roles combined with this sense that we don't talk about it, is I think part of what came together to bury these histories. And now that patriarchy, that misogyny shows itself a lot.

I ranted earlier about Mardechai Anyelovich. You've binned the former Site of the Warsaw Ghetto, I assume. And so you've seen Nathanya Brakoport's monument there to the ghetto fighters. Mordechai Anyelovich is on that one. He is portrayed as like a biblical hero. There's only one woman on it, and she's looking away from the viewer, and she's a breastfeeding mother, which is fine. There were breastfeeding mothers in the Warsaw Ghetto during the uprising.

But that woman in the sculpture does not have agency. She's not an active participant in this monument. She's looking away. And that was done in 1948 in the context of this post-war return to the kitchen. and so I think that those factors all came together to create this series of histories, which was just buried by patriarchy.

By the self-silencing of survivors. And I'm gonna say it's still buried by the patriarchy. another woman wrote a book about this cohort of women a couple of years ago. I learned about it actually when I was writing the proposal for this book. And they're very different books, they're just about the same cohort of women.

But ever since mine came out, people have been saying, what about XYZ's book? Isn't it just like XYZ's book? And I'm thinking, no, it's not just like her book, because God forbid, two whole women, right? Two whole books about a cohort of criminally overlooked women who were operating across occupied Poland during the war. So there's still a very intense misogyny when it comes to telling these stories. it's only in like the nineteen eighties that female Holocaust scholars

even sort of got institutional respect and ownership and support in doing gendered histories of the Holocaust. So in a way it does make sense that outside of the Academy, these histories are only just starting to make a real impact on collective imagination and memory.

Waitman Beorn (1:14:27)
I mean I yeah, I I couldn't put it any better. I mean I th I think that's 100% correct. You know, it it's and and I will say, you know, that that you know from the glass half empty side, it absolutely you know, there there are even in Holocaust studies, just like anything else, there are the patriarchal sort of blind spots and intentional blind spots as well, you know, of of sort of not looking at things. and in the glass half full side of things, this is this is revisionist history.

And I mean that in a good way. And it's it I I hate the fact that Holocaust denial has sort of co opted the idea of revisionism because like all good history in a certain level is revising our understanding, right? It's it's adding something new, it's looking at something in a different way, either from a theoretical perspective or from a source perspective or something, right? Revisionism is not a bad word. It's a it's a it's

Elizabeth (1:15:06)
Absolutely.

Right. And with and with Holocaust

history, we start with Rao Hilberg and we've all been doing revisionist history on his first master work since then. That's how history works. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (1:15:24)
Yeah, I mean it it all like I said, all good history

is i i in a in a large or a small way, you know, revising our understanding. It's not refuting necessarily, but it's it's changing, right? And and complicating, exactly. That's a great that's a great historian historian word too. I wanna let me complicate that a little bit. Yeah, that's right. That's right. But it it's true. I mean it's it's it's absolutely true. And and I think this this book does does a great job of that. And there are I I will say

Elizabeth (1:15:35)
Complicating.

Let's complicate the textual narrative of the hospital.

Waitman Beorn (1:15:53)
for our readers or listeners rather, I'm sure our readers as well, you know, there are things that we didn't even touch that I wanted to, but we didn't have time. I mean, but there are lots of other elements that that Elizabeth brings up in this book that are worth discussing and you should you should pick it up and and check it out. But before we let you go, we always ask, you know, what is what is one book in Holocaust that you'd recommend? And I I know I scooped you, but I will let you I'll let you introduce it a a as well.

Elizabeth (1:16:21)
You did scoop me. between Dignity and Despair by Mary and Kaplan, I always say that that book like invented me as a historian. It opened my eyes to just how dramatically gender roles and behavior can impact how individuals experience and react to historical events.

So as you were starting talk about much earlier in the podcast, this book was about how German Jewish women were the first to notice the danger they're were in, in the danger they were in as Jews trying to exist in Germany under the Nazi regime. They were the ones who felt the danger and saw the danger before the men did, entirely because of gender socialization. And so that just really completely changed how I viewed and practiced history. However,

you know, that is still somewhat niche. And so I'm gonna say for readers who aren't academics but still want to read something, Soul Friedlander's The Years of Extermination is probably the best treatment of the Holocaust I've ever read. obviously it's a treatment of the whole thing, so it doesn't go into these little specifics, but it's a really fabulous, fabulous book.

Waitman Beorn (1:17:39)
Absolutely. I mean and and I've you know the both both of these books are great recommendations. I mean the Marion's book is great because it's I think in in some ways it really shows, you know, for anybody who's a naysayer, and I'm sure my my listeners aren't, but you know, about why gender why gender matters as a topic of of analysis, it's a fantastic example of that. because it's not the it's not a book that is sort of theoretically over your head.

Elizabeth (1:17:54)
I hope not.

Mm mm.

Waitman Beorn (1:18:07)
It's

it it's it shows exactly, you know, in a way that we can all understand, you know, how when you upset again, whatever the traditional normative roles are, y you know, it it it causes it causes anger anguish and it it forces people into sort of different perspective different different modes of behavior. And then Friedlander's book, you know, again for our listeners, is in some ways, you know, Friedlander, I I mention this whenever I talk.

about my book and and and others, you know, is, you know, he called for an integrated and integrative history of the Holocaust. One that one that takes into account everyone at the same time and their perspectives, right? And you know, he for a large extent does that. And so for for a lot of us, it's as you point out, it's it's a great example of sort of how to do this history

Elizabeth (1:18:51)
Yes.

Waitman Beorn (1:19:05)
in a way that includes everyone. And he also kind of does the Forest Gump approach of like having people, you know, who who've who move through the story. So it's not just a sort of yeah, it's not just a it's not just a kind of overview, you know, bird's eye view of it. You know, there are people and people's feelings and experiences that sort of go through it. So those are great recommendations.

Elizabeth (1:19:09)
Yes.

So seamlessly. In some books Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (1:19:32)
Again, for all of our listeners, thank you so much for listening. please feel free to get in touch and to give us a like, subscribe, rating on your on your favorite podcast source of choice. and Elizabeth, thank you so much for coming on and talking about your work.

Elizabeth (1:19:48)
Thank you.

Thank you so much for having me.