Women of Valor: Polish Resisters to the Third Reich

by Joanne D. Gilbert

Women of Valor: Polish Resisters to the Third Reich provides a unique and inspiring perspective on the extraordinary Jewish and non- Jewish women who risked everything to defy the Nazis. In this highly readable and educational collection of true stories, educator, public-speaker and author Joanne D. Gilbert celebrates the heroines of World War II who not only fought the horrors of the Holocaust, but survived well into their 80s and 90s—living lives of commitment to the human spirit and human rights.

“ . . . I saw that a Nazi was already chasing me . . . I felt and heard bullets flying by—I just kept on running.” ~18-year-old Partisan Manya Feldman

“I also had a grenade with which to blow myself up so if captured, I wouldn’t break under torture.” ~ 19-year-old Partisan Faye Schulman

“Face-to-face with Adolf Eichmann . . . instead of being struck by terror, I was struck by how normal he looked.” ~17-year-old Lola Lieber

“I was determined to be as strong and productive as a boy. . . . I helped the posted guards . . . I camouflaged trails, and scouted out the surrounding areas for safety.” ~7-year-old Miriam Brysk

About the Author
Author’s Bio: Influenced as a little girl by her Grandmother’s vivid and poignant stories of the beloved family and friends who were so brutally murdered when the Nazis destroyed the Jewish People of Vilna, Lithuania, Joanne has always understood the importance of preserving Jewish History – one family story at a time. With this mission in mind, she became a professional Personal Historian in 2007, creating her own business, “Your Write Time!”

A popular Adjunct English professor at the College of Southern Nevada, Joanne is also a sought-after-public-speaker, whose presentations on both Jewish Genealogy and Jewish and Gentile WOMEN OF VALOR: Polish Resisters to the Third Reich consistently receive glowing reviews.

Joanne’s extensive travels to meet with Female Resisters and Partisans have taken her to Toronto, Detroit, Grand Rapids, Palo Alto, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Paris, where she was honored to meet with a group of women who had been in the French Resistance.

Genres: History, Holocaust, World War II, Nonfiction

208 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 2, 2014

Reviews

[J. Dolan · Rating 5 out of 5]

To say Gilbert's Women of Valor is one of the better explorations of Jewish resistance to the Nazis I've come across lately isn't saying enough. The way she structured it, first, brings the reader up to date on events leading up to WWII (1939) and the onset of the Holocaust in earnest (1942), then by interviewing her four subject women in the present, at their homes, helps personalize them for that reader. She furthers this by bracketing each heroine's 1st-person account of her exploits with a 3rd-person overview of her life before and after them.
As for the text, it isn't only well-written but an easy read, chock full of photos. Its crowning achievement, however, lies in blowing the lid off the myth of Jewish passivity in the face of Nazi violence. These women, three of them little more than children actually, despite unimaginable physical suffering and mental anguish, refused to be victims of the war being waged against them, instead bringing, each in her way, that war to her oppressors. After listening to one of them, all by now elderly, Gilbert observes, "And as she spoke, her tiny physique seemed to transform into the impressive stature of the strong, undaunted woman-warrior she'd been."

This is the kind of book that after finishing you should pass on to your older children--your sons certainly, but your daughters especially.

[Nannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Women of Valor is a book containing the accounts of four Jewish Women from Poland and how they fought against the Nazis in any way they can during the Holocaust. It's definitely worth reading for those accounts, but the book has a very strange emphasis on making sure the audience knows how important some Gentiles were to these Jewish survivors. So much so that I (who isn't a Jewish person myself) felt uncomfortable.

It may be important to note this was written in 2004. The epilogue states how wonderful it is that these women have survived to see Poland overcome its past antisemitism and see its government work to implement laws and rules to preserve some of its Jewish culture and history, etc. etc. etc.

And it seems to be a theme throughout the book: Gentiles helping Jewish people.

Maybe that was the case for 2004 (and don't quote me on that; I'm not an expert in this), but that's definitely not the case for what's going on in Poland now in 2018. In Poland now the rising right-wing government has made it illegal for people to even speak about the antisemitism of its gentiles during the Holocaust. There's propaganda ads playing on Youtube and other sites. Poland is literally doing all it can to cover up any antisemitism and everything it did to contribute to what happened to its Jewish people during the Holocaust.

So while this book was worthwhile to read for its genuine accounts, it had to be read a bit carefully whenever the author intervened with her (perhaps outdated??) personal opinions.

[Alex Baugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

When we think of partisans and resisters to the Nazis, most of us don't usually think about women. After all, it was a hard, dangerous business to fight such a cruel regime. But, as we learned from Kathryn Atwood's informative book, Women Heroes of World War II: 26 Stories of Espionage, Sabotage, Resistance and Rescue, many women were willing to risk everything, including their lives, to fight for what they believed to be right.

Now, Joanne D. Gilbert has written a book that tells us about even more brave women and since March is Women's History Month and this year's theme is Weaving the Stories of Women's Lives, it seems a perfect time to showcase Women of Valor.

Between 2012 and 2014, Gilbert interviewed four women who had lived with their families in Poland, but who, through different circumstances, had found their way in the surrounding forests and either joined partisan groups or found other ways of resistance when the Nazis occupied their country.

Manya Barman Auster Feldman had lived a religious, comfortable life with her parents, 3 sisters and 2 brothers in Dombrovitsa in eastern Poland until Hitler invaded it in 1939. Suddenly, life became harder and harder and eventually all of Dombrovitsa's Jewish families were crowded into a two block ghetto. When it appeared likely that the ghetto was going to be liquidated, Manya's father decided her, Manya, her older sister and two brothers would try to escape into the forest, leaving behind her mother and two little sisters. Walking all night, they found the Kovpak partisan headquarters, where they were sent to different battalions. Manya, still just a teenager, soon learned how to fight, steal, sabotage the Germans efforts, and nurse the sick and wounded. Her story, as are all the stories included in Woman of Valor, is harrowing and amazing at the same time, and Manya herself credits luck for her many narrow escapes from death while she fought with the partisans.

Faye Brysk Schulman was also living a comfortable, religious life with her family in Lenin, Poland. Her older brother had learned photography and had enlisted Faye to help him. It was her knowledge of photography that saved Faye's life when the ghetto they had been forced to live in was about to be liquidated, it was her job to take the photos that the Nazis demanded she take. In September 1942, Soviet partisans stormed through Lenin, and warmed the remaining Jews to run. Faye, still a teenager, found the partisans, joined the Molotavia Brigade, where she spent the war years fighting, nursing and photographing events whenever she could steal, make or find what she needed.

Even though the rest of her family was Polish, Lola Leser Lieber Schar Schwartz was born in Hungary/Czechoslovakia. In 1938, when the Germans occupied Czechoslovakia, the Polish passports of her immediate family were no longer acceptable there. The Lesers, including Lola, quickly fled to Poland and their extended family. Little did Lola dream that after being continuously on the run from the Germans, hiding in all kinds of weather and places, including under a tree in the forest, it would be her Hungarian/Czechoslovakian birth that would save not just her life, but many others when she received official documents exempting her from the same treatment as the Polish Jews. Needless to say, these documents sparked a flurry of forging more "official" documents for other Jews in peril. Later, when her husband Mechel Lieber was arrested, Lola was even brave enough to go the Adolf Eichmann's office to try to convince him that it was a mistake. Lola was indeed a woman of great courage.

Miriam Miasnik Brysk is the youngest of the women interviewed. Only 4 years old when the war started, Miriam's family left Warsaw, Poland for Lida, her father's home then under Russian rule. But when the Germans arrived in Lida in 1941, it didn't take long for persecutions to begin. The Miasniks were fortunate because Miriam's father was a surgeon and the Nazis needed him. In 1942, Miriam and her parents escaped the Lida ghetto with the help of a partisan group that decided they needed a doctor more than the Nazis did. Miriam spent the rest of the war going from place to place with the partisans. Her hair was cut off and she was dressed like a boy, had not formal education until after the war, but did possess her own gun for a while. And she helped out wherever she could, even taking apart machine guns, cleaning them and putting them back together.

As each woman tells her story, it feels as though she is speaking to you personally, making this a very readable book and I highly recommend it. As they wove their stories, each remembered in great detail what their lives were like before and under the Nazi reign of terror and each acted with remarkable courage. Sadly, they all lost almost all the members of their families, often witnessing their murders. Glibert doesn't let them stop at the end of the war, but we also learn about their lives after and up to the present. Interestingly, they all found ways to express their Holocaust experiences though art later in life.

These are only four stories about acts of resistance, however, and, as Gilbert reminds us in Epilogue, most of the women who chose to resist the Nazis perished, taking the details of their courageous deeds with them, reminding us that what we do know about women resisters is really just the tip of the iceberg. But let all these brave women, known and unknown, be an inspiration to us all in the face of oppression.

This book is recommended for readers age 13+
This book was sent to me by the publisher, Gihon River Press

This review was originally posted on The Children's War

[Mathias B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stephen Feuer,who is the publisher of Gihon River Press in Pennsylvania, informed me that Joanne Gilbert’s new book Women of Valor had just been published by his press. He asked me if I was willing to review it and I declined. However, we agreed that I would send him I Truly Lament: Working Through the Holocaust, a collection of short stories, which was recently published and he would give me Women of Valor, a sharing among brethren. Without the pressure of having to review the book, I read with no preconceptions.

As a historian Gilbert is well-versed with the Holocaust, much more than knowledgeable and her opening chapters that set the scene in Poland are very well done, detailed and informative. One can argue that this book could be used in a course on women’s studies, for it has much to say about gender and gender roles.

Since I approach the Holocaust as a fiction writer I count upon my imagination and whatever empathetic skills I own as a man, setting out to describe the unfathomable – am I wasting my time? I have written a novel and a book of short stories about the subject and I will not be writing any more on it. Gilbert has interviewed and taped, and edited narratives from four women of exceptional courage and remarkable strengths. One or two of them have published their own memoirs. All of them have lived long lives since the Holocaust; they have similarities and differences but essentially they share how fortunate it is to have survived and how important it is to give witness to what they experienced as Jews.

Ms. Gilbert has three overarching themes, which I will sum up as that Gentiles and Jews did help one another and that this was not uncommon; that shared miseries crossed religious boundaries; that Jews abetted in their own destruction is a lie. Gilbert writes to take testimony from these survivors, to add to the collective archive of Jewish memory. My purposes are different but have similar goals. I write to feel, to write how it was to be a Jew in the Holocaust; to give the reader my feelings about what it was to be dehumanized. A wise man wrote that not even a survivor understands the circumstances of his plight. In the dazed, confused, and exceedingly cruelly randomized world of the Holocaust this was a given. I suppose as I look over my writings I deal with the dehumanization of the Jew. Women of Valor is saturated with that experience and so I approached the book differently. I wanted to see if I would be touched or given insight from such behaviors, which is my background as a writer and a retired psychotherapist.

So here are observations I would like to share about Women of Valor. In a short declarative sentence in one of the narratives, it doesn’t matter which one, as it is latent in all four, the word “terror” is mentioned. Terror immobilizes, it paralyzes, cells freeze up, the mind cannot fathom, cannot respond; first there is the horror, and then there is terror. One indelible insight I uncovered as I read the book is how each of these women idiosyncratically experienced sheer terror, grappled with it and stood their ground. Somehow and in some fashion, they metabolized this fear, unlocked themselves, fought back at attempted rapes, learned to shoot a gun, to outwit and outsmart the Hun. In short, to act. They would not use this word, but they acted existentially. I see this in all four testimonies. I choose to live. I choose to resist. I am Sisyphus. Arrival is not the issue. It is all in the struggle. It is a monumentally brave thing, is it not? Each one moved from real fear and the pungency of terror so as to unlock her self and fight back, to resist, to self-actuate one self. Quite remarkable. And since women throughout the ages have suffered the collective backhand slap of men, it even takes on a larger measure of strength, character and that great word, resolve.

As I say terror was a constant, and I must add that to mobilize one self to resist was a choice these women also had to make. Psychological surrender would have been the comfortable way, paralysis and numbness the alternatives. Just examine the people about you and one can only surmise who would endure, who would resist and who would be shattered by the relentless Nazi machine of dehumanization, unprecedented in the history of man because it was systematic and organized. With people about you who would be traitorous, and who might very well reveal your identity, your very hiding place, one can only imagine what inner strengths had to be called upon so one would not commit treason against one’s self. Capitulation was always an available option.

A constant state of anomie prevailed in this environment. And how to engage that often became a test of character. Fortitude is the word that comes to mind. All of the women in one way or another, gave up their adolescence and assumed the mantle of adult behaviors. It had its cost much later on. It is often said that young people in the camps, after two weeks, had already garnered the behavior of men. One of the delayed savageries of the Nazi system was the indelible cost it made upon the survivor in later life. Survivors suffered twice over.

Indeed, at the end, one woman of valor who became a scientist and has a brilliant mind speaks of post traumatic shock disorder. The word is not the thing itself, one philosopher has said. And before we had the term, the disorder had been with mankind for centuries. Survivors who have had relentless dreams and flashbacks decades later can attest to this phenomenon. In my own stories I enter here with my own skills and try to grasp the psychological mayhem done to survivors. Ms. Gilbert gives the facts and her empathy; I relate feelings based on such facts as she has supplied as well as others, Primo Levi, Olga Lengyel and Wiesel.

It takes guts, if you think about, to be a living, feeling, thinking, and compassionate human being! Imagine the task for a young teenager who must psychologically defend herself and at the same time sustain her own inner-directedness as her culture collapses about her.

[Judy Stone · Rating 5 out of 5]

A deep and personal look at four Polish women resisters by Joanne Gilbert. I particularly liked Manya Feldman’s story, because I had heard Joanne tell it as part of the Teach the Shoah series (available on YouTube). I was also drawn to Faye Shulman, a photographer who documented both Nazi atrocities and partisan resistance.

Gilbert had the honor and benefit of personally interviewing each of these strong women, and documented their experiences from childhood, through their wartime resistance, to old age. Those real-life relationships with these women of valor make their brave stories all the more memorable.

The profiles of the Women of Valor are well-told and abundantly referenced, and the photos help bring it to life. There are also wide-ranging educator materials included that make it easy for teachers to incorporate these true stories into existing curricula.

Kudos to Gilbert for her attention to detail and her engaging biographies.
Highly recommended, particularly for teens and young women looking for inspiration.

[Arielle Sokol · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joanne D. Gilbert's Women of Valor: Polish Resisters to the Third Reich, recently published by Gihon River Press, is a gripping and inspiring compilation of first-person accounts from four remarkable young women who, equipped with their intelligence and skills, as well as a significant amount of good luck, successfully defied the Nazi-Germans—and survived. Despite the heavy subject-matter, I was mesmerized, unable to put the book down until I had finished the Epilogue. While each account is both compelling and horrifying, they are not depressing, because they show that the women survived and went on to live normal lives.

The honesty, candor, and voice of each woman is clear, as is her need to finally share her experiences with the world, so that what she went through will never be forgotten. A volume such as this is particularly important in an age when many Holocaust survivors and resisters are losing their battle with time. In less than a generation, all that will remain of those who endured the Holocaust will be their words and other recorded memories. It is not only important to future generations that they learn about what happened during World War II, but also important to those who endured; the telling of these stories appears to be both healing and empowering to all. Faye Lazebnik Schulman, one of the resisters whose story is in this book, states, "This education is essential to preventing another Holocaust . . . And whenever possible, as long as I can speak - I will tell the story. To my dying breath . . . I will tell the story." Gilbert has made these accounts, and their historical context, accessible to readers of all ages and levels of Shoah-related knowledge through detailed and extensive footnotes. Her Introduction also engages readers and encourages them to place themselves in the shoes of the women they will read about, asking them questions such as "Would you risk death to protect your loved ones?" and "Would you accept your fate?". The accounts themselves are uninterrupted by commentary, but each woman is briefly introduced by Gilbert, and following the Epilogue there is a Reader-Discussion Guide that can help readers process what they have just read. The focus on women, especially those who survived the war as child or teenage partisans, should be especially appealing to readers as it offers a different perspective on the Shoah than has been presented before. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who wants a deeper understanding of what truly happened during World War II, and I look forward to Gilbert’s subsequent volumes detailing the experiences and actions of other Women of Valor in Germany, France and the Netherlands.

[mairiachi · Rating 3 out of 5]

A compilation of stories from four women involved in the resistence.