Christian Science Monitor
April 16, 2021
Judy Batalion’s thrilling, devastating book tells of an underground network of young Jewish women in Poland who resisted the Nazis by engaging in smuggling, sabotage, and even armed defense. Their courageous deeds, largely forgotten until now, are astounding.
Read MoreDaily Express
April 20, 2021
ZIVIA Lubetkin was ready for death. The shattered, burning buildings and corpse-strewn streets of the wartime Warsaw Ghetto, created to house Jews before they were deported to extermination camps, had been the backdrop to her existence for weeks. The Nazi "aktions" against Jews in the Polish capital were increasing in barbarity and regularity by the start of 1943.
Read MoreThe Boston Globe
April 15, 2021
The Polish Jewish heroines of “The Light of Days” threw off gender norms and ghetto constraints to resist Nazism, and sometimes survived to tell their stories.
A multilingual museum curator and the granddaughter of Polish Holocaust survivors, Judy Batalion first stumbled on their accounts in an unexpectedly riveting Yiddish-language book in the British Library. “I was jolted by these tales of agency,” about “women who acted with ferocity and fortitude — even violently,” she writes.
Read MoreCBC The Current
April 20, 2021
When Montreal-born author Judy Batalion first learned about a group of Jewish women in Poland who rebelled against the Nazis during the Second World War, it was by total chance.
Read MoreHistory Extra (BBC podcast)
April 26, 2021
Author and historian Judy Batalion discusses her new book The Light of Days, which recounts how a group of young Jewish women fought back against their German oppressors in Nazi-occupied Poland during the Second World War.
Read MoreChristian Science Monitor
April 19, 2021
In 1942, two years before his death at the hands of the Gestapo, Polish-Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblum, in a diary entry written from the Warsaw Ghetto, praised the courage of female resistance fighters. “How many times have they looked death in the eyes? How many times have they been arrested and searched?” he marveled. “The story of the Jewish woman will be a glorious page in the history of Jewry during the present war.”
Read MoreThe Forward
April 13, 2021
More than a decade ago, Judy Batalion accidentally stumbled upon a Yiddish-language book in the British Library. Published in 1946, the book comprised a collection of memoirs of “ghetto girls,” young Jewish women who revolted against the Nazis in Poland. These women tricked the Gestapo into carrying their luggage filled with contraband, hid revolvers in teddy bears, flung Molotov cocktails, and bombed German supply trains.
Read MorePBS Newshour
April 8, 2021
Judy Batalion's new book, "The Light of Days," details acts of heroism by Jewish women in the ghettos of eastern Europe - and even within the death camps.
Read MoreThe Shmooze (Yiddish Book Center podcast)
April 8, 2021
Judy Batalion is the author of the recently released The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos, which illuminates the extraordinary history and accomplishments of brave Jewish women who became resistance fighters—a group of unknown heroes whose exploits have never been chronicled in full until now.
Read MoreCan We Talk? (Jewish Women’s Archive podcast)
April 8, 2021
"They were women who carried cash in their garter belts and dynamite in their underwear," says Judy Batalion, the author of The Light of Days, a new book about Jewish women resistance fighters in World War II who "blew up Nazi supply trains and shot and killed Gestapo men."
Read MoreTIME
April 8, 2021
On Yom Hashoah, we light memorial candles and mourn the dead. But which narratives of the Holocaust do we recall? Why have certain stories predominated our understanding while others have seemingly vanished?
Read MoreTimes of Israel
April 7, 2021
In 2007, author Judy Batalion happened upon a book housed at London’s British Library titled, “Freuen in di Ghettos.” Published in 1946 in New York, it was a collection (in Yiddish) of accounts of young Jewish women who had defied the Nazis through various acts of resistance.
Read MoreNew York Times Book Review
April 6, 2021
Judy Batalion was raised in Montreal surrounded by Holocaust survivor families with stories of loss and suffering. “My genes were stamped — even altered, as neuroscientists now suggest — by trauma,” she writes in “The Light of Days.” “I grew up in an aura of victimization and fear.”
Read MoreTablet
April 6, 2021
The next day, Freedom members met with community leaders to discuss a response. They proposed attacking the Jewish police—who weren’t armed—with clubs. They also wanted to incite mass demonstrations. Again, the leaders warned them not to react hastily or upset the Germans, cautioning that the murders of thousands of Jews would be on the young comrades’ heads.
Read MoreTablet
April 6, 2021
Every author looks forward to her book’s publication date. But for Judy Batalion, today is doubly important, because she has two books coming out.
Read MoreLit Hub
April 6, 2021
The British Library reading room smelled like old pages. I stared at the stack of women’s history books I had ordered—not too many, I reassured myself, not too overwhelming. The one on the bottom was the most unusual: hard-backed and bound in a worn, blue fabric, with yellowing, deckled edges. I opened it first and found virtually two hundred sheets of tiny script—in Yiddish.
Read MoreLilith
April 5, 2021
Assassinating Nazis, escaping death via sewers, and saving fellow Jews in World War II Poland sounds like an action movie, but it was real life for the Jewish women profiled in The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos (William Morrow).
Read MoreNPR Here & Now
April 5, 2021
In the 1940s, a group of young Jewish women living in the ghettos of Poland reacted to Adolf Hitler’s murderous campaign with unfathomable courage.
Read MoreInsider
April 5, 2021
After German dictator Adolf Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, Nazis began segregating millions of Jews in Eastern Europe into sections of towns and cities designated "ghettos," eventually stripping inhabitants of their belongings and rights and sealing them in with barricades and armed guards.
Read MoreHistory News Network
April 4, 2021
In 1959, writing about the Holocaust, scholar Mark Bernard highlighted that Jewish resistance was almost always considered a miracle, ethereal, beyond research scope. Still today, this impression generally persists. And yet, Jewish defiance was everywhere during the war, carried out in a multitude of ways, by all types of people.
Read More