TLS
July 23, 2021
In The Light of Days, Judy Batalion has uncovered a trove of unknown or forgotten information about the Holocaust of genuine import and impact.
Read MoreLos Angeles Review of Books
July 17, 2021
Women’s roles in wars and revolutions are so often underplayed, but in her brilliantly researched new book, The Light of Days, Judy Batalion champions the true stories of audacious acts by Jewish women during Work War II.
Read MoreLos Angeles Review of Books
July 17, 2021
MONTREAL-BORN AUTHOR and essayist Judy Batalion, who wrote White Walls: A Memoir About Motherhood, Daughterhood, and the Mess in Between, embarked on an entirely different project more than a decade ago while living in London, pursuing her PhD in art history, and performing as an actor and comic.
Read MoreThe Globe and Mail
July 2, 2021
Three books by Canadian authors reveal new information, new perspectives to add to the Holocaust literary canon
Read MoreShondaland
June 7, 2021
Judy Batalion, the author of the critically acclaimed The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos, was raised in a community of Holocaust survivors in Montreal and educated at Harvard.
Read MoreThe Spectator
June 5, 2021
Judy Batalion celebrates the women of the Warsaw ghetto whose courage and ingenuity saved many Jews from certain death
Read MoreThe Economist
May 1, 2021
Judy Batalion brings to light half-forgotten tales of astounding courage.
Read More51% (Northeast Public Radio)
April 15, 2021
This week on 51%, we hear the untold story of women resistance fighters in Hitler's ghettos.
Read MoreC-Span Book TV
April 10, 2021
Judy Batalion, the daughter of Holocaust survivors and author of The Light of Days, and Rebecca Donner, author of All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, shared the stories of women who fought against Germany during World War II. This was a virtual event hosted by the San Antonio Book Festival.
Read MoreC-Span Book TV
April 18, 2021
Judy Batalion recounted the Jewish women who served as resistance fighters against the Nazis in Poland during World War II. This was a virtual event hosted by the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City.
Read MoreIrish Times
April 18, 2021
Book review: The unspeakable is succeeded by the unthinkable in this passionately written history.
“Heroic girls” the historian Emmanuel Ringelblaum called them, writing in 1942 from the misery of the Warsaw ghetto. “Nothing stands in their way. Nothing deters them. The story of the Jewish woman will be a glorious page in the history of Jewry during the present war.”
Read MoreThe Jewish Chronicle
April 8, 2021
Of the hundreds of terrifying incidents recorded by Judy Batalion in her powerful book, The Light of Days, one, perhaps, encapsulates the overwhelming problems faced by young Jews in Poland during wartime.
Read MoreThe Jerusalem Post
April 7, 2021
Zelda Treger was a resistance fighter in disguise. A Nazi and a police officer caught her, after she was denounced as a Jew. The police officer allowed her to live in exchange for gold, but forced Zelda to his apartment. The police officer’s landlord, however, did not approve of his lady guest and threatened the officer. Zelda managed to escape in the riot that ensued. Nonplussed, she continued on her mission to smuggle weapons into the ghetto.
Read MoreChristian 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.
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