If you asked me who is one of the most memorable and fearless Jewish female fighters of the century, Zivia Lubetkin is the answer.
Zivia was one of six children born in 1914 to a lower-middle-class religious family in a small town named Byten, Poland. She attended Polish elementary school and learned Hebrew after-school, becoming a fluent speaker.
She was a star student, intelligent, and had a remarkable memory. Being the most trustworthy in the family, she worked at her father’s grocery store instead of attending high school.
From an early age, she was drawn to the idealism of Freedom (Freiheit), a Zionist-Socialist group, becoming an active member and quickly rising to leadership roles.
Passionate, bold, and brutally honest, she worked tirelessly as an administrator, joining her comrades after hours in the laundry or the kitchen and venturing into men’s work.
In August 1939, she was sent as a delegate to the Zionist Congress in Geneva, Switzerland. Just one month before World War II broke out, people sensed the imminent danger that would soon fall upon Europe.
The delegates saw this as a golden opportunity to flee Europe via Switzerland to Palestine as they obtained travel permission.
Not Zivia Lubetkin.
She would not leave her brothers and sisters behind in Poland in their direst hour.
On her way back, Zivia had to contend with closed borders, blocked roads, crowded trains, and the sudden Jewish hatred that washed over Poland as soon as the war started.
Once the Warsaw ghetto was sealed, the community faced unprecedented chaos, with more than four hundred thousand Jews constrained into a small residential area.
For the Freedom movement, education was initially their primary concern. Since all Jewish schools had been shuttered, Zivia worried for the ghetto children. In response, the movement launched an underground elementary and high school, providing 120 students with Jewish and secular studies.
Thirteen teachers, starved and frozen, roamed from apartment to apartment. They taught the Bible, biology, mathematics, literature, the Polish language, and psychology in small crowded rooms. This mobile school system continued for about two years.
The Freedom communal center, at 34 Dzielna Street, provided training on raising young children and a daycare center. Now more neglected than ever, the orphanages were not forgotten by the Freedom girls, who collected clothes and writing supplies and gathered the children for holiday parties.
Later, overcome by the undeniable fatality of their destinies, all efforts were focused on survival by feeding the famished, caring for abandoned or orphaned children, hiding, smuggling people across borders, acquiring weaponry, and planning covert missions.
As youth movements all over Poland collaborated, Zivia thought it was essential to create a communication system that would transcend ghetto walls.
For this purpose, young women served as messengers and traveled from place to place, disguised as Aryans, while carrying false identification documents; a simple misstep would mean deportation or death.
The girls would hold secret meet-ups, spread critical information and updates, encourage and inspire small groups to pursue movement activity, smuggle weapons, and carry out missions in their towns and ghettos. These brave young women were called “courier girls,” “Zivia’s girls,” or kashariyot in Hebrew.
“They were developing a role that would soon become one of, if not the, most important of the resistance,” says Judy Batalion, who researched the life of female resistance fighters in the war for ten years.
The first organization in the Warsaw Ghetto to raise arms against the Germans was the ZOB (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa), the Jewish Fighting Organization. Zivia was one of its founders, a fierce member, and an active fighter. She was also a member of the Jewish Coordination Committee.
At the height of deportations, death, and despair in the Guetto, Zivia did not relent. Instead, she would fight with all her might; in the ZOB’s first resistance operation in January 1943 and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April 1943.
On April 19th, 1943, German troops entered the Ghetto to deport its remaining population. This time, about 700 young Jewish fighters decided they would not go quietly to the gas chambers.
They broke out in what is known as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the largest Jewish uprise in World War II and the first significant urban rebellion against Nazi occupation in Europe.
The German response was brutal. First, the Nazis set the Ghetto on fire, burning and trapping its occupants confined to bunkers and underground tunnels.
Facing certain death and extermination, Zivia still did not give up.
She went to the various bunkers and maintained contact between the leaders and the fighters who remained in the burning Ghetto. Sadly, eventually, there was nothing left to fight with, nor whom to fight for.
Along with many others, Zivia had no choice but to flee to save her life. She organized precarious escape routes for fighters through the sewer canals out of the Ghetto.
Unfortunately, many were caught and did not survive, which haunted her until the end of her life.
On May 10th, 1943, she escaped through the sewer system and the remaining forty freedom fighters.
She wrote later, “It seemed as if you were leaping into the darkness of the depths, with the filthy water splashing and spraying about you. You are overcome by a terrible feeling of nausea. Your legs are drenched with the foul-smelling cold slime of the sewer. But you keep on walking!”
They made out safely to the Aryan side and hid together in Nazi-occupied Warsaw.
Still, Zivia did not stop fighting the enemy. She served in the People’s Guard, a Polish underground army organization, from August to October 1944, until their rescue in November of that same year.
After the war, she tirelessly searched for survivors and members of the organizations she passionately and selflessly led. In addition, she strongly encouraged and assisted in the immigration and rehabilitation of Jewish survivors in the Land of Israel.
In 1946, Zivia married Itschak Zuckerman, famously known as Antek, and commander of the ZOB, the Jewish Fighting Organization. Together with other fighters, she founded the Kibutz Lohamei HaGetaot, (the warriors of the Ghettos) and the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum.
She was blessed with two children, living at the Kibbutz until her passing on July 11th, 1978.
To Zivia and all the brave women out there. May we know them, may we be them.
