Menu
The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos
Next in the queue
62
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
56/100Critics
67/100Scholars
Author:
Judy Batalion
Publisher:
William Morrow
Date:
April 6, 2021
Witnesses to the brutal murder of their families and neighbors and the violent destruction of their communities, a cadre of Jewish women in Poland--some still in their teens--helped transform the Jewish youth groups into resistance cells to fight the Nazis. With courage, guile, and nerves of steel, these "ghetto girls" paid off Gestapo guards, hid revolvers in loaves of bread and jars of marmalade, and helped build systems of underground bunkers. They flirted with German soldiers, bribed them with wine, whiskey, and home cooking, used their Aryan looks to seduce them, and shot and killed them. They bombed German train lines and blew up a town's water supply. They also nursed the sick and taught children. Yet the exploits of these courageous resistance fighters have remained virtually unknown. The Light of Days at last tells the true story of these incredible women whose courageous yet little-known feats have been eclipsed by time.
What The Reviewers Say
... brilliantly researched.
In [Battalion's] capable hands, their disparate voices are successfully woven together to create a gripping and horrifying narrative.
Why, Batalion wonders, had she not heard these women’s stories before? She stumbled across them only by chance on the dustier shelves of London’s British Library. The problem she then confronted in writing this book, which pulses with both rage and pride, was choosing which women to include and which to leave out. Her desire to pay tribute to as many as possible is understandable, but a simpler narrative with fewer subjects might have been even more powerful..
Writing with passion and novelistic license, Batalion takes readers deep into the psyches of these women.
