Judy Batalion, THE LIGHT OF DAYS UJA EVENT

[1:05]Zibby Owens: This is Zippy Owens and you're listening to the award winning podcast, Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. I'm also the host of Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight, and I'm the editor of the anthology, which you should run out and buy, called Moms Don't Have Time to A Quarantine Anthology. All proceeds of that book go to COVID nineteen vaccine research. And I'm the editor in chief of Moms Don't Have Time to Write, a new publication on Medium, and we're accepting submissions, so please send your personal essays there. And if all that isn't enough, you can follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens. My website is zibbyowens.com. Okay. Now back to this amazing podcast. I am so thrilled that Ferity brand is back at being my sponsor again because as many of you know because I talk about them a lot and I post about them a lot. Ferdy is like my favorite clothing brand right now. It is fashionable enough that I always feel good wearing it, super comfortable, very forgiving, and just really cool. So I'm so excited they're my sponsor. You can get a discount with feritybrand.com/zippy and you'll get 20% off. Again, that's feritybrand.com/zippy. Get 20% off. And a few other things that you should know about Ferity aside from the fact that I'm living in their dresses for this summer is that they're a family run brand fueled by purpose and optimism. They make high quality, sustainably minded, feel good favorites that you'll be proud to wear. I certainly am. They believe in family, quality, sustainability, and community. Summer is in their DNA, and they've created many staples for the summer, sustainably minded with the highest of quality, comfort, and versatility, and all are made for life, which I can a 100% attest to, and you should definitely go check it out. So again, fairetybrand.com/Zibby for 20% off. Go try it out. So I've already interviewed Judy Battalion before, and that's what this episode is going to be is my another conversation with Judy Battalion who wrote The Light of Days, The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler's Ghettos, which is a New York Times bestseller. But I wanted to release this conversation we had with UJA because it was really an amazing conversation and is so timely given the rise in antisemitism right now and really had us delve deep into her background and her family from the Holocaust. It was really great conversation. So I hope you enjoy Judy was born and raised, by the way, in Montreal, where she grew up speaking English, French, Yiddish, and Hebrew. She studied the history of science at Harvard, moved to London to get a PhD in art history, worked as a curator, researcher, editor, lecturer, comic, actor, producer. I mean, does she did everything. And then eventually, wrote essays and articles for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vogue, The Forward Salon, Jerusalem Post, and many others. She also wrote a memoir called White Walls, A Memoir About Motherhood, Daughterhood, and the Mess in Between, which was optioned by Warner Brothers, for whom Judy is also currently developing the TV series Cluttered. This book, by the way, The Light of Days, which also has a young version young reader's version associated with it, was optioned by Steven Spielberg's Amlan Partners, and she is co writing the screenplay for that. Judy currently lives with her husband and three children in New York City. So please enjoy our conversation.

[4:25]Judy Batalion: Hi, Judy. Hello.

[4:27]Zibby Owens: Hello. Good morning. I'm so excited to be here. I'm so excited to be here with you, especially to talk about your amazing book, The Light of Days, The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler's Ghettos, which I'm sure many of you who are on this Zoom saw the huge New York Times article about Judy's book, and it's a bestseller, and it's amazing. And if you haven't, you should go buy this right now while we're still on the Zoom. Anyway, welcome, Judy. Thank you for doing this. Thank you. Thank you. So, Judy, why don't you tell everybody, in case they haven't read your book or they don't know about it yet, what your book is about and then the amazing story of how it came to be. Sure.

[5:12]Judy Batalion: So the book, The Light of Days, is really the story of young Jewish women who were part of the organized resistance against the Nazis in Poland. Primarily, I tell the story of ghetto fighters, young Jewish women who were part of the underground in the ghettos, and I'll get into all the kinds of underground work they did ranging from, you know, organizing soup kitchens, secret schools, secret performances, underground printing presses, writing bulletins. They used to hide them by braiding them in their hair. All the way through to Jewish women who blew up Nazi supply trains, who shot Gestapo men in the head, who were ghetto fighters in ghetto uprisings, flinging Molotov cocktails and hitting Nazi tanks with explosives. I focus in particular on a group of women called the Courier Girls, or in Hebrew, were called Keshariyot, connectors. These again were young Jewish women, usually around 18, 19, maybe 22 years old, who would pretend to be Christian, slip out of the ghettos, and connect the ghettos. They would bring information. They would bring even current events. Jews in ghettos didn't have newspapers. They didn't have radios, they weren't allowed. It was young Jewish women who were transporting information, were bringing news of the Nazi genocide, who were bringing supplies and medical supplies and money and fake Arian documents and were arming the ghetto undergrounds, bringing back into the ghettos guns, explosives, ammunition, and also doing rescue work, helping to take Jews, children, adults out of ghettos, out of slave labor camps and finding them hiding spots in the forests and in the cities and then looking checking up on them in these hiding spots. So the book sort of details all these various roles that women played in the organized underground in Poland during the war. Was that a long enough answer? I can go on, as you can see.

[7:26]Zibby Owens: Also, I should have mentioned to everyone watching, if you have questions about anything Judy says or is talking about or things that you would like us to address, please add them in the chat. And also, if you go to the little corner and say view, if you put it on speaker view, then the two of us will be sort of highlighted versus sea of Zoom boxes. So anyway, just some maintenance I forgot to say. Okay. So that is the story of some of the amazing, the plights of the women that you detail. Tell us about the notebook that you found, the journal Oh, yeah. Research and that whole thing of how you actually discovered all of these stories.

[8:03]Judy Batalion: Right. Question one b, I forgot. This so this project began fourteen years ago. Someone recently was taught they said this was an odyssey. This was an odyssey and it began by accident. This began by accident. I didn't set out to write this book at all. I was living in London at the time. It was a time in my life. I was 30 and I was thinking a lot about my Jewish identity, my identity and I am the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors and I was thinking a lot about what I call the emotional legacy of the Holocaust, the way that trauma passes through generations. In my own life, I'm a very anxious person and it was a time in my life where everything around me felt very dangerous and I started thinking how much has my Holocaust heritage shaped how I was perceiving and reacting to everyday dangers? This was something I wanted to explore. I was doing a lot of performance work at the time so I decided I was going to write a performance piece and it was going to be about confronting danger and I wanted it to have a historical kind of spine and I was trying to think what is an example of a Jewish woman who confronted danger and the first one to come to mind was someone I had studied in fifth grade and her name was Hannah Senesch. Many of you might know who she was. She was a Hungarian Jew. She was young, about 20 years old and she made aliyah. She moved to what was then Palestine in the 1930s. She was a poet. She wrote lyrics. You might know her songs But during World War II, Hannah Senesch decided she wanted to fight back. She joined the Allied Forces, she became a paratrooper and she volunteered to return to Nazi occupied Europe. She was actually caught very early on but legend handed she looked her executioners in the eye when they shot her. I grew up with Hannah Senesch as a symbol of Jewish courage. She was a hero. But back in 2007 in London, I I didn't wanna know about Hannah Senisch the hero. I wanted to understand Hannah Senisch the person. Who does that? Who volunteers to return to Nazi occupied Europe? What is the psych what motivates that kind of audacity, that courage, that bravery? What what is the psychology behind that? This really was my core question and that led me to the British Library where I decided I wanted to find a nuanced biography about Hannah Senesch. Not not just a hero myth but someone who really studied her her personality so I typed Hannah Senesch into the catalog. There were not very many books about Hannah Senesch at the British Library so I just ordered whatever they had and one of the books that came back to me in the stack was an unusual book. It was an old book. It was dusty. It had a blue fabric cover. It was kind of worn. It had gold embossed lettering on the front and it was in Yiddish. It was called Freund in the Ghettos, Women in the Ghettos. I would say even more unusual than the book is the fact that I speak Yiddish. So I start flipping through this book looking for Hannah Sanish, looking for this biot but she wasn't there. I couldn't find her. She was only in the last few pages. In front of her, there were a 150 pages of small Yiddish text with photos and bios and snippets and ex of dozens and dozens of young Jewish women who fought the Nazis and who fought them from the Polish ghettos with chapter titles like ammunition, Weapons, Partisan Battle. And it was simply like nothing I had ever read, nothing I'd ever come across in any Holocaust narrative. It was so different in tone and in content to any Holocaust narrative I've ever heard and that's where it all began. Wow. How did you end up speaking Yiddish? Good question. I speak Yiddish for two reasons. I was really raised by my grandmother who was a holocaust survivor from Poland and she spoke to me in Yiddish. Yiddish is Gevan mein Erschen Sprach. Actually, it was my first language so Yiddish was always in my bones but I also went to a very unusual Jewish day school. I grew up in Montreal and the day school I went to, and I only found this out doing research for this book, actually came directly from Polish Jewish education philosophies and I studied the same thing these women did and in this school, we studied they were secular socialist, My school was too. And we studied Hebrew and Yiddish language and literature. And our Jewish identity came from the study of the Jewish arts and language. And that's how I speak Yiddish. Wow. Who knew who knew Yiddish would be my cash cow, I always say. You know? I would I would be studying, you know, one night I had a physics exam, the next night Yiddish. We're like, why am I wasting my time doing Yiddish?

[13:15]Zibby Owens: Who knew? Now Yiddish my whole career. There you go. Your grandmother must be spelling. She must be so, oh my gosh, over the moon. Would you mind sharing your grandparents' story of their experience with the Holocaust? Is that okay to ask? Yes. Of course. And, you know, I wish I

[13:34]Judy Batalion: I wish I could tell my grandparents' story in as much detail as I can tell some of these stories and I can't. And this is something that's come up in many times. I spoke to many of these families. It's often very difficult for families. Often we don't, we didn't get full stories. We got snippets of the narrative and that's what happened in my family. My grandfather never talked about his experience but my grandmother did and my grandparents, these are my mother's parents, they were married. They were living in Warsaw when Hitler invaded and my grandmother did not look Jewish. She looked the least Jewish, the most Polish of the whole extended family and I bring this up because it's something we'll get back into. It's a big theme in this book and she so the family sent my grandmother to wait in the bread lines. This was very early in the war and it was in these bread lines that my grandmother really started to understand what was going on. She heard what was going on around her, what German soldiers were saying, what the Polish people around her were saying, what she took it in and she came home and said to my grandfather, we have to get out of here. It's not safe. And they fled east. My grandfather had a brother who lived near the Russian border so they were they went east. It's a dramatic narrative of all snippets. They hid in a convent, a Nazi turned a blind eye, they swam across a river but eventually they met up with my grandfather's brother and they were shot at and my grandfather was injured but his brother was killed so they kept going east because of that and they crossed the Russian border and out of the 300,000 Jews who survived, the Polish Jews who survived the war, 200,000 survived because they survived in Russia. They were called at the time the Asians. So my grandparents were, like many of them, put in work camps in Siberia and they lived out the war in these work camps which they never talked about. That's another book for me to write. It's a very underreported story. And then moved back to Poland in '45 and my mother was born along the way. Wow.

[15:47]Zibby Owens: They moved back to Poland. Yes. They lived in Poland for a number of years. I feel like I never hear about Jews moving back afterwards.

[15:56]Judy Batalion: Did you did they tell you anything about that? And I'm sorry. We'll talk about your book. I'm, like, fascinated by this. Yeah. This is I I don't usually get asked these questions, so it's it's good for me. They in fact, I still have family in Western Poland. Jews were resettled in parts of Western Poland like Nizia, Rotslav and my family were they went, they wanted to see who if anyone was alive, They were trying to you know put their lives back together. In fact, they told that my mother's no, she that my grandfather had a business. He was in the Shmazza business and they this was one of the more prosperous periods of their lives and but then after a few years, they decided to leave and they went to Israel actually and then they found out that my grandmother's sister was alive. They hadn't even known for a number of years and she was in Canada And then they connected and she wanted to be with her sister. So they moved to Canada. Oh my gosh.

[16:51]Zibby Owens: I got goosebumps thinking about her finding out about her sister. Wow. Oh my gosh. What a story. And then your whole notion of inherited trauma. I mean, of course, you're interested in this. This is, like, in your blood. This is your main sort of matriarchal story in your life. And I feel like the bravery of your grandmother is what you're looking to tell. I mean, that's the story of these women in one shape or way or another. Not exactly what happened here, of course, but still that sort of will to survive and how you did it. And wow, the fact that it could become this book and you could discover this treasure trove of other role model women at the time is really amazing. Were there any of the women in the story whose backgrounds paralleled more of your families or that you felt a particular allegiance to or just responded to on some sort of emotional level as you were researching all of their stories?

[17:47]Judy Batalion: That's a good question. Can't have a favorite child. Okay, all Or do you? I think I'll never tell. No, I'm kidding. I do not. Of course not. I think that, you know, I connected with many of these women in different ways and, you know, the things that connected me to these women and that's what I really hope to bring to life for my readers was how modern and contemporary these women were. You know, they what connected me to someone like Frumka Plutnitska who, you know, had fled like my grandparents. She'd fled east but she came back. She insisted on she smuggled herself back. She she couldn't take not being there to help her people. She went to Warsaw. She became a leader in the Warsaw Ghetto. She traveled the country. She covered her Jewish features with a kerchief. She brought information. She told of the concentration camps, the death camps. She then was one of the first people to smuggle weapons into the Warsaw Ghetto. She put them in a sack of potatoes. She was stationed in this town of Bejin. She ran the underground. She died fighting, shooting Nazis with a revolver. Frumka, what I related to most with Frumka was her personality, the stories people, her friends had written about her. Found letters of hers. She was very shy. She was very introverted, she had trouble maintaining friendship, she had, you know, it was those kind of details. I'm shy, I have trouble with friendships. I felt very connected to her for who she was for this. You know many of the women that I wrote about were very educated. Fermke was from a poor family. Many of these women were had degrees, university degrees. Nussia Teitelbaum, degree from Warsaw University and she shot Gestapo men in the head like this is how they were talked about. They were educated, many of them were middle class, even upper middle class and they felt very relatable to me in a way that they were I think I'd always had a perception of Polish Jews of the time as other and I think maybe that was easier for me to handle but actually these people were so alive on the page and so similar to to us I think in so many ways. Today's episode is sponsored by Quince.

[20:16]Zibby Owens: Summer always makes me rethink what I'm reaching for every day lighter fabrics, better materials, pieces that just feel good the moment you put them on and look effortless. That's why I keep coming back to Quince. They focus on high quality essentials. Think breathable linen, soft organic cotton, washable silk, but without the luxury markup. It's that rare balance where everything feels elevated but still easy. Quince has beautiful everyday pieces like 100% European linen pants, dresses, and tops with styles starting at $32. Their denim is soft and easy to wear. I wear my jean jacket all the time. Their organic cotton sweaters are perfect for layering on cool summer nights. Everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. Quince works directly with ethical factories and cuts out the middlemen, so you're paying for quality, not brand markup. And it's not just clothing. Quince has really become a destination for elevated essentials across home, kitchen, bedding, and beyond, making it easy to bring a more premium feel into everyday life. In addition to my jean jacket, I recently got a white tank top dress with a beautiful cotton skirt that is absolutely gorgeous, and I can't wait for it to be warm enough so I can wear it every day, but it has been a cool spring. Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to quince.com/zippy for free shipping on your order and three hundred and sixty five day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's quince.com/zippy for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com/zibby.

[23:07]Zibby Owens: Well, your original question of what is it about the psychology of someone that makes this person versus that person choose the path of leadership, really, is what these women were. They were true leaders. And what did you find? Like, what theories have you come up with based on all your research? What makes a Jewish leader or a woman leader or just a leader in general? Easy question. No, not easy at all. Putting you on the spot, Judy. Trying to keep you on I your

[23:35]Judy Batalion: like the spot. So I thought about this question a lot and because I write about a lot of different women, it's hard to say they were all like this, they were all like that, but I've come up with a few different theories. So some of it has to do with their personalities and some of it has to do with their training. So let me start with the training. This and now we're gonna I'm gonna rewind here a little bit and take us into Poland in the 1930s which by the way is my new obsession period because as I was saying, very progressive and contemporary and another under discussed period of Jewish history. It's been so eclipsed by what happened after of course but it was such an interesting time for Jews in Poland. You know there were 180 Jewish newspapers in Warsaw in the 1930s. It was a moment of such cultural flourishing. In this time, there were many Jewish political parties and many philosophies and these political parties had these affiliated youth movements and young Polish Jews were by and large members of youth movements, a 100,000 young Polish Jews. This is from their late teens early 20s. These youth movements were like the scouts you can see if you see photos they're wearing ties and things but they were more than the scouts I always say. These were spiritual, intellectual, physical, emotional, social training grounds for young Jews and they used to joke even that their last name was their youth movement their identity was so tied to the movement they were part of. The movements that I write about in my book were largely the secular socialist youth movements. These are the movements that became the undergrounds in the ghettos and they had real values. They valued Jewish pride. They valued you know a cultural education similar to my education in many ways which is another way in which I felt connected to them. They valued, they were socialists, they valued collaboration, collectivism, they read psychology, psychoanalysis, they had reading groups, they discussed, they were very emotionally aware, they discussed their relationships with each other, they discussed their strengths, their weaknesses, they understood and talked about how to work together. They were also in many regards egalitarian. Women were leaders in these groups already. Frohnkoplavnitska who I mentioned before was a leader of a whole group of these socialist, secular, Zionist youth movements in the Warsaw in the 30s so women had already had leadership roles and they were really trained in these groups. Also promoted self sufficiency, self defense, they worked the land, they were athletic, they were taught confidence, they were taught to analyze, to plot and to act and to work together. They were taught to collaborate. So a lot of their reaction in the war, their becoming of this underground, their rebellion, their resistance activity was primed from before the war. The youth movements never thought they were gonna be fighting Nazis. They, you know, they were singing songs on on on in Kibbutzim. Oh, many of these women even left their family homes to live in kibbutzim that were all over Poland. I had no idea about this. So they lived in these communes. They lived together. They were really they trusted each other. They had strong bonds. So going back to original question, what made them act this way? Lot A of it had to do with their training in these youth movements before the war and how they learned to be, to understand themselves, to feel pride and to work together. Then there's also personality elements and this is different for different people but one thing my central character is this woman named Renya and spoke to Renya was a courier girl she did missions between Warsaw and Beijing she brought fake money. She organized rescue plans. She went to weapons dealers. She bought weapons. She taped them to her torso. She had explosives in her handbag. She was a smuggler. And Renya, when I spoke to her son a few years ago, you know, I interviewed him, I got all these details and then in passing, he said to me something like, you know, she just she wasn't the kind of person when she looked when she crossed the street, she wasn't the kind of person who looked left and right and left and right. She just crossed the street and that even it wasn't even part of the formal interview but that really stood out to me as an anecdote that explained many of these women as I came to understand them. They had a very strong sense of instinct, they were doers, they understood when to go and they went for it. By the way, I am not like this at all. I cross the street, I'm like left and right, right and left, right and left, then I go back, then I come back, left, So part of my fascination with these figures was that they are they are very different from me. But I I think I know that's just a a small anecdote, but I actually think it says a lot about some of these women. You know, they went they just they crossed the street. Wow.

[28:52]Zibby Owens: I crossed the street without looking a lot and I think that's a weakness. I mean, my husband literally today was like, Look right and left. Look after the bikers. I'm going to tell him that, you know I admire you. I admire you. No, it's not a good thing. You know, it's funny how you're like, this is like my upbringing. This was like my school. This I felt like was like me. I feel like it's something that we always do with books is look for the commonalities and what would we have done in that instance? I interviewed this author, Lisa Scatalini. I don't know if you have read her book Eternal about the Italian the holocaust as it happened in in Italy. But she says, like, it's very important point, which is when you're living a historic moment, you don't know that you're living in history necessarily. Right? You're just this is your life and things are slowly moving. And I feel like that's what's going on with these women. Right? It's not that one day your grandmother was in the breadline and said, This is history. I can see it, you know, in the grand scheme of things, I'm moving. And it wasn't necessarily that these women in their training could see that either. Like, Here's my moment. This is what I've trained for. And yet it's just one day after another and it all sort of combines to make you act in a certain way. And I guess my sort of follow-up question is how do we make today's women and like our children and everybody, they don't have necessary This is not a common training. Like I was listening to what you said. I'm like, Is this like, you know, a sorority? Like, are the sorority girls gonna be the ones who save us in the end? What can we do to create

[30:28]Judy Batalion: leaders who band together all these great skills? Well, I think what's important to remember is that exactly as you said, when these groups started, these groups didn't think they were gonna be fighting Nazis. They were they even said they were like, we were groups of creation. We became groups of destruction. They went completely against what they were. This was not their point, but they were organized and they were self aware and they had structures and systems. So I think what we need to think about in terms of using a lesson from this if ever possible is, you know, look to our organizations that are organized. They might not be organized for this purpose but there are areas where there are organizations. We're here with one today and you know we have to think about how we can use these organizations to work together to collaborate. I mean some of the issues that these the fighters had in the ghettos was that each of these youth, they were so politicized, they didn't get along with each other and this happened in the Polish resistance too. There were different factions of the Polish. They didn't get along with each other and that in certain cases like in Warsaw ended up delaying the creation of a mass underground because there was infighting. Even though the Nazis was the common enemy, there was some infighting between Jews, between Colts, between other undergrounds. So that's another thing I I hope to think about, to talk like, stop with the infighting. Like, need to when when we need to work against that, we need to really focus on coming together. And if you read the book, can read the stories. You know, it took so long in Warsaw to get the Jewish groups united to be able to have this mass body, this mass crew to create the Warsaw Ghettoizing whereas in a city like Vilna, they combined more easily and more quickly. They had each group had a leader. They were sort of equal leaders and it worked more quickly. So there's just little things we can think about but they really come down to communication and collaboration and you know the keywords that we talk about now too.

[32:44]Zibby Owens: That's true. I know you have some pictures. Would you mind showing us sort of some of the visual aids? No, you don't have to. Oh no. The problem is I won't stop. I have so many pictures. I loved doing the picture research

[32:57]Judy Batalion: and some of these are from the book, some aren't. Does that work? Are you seeing Yes. The Perfect. So let me tell you a little bit about some of these women. This picture is in the book as well. So this is one of my of my favorite stories is about this courier Bella Hazan and she's the woman in the middle on the bottom Bella Hazan was part of the youth movement she was in the underground from the get go she had a good look like my grandmother she did not look Jewish and so she could pass and the underground sent her to live on the outside on the Aryan side they sent her to the town of Grodno and she was going to do her underground work connecting with the Polish underground smuggling weapons helping to arm the ghettos from the outside in Grodno so she was one of the people that had to perform Christianity twenty four hours a day so what these women did is they found an apartment, a room usually with a Polish family and then she had to get a job. Of course she had to decorate her room with crucifixes and they supplied New Testaments and then she had to get a day job because otherwise she would look suspect. Everything about your life had to you couldn't have any suspicion at all. So she went to the town's employment office and applied for a job and they're you know interviewing her and then they just say oh I have the perfect job for you. So what's her job? Oh you're going to be a receptionist at the Gestapo. So she becomes the secretary at the Gestapo office in Grudna and she ends up doing translation work for them. She brings them tea, coffee and what she also does is steal their documents. She steals Aryan passports, Aryan IDs, Aryan papers, Aryan stamps and she brings this stuff with her. She makes up lies and excuses and she brings us to Vilna where they have a kind of Jewish underground forgery lab in the ghetto. A number of ghettos that a lot of them did this kind of forgery to make fake papers both for the underground for people like her so that they could travel the country and for Jews in general to help rescue them, to help get them out of ghettos. It was all about the papers and I in my book, I go into a lot of detail about the different types of fake IDs and that kind of became obsessed with that too. Anyways, Wallbella is working in this this totally fake life where by the way, everything had to be considered. You know, she she had to there was a fear of falling asleep on a train. What if she mumbled in Yiddish? One had to be alert and performing. They called it a it was a 20 fourseven life or death acting job with no intermission. And during this time that she was living this, she was also started smuggling weapons. One man in the Gestapo office develops a crush on her. They were all kind of taken by her. She was very beautiful. One man really gets into her and he invites her to the Gestapo Christmas party. The the Nazis love their Christmas parties. Read a lot about these parties. She invites her, she can't say no, that would seem suspect and you have to go with it, you have to, you know. So that night it happens that these other two courier girls, here we have Lanca Schneiderman and Tema Schneiderman and they also are like master couriers they're traveling the country with weapons and underground information they're staying in her room that night so she's to bring them with her to this Gestapo Christmas party. So here you have three Jewish girls dressed up pretending to be Christian and this photo was taken at the Gestapo Christmas party in Grodna in 1941 and this was, you know, sort of an event at the party. They took portraits. This photo actually ends up getting her caught later on but you have to read the book. I can't give the whole story away but this is, yes, this photo is in the book too. I'm just trying to, I'm gonna, do I have time to show you more? Yeah. Okay okay okay so this is Vladka Some of you might know her because she after the war she came to The U. S. Was very involved in the Jewish community and the Holocaust education community here. This is a picture of Vlad Kameed in Central Warsaw in 1944. She is pretending to be a Christian girl, an upper middle class Christian girl out on a day of you know theater lunch shopping. She is actually was a major underground operative she had transported dynamite into the Warsaw Ghetto for the uprising she I mean endless missions she at this time there was no more ghetto and her job she worked in rescue organizations her organization helped 12,000 Jews in Warsaw alone and she also went out into the country she was basically finding hiding spots for Jews bringing paying off the hiders visiting them bringing them books or paper or anything that could help them spiritually pass the time. In hiding she would make sure that they were still safe sometimes the hiding spots, they called them they got burned or they became threatened or the hider didn't wanna do it anymore. She would find new spots. She would move Jews. And so they would walk around. They would talk about this. They would walk around Warsaw with their this purse is probably filled with money at the time, and they were going around paying off hiders. She would also bring medics and trusted medics, photographers to take pictures for fake IDs. They had groups of teams of people and she would help the hiders. People wrote applications to her for money if they needed funding. There's some amazing she would go through these applications. They're like I'm passing. I'm a dentist. I really need money to buy a new dental chair and then she would review this and they would do budgeting and this was all going on during the war. One more? Or One more. One more. Okay. Okay. Okay. So this is another case of a courier girl. This is Shoshana Longar and Hella Schupper. Hella's on the left. They were leaders of the Krakow underground. Hella was the, I mean, master weapons courier for Krakow and this is a picture of them in Warsaw as well in 1943 in the summer and they're pretending to be Christian girls. Again Hella talks in her memoirs quite a bit about borrowing the right clothes, buying the right it had to be a floral jute handbag because that was fashionable at the time and they were dying their hair, know, a lot of discussion about getting exactly the right look. Hella tells one story where she came to Warsaw. She waited on a street corner, met mister x from the Polish underground. They had a secret. You know, she had to say what time is it. He folded his newspaper a certain way. She followed him several blocks. She waited all night, came out. He came out the next morning with five revolvers, four pounds of explosives, and clips and clips of cartridges that she put into these designer handbag I mean, not design fashionable handbags that she had purchased for this, taped them to her body, put them in her pockets, and got on a train and brought them back to Krakow. And in Krakow, they ended up using this weapon. They they had a number of small uprising acts. They also blew up a another Gestapo Christmas party using these weapons. And I should say Hala also attended business school before doing all of this. Wow. And I could go on and on and on, but I I

[40:32]Zibby Owens: I will control myself. Don't spoil the book. Don't the book. Judy, I feel like we've had many discussions, and every single time, I learn more and end up with even more respect for you than at the beginning. Like, you are so amazing what you're doing for these women, the Jewish community, the world at large, the way you write, the passion you show, it's just amazing. And it's it's really and the humor on top of it. It's, like, such a gift, and I'm sure everybody here agrees with me. So thank you for doing this, and thank you to everybody for coming. Go buy Judy's book. Give it as a gift. Buy the young version. Buy her white walls. Buy everything. And thank you. I don't know if anyone Yeah. I just wanna say thank you also. This was an amazing, fascinating conversation.

[41:36]Zibby Owens: Thanks so much to Ferity Brand for being my sponsor again. Go to feritybrand.com/zibby for 20% off. Enjoy. Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't

[41:55]Zibby Owens: and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the sound editing, and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.