Daily Alert Archives

The Nazi-Fighting Women of the Jewish Resistance

(New York Times) Judy Batalion - In 1943, Niuta Teitelbaum strolled into a Gestapo apartment in central Warsaw, likely dressed as a Polish farm girl with a kerchief tied around her braided blond hair. She pulled out a gun and shot three Nazis, killing two and wounding one. She later entered the hospital where the injured man was being treated and killed him. On every Gestapo most-wanted list she was known as "Little Wanda with the Braids." While searching in the British Library for books about Hannah Senesh, a Hungarian-born World War II resistance fighter who parachuted into Europe, I found a book in Yiddish from 1946 titled Women in the Ghettos which relayed tales of dozens of other young Jewish women who defied the Nazis. It told the stories of Polish-Jewish "ghetto girls" who paid off Gestapo guards, hid revolvers in teddy bears, flirted with Nazis and then killed them. They distributed underground bulletins, flung Molotov cocktails, bombed train lines, and organized soup kitchens. More than 90 European ghettos had armed Jewish resistance units. 30,000 European Jews joined the partisans. Rescue networks supported 12,000 Jews in hiding in Warsaw alone. The writer is the author of the forthcoming The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler's Ghettos.
2021-03-25 00:00:00
Full Article