Resistance by Tec Nechama

Author:Tec, Nechama
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2013-09-08T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOUR

The Concentration Camps

Bela Chazan Yaari was born in 1922 into a Jewish Orthodox family in the small Polish town of Rizyszczyce. Her father died when Bela was five years old, leaving her mother to take care of her eight children. An independent woman, she opened a grocery store, which gave the family an adequate income. She insisted that her children not feel sorry for themselves nor refer to themselves as orphans. Bela’s mother was a broad-minded woman, encouraging her children to become familiar with a wide range of political principles. Not surprisingly, as a young teenager, Bela joined the leftist Hehalutz organization, hoping to eventually settle in Palestine. After Germany invaded Russia in 1941, Bela and a large contingent of Zionist comrades attempted to immigrate to the Soviet Union. When they were refused entry, they returned to their home in German-occupied Poland.

After the Germans formed Jewish ghettos, Bela’s Hehalutz comrades reacted by creating an underground. When she lived in the ghetto, Bela was employed as an assistant nurse, but she worked as a courier in the Hehalutz underground. This meant that she moved illegally in and out of the ghetto. Bela’s Aryan looks made it easy for her to pass for a Christian. However, her somewhat limited knowledge of Polish was a problem. With time, as her underground responsibilities grew, Bela learned how to better hide her Jewish identity. She traveled extensively to cities such as Vilna, Warsaw, Bialystok, as well as to many smaller communities. Her successes gave her courage, making her feel invulnerable.

At one point her underground duties took her to the city of Grodno, where she rented a room from a Polish family. Occasionally, Bela would sneak underground comrades in need of temporary shelter into her rooms. One such man was the underground leader, Mordechai Tennenbaum. When he left, she overheard the young son of her landlady say to his mother: “Mama, Jews are coming here.” Such a comment spelled danger. Unobtrusively, Bela gave up her room and relocated to the Bialystok ghetto.

Soon news reached her that one of the Hehalutz underground’s most courageous and daring couriers, Lonka Kozibrodzka, had failed to return from a mission. For weeks her comrades waited for her return. Eventually someone discovered that Lonka was being held in the Pawiak prison, in Warsaw. Bela set out to find out how she might help. At a train station on the outskirts of Warsaw, two Gestapo men stopped her. They showed Bela a photograph of her in the company of Lonka and one other woman courier, whom the authorities could not identify. Bela admitted that she knew this photo and that it had been taken by the three friends as a souvenir. She told them that she had lost touch with Lonka and the third girlfriend. She was arrested. Over the course of the interrogation that followed, Bela slowly realized that the authorities were unaware that the women were Jews.

The Gestapo placed Bela in a cell in Pawiak prison. From time to time they would take her out for further interrogations.

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