The Light of Days: Women Fighters of the Jewish Resistance

Judy Batalion, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, discovered an extraordinary story of women who fought the Nazis. The ghetto girls paid off Gestapo guards, hid revolvers in loaves of bread and jars of marmalade, helped build systems of underground bunkers. They flirted with Nazis, bought them off with wine, whiskey and home cooking, and shot and killed them. They helped the sick and taught the kids, they bombed German train lines and blew up Vilna’s water supply.

There has been no book in the English language that brings together the incredible and integral stories of Jewish female resistance fighters. A propulsive narrative history, The Light of Days will at last tell the true story of these incredible women. It follows a group of intimately bound resistance fighters in the harrowing year of 1943 as they prepare for insurgence and find themselves in ever graver danger. At its center is Renieh Kukelkohn, a smuggler and messenger from a small city in Poland who scurried by foot and by train across her war torn country at constant risk of death in service of defeating Hitler. The result is an unforgettable story about feminism, female friendship and revolt.