Michael: When you think of World War II resistance fighters, you probably picture men with guns in the French countryside. What if I told you some of the most effective, daring, and ruthless spies and saboteurs against the Nazis were young Jewish women, hiding in plain sight inside the ghettos? Kevin: That completely upends the image I have in my head. I usually think of Anne Frank's diary, stories of hiding and quiet endurance, not active, armed resistance from women. It sounds like a Hollywood script. Michael: It feels like one, but it's all true. That's the explosive, hidden history at the heart of Judy Batalion's book, The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler's Ghettos. Kevin: And Batalion was uniquely positioned to tell this story, right? I read she has a PhD, but more importantly, she grew up speaking Yiddish with her survivor grandmother. That's how she stumbled upon this obscure 1946 Yiddish book that basically blew the lid off this whole forgotten history. Michael: Exactly. It's a story that was almost lost, and it's been so impactful it's already been optioned by Steven Spielberg for a film. It completely reframes what we think we know. And this discovery is our first major point: there was a hidden army of women fighters, and their stories were deliberately buried.

Kevin: Okay, let's start there. How does an entire army of resistance fighters just get... lost? Especially when their stories were apparently written down right after the war. Michael: It’s a fascinating and tragic story in itself. Batalion is in the British Library in 2007, researching the famous Jewish hero Hannah Senesh. She's looking for nuanced stories of female bravery. On a whim, she orders a dusty, 180-page Yiddish book from 1946 called Freuen in di Ghettos—"Women in the Ghettos." She almost dismisses it because her Yiddish is rusty. Kevin: I can imagine. It sounds like something you'd find in a forgotten corner of a university library. Michael: Right. But she starts reading, and she's stunned. This isn't a book about suffering and endurance. It's filled with accounts of young women—teenagers, some of them—organizing sabotage, smuggling grenades, assassinating Gestapo officers, and leading armed uprisings. These weren't just helpers; they were commanders, spies, and soldiers. Kevin: Whoa. So this isn't just a few isolated cases? This was an organized network? Michael: A massive one. We're talking about armed underground groups in over ninety ghettos. Thirty thousand Jews joined forest partisan detachments. In Warsaw alone, Jewish networks were financially supporting twelve thousand people in hiding. And at the center of it all, as the Warsaw ghetto chronicler Emanuel Ringelblum wrote at the time, were the women. He called their story "a glorious page in the history of Jewry during the present war." Kevin: That's incredible. If it was so widespread and even documented at the time, why was it forgotten? Why did we only get the stories of passive victims or male heroes? Michael: That's the million-dollar question, and Batalion gives a few powerful reasons. First, after the war, the new state of Israel was building a national identity. The stories they promoted were of strong, male ghetto fighters—heroes who fit the narrative of building a new, tough country. Stories of women, especially those who survived using methods that were morally complex, didn't fit that clean, heroic mold. Kevin: So it was a branding issue, in a way. They were curating their own history. Michael: Precisely. And there was another layer. Many of these women were the designated record-keepers of their youth movements. Their job was to document the heroism of others, not themselves. They wrote about the men, the leaders, the martyrs. They were conditioned to be humble and put the collective first. Kevin: They literally wrote themselves out of the story. Michael: They did. And finally, there was the trauma. Many survivors just wanted to move on, to build new families and not burden their children with the horrors of the past. They silenced themselves. So you have this perfect storm of political narrative-shaping, personal humility, and deep trauma that buried these stories for over seventy years. Kevin: It's like finding a lost city. A whole world of heroes we never knew existed. Michael: Exactly. And their methods of resistance were just as hidden and just as brilliant. It wasn't always about guns and bombs.

Kevin: Okay, so this army existed. But what did their resistance actually look like? It couldn't have just been shootouts in the street. Michael: You're right. Their most powerful weapon was often their appearance. The Nazis had a very specific, antisemitic image of what a Jew looked like. But many of these young women had fair hair, blue eyes, and spoke flawless, unaccented Polish. They could "pass" as Aryan. This made them the perfect deep-cover agents, the kashariyot—the courier girls. Kevin: Hold on. You're telling me teenage girls were the main smugglers because they could blend in? Michael: They were the nerve centers of the entire resistance. While Jewish men were marked by circumcision and often had more noticeable Yiddish accents, these women could move between ghettos, cities, and even across borders. They smuggled weapons, money, underground newspapers, and, most importantly, information. They were the lifelines. Kevin: That's a level of psychological pressure I can't even fathom. You're not just smuggling an item; your entire identity is the contraband. Michael: And the book is filled with these cinematic stories. Take Renia Kukiełka, one of the central figures. On one of her first missions, she has to smuggle a huge sum of money to the Warsaw fighters. She sews the bills into her garter belt and the straps of her bra. She gets on a train, acting like a carefree Polish girl, flirting with soldiers, all while knowing that one wrong move, one slip of the tongue, could get her executed on the spot. Kevin: It’s like a spy movie, but the stakes are infinitely higher. What other kinds of roles did they play? Michael: Some were even more audacious. There's the story of Bela Hazan, who, with her perfect German and Aryan looks, managed to get a job as a translator right inside a Gestapo office. Kevin: You're kidding. Inside the lion's den? Michael: Literally. She's translating documents, overhearing plans, and secretly passing intelligence to the resistance. She would see lists of Jews scheduled for deportation and find ways to warn them. She was playing this incredibly dangerous double game, where she had to be charming and efficient for her Nazi bosses by day, and a resistance operative by night. Kevin: I can't even imagine the mental gymnastics of that. Playing a part 24/7. But this must have been incredibly dangerous. What happened when they were caught? Michael: The reality was brutal. Many were. The book doesn't shy away from the cost. Couriers were caught, tortured, and killed. One story that stands out is of a fighter named Idzia Pejsachson. She was caught with weapons, and the accounts of her death vary, but they all end with her dying in Nazi hands. There was no safety net. Every mission could be the last. Kevin: It adds such a heavy layer of realism to the heroism. They weren't invincible superheroes. They were young women who knew the risks and took them anyway. Michael: And for the few who did survive, like Renia, the end of the war wasn't a simple, happy ending. In fact, for many, that's when a different kind of battle began.

Kevin: That's a chilling thought. You survive the unimaginable, and the fight isn't over. Michael: Not even close. There's a quote in the book from a survivor named Hadassah Rosensaft that just stops you in your tracks. She said, "We had been liberated from the fear of death, but we were not free from the fear of life." Kevin: Wow. "Not free from the fear of life." What does that even mean? Michael: It means that after years of living on pure adrenaline, with a clear mission—survive, resist, avenge—the sudden silence of peace was deafening. The structures that had defined their lives, even the horrific ones, were gone. They were left with overwhelming guilt. Why did I survive when my family, my friends, my comrades didn't? Kevin: Survivor's guilt. I can't imagine the weight of that. Michael: And it manifested in different ways. Take Renia. After the war, she makes it to Palestine. She's asked to speak about her experiences at a kibbutz. She gets up, starts telling her story in Polish and Yiddish, and partway through, the audience starts getting restless. They start moving chairs and tables around, getting ready for a dance. Kevin: No. That's heartbreaking. They just... didn't want to hear it? Michael: She didn't know if they didn't understand her or just didn't care. She was so hurt, she ran out. It's this perfect, painful example of the disconnect between the survivors and a world that wanted to move on. For years, Renia chose to focus on the future. She married, had children, and created a joyful home. She actively shielded her kids from her trauma, telling them, "Life is short. Enjoy everything." Kevin: A conscious choice to contain the past to protect the future. But that must have come at a cost. Michael: A huge one. Many of these women suffered from severe depression. Zivia Lubetkin, a major leader in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, was plagued by guilt for the rest of her life, feeling she had deserted her friends in the sewers. Another fighter, Chajka Klinger, whose diaries are a key source for the book, was so tormented by her past that she eventually took her own life. The book makes it clear: not everyone survives surviving. Kevin: That's a devastating thought. That the 'happily ever after' was just... more pain. How does this trauma pass down? What is the legacy for the children and grandchildren? Michael: That's where the author, Judy Batalion, comes back in. She is, in a sense, part of that legacy. Her work is an act of un-silencing these stories. The children of survivors often grew up in the shadow of a trauma they couldn't fully understand. Now, it's the grandchildren's generation that is digging into the archives, translating the Yiddish, and piecing together the stories their grandparents couldn't, or wouldn't, tell. They are giving them the glorious page in history that they were denied.

Michael: So what we're really seeing is a story that was hidden, a form of resistance that was misunderstood, and a survival that was far more complex than we imagine. These women weren't just victims or just heroes; they were strategists, spies, and survivors who used every tool they had—their looks, their wits, their courage—to fight an impossible war. Kevin: It makes you question what other "glorious pages" of history have been torn out or ignored simply because they didn't fit the narrative we wanted to hear. The stories that were too complicated, too female, or too traumatic to be told at the time. Michael: It's a powerful question. The book is a testament to the idea that history is never truly settled. There are always forgotten voices waiting to be heard. We'd love to hear your thoughts. What other hidden histories do you think need to be brought into the light? Let us know on our social channels. Kevin: It's a reminder that the most important stories are often the ones that are hardest to tell. This is Aibrary, signing off.