The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos by Judy Batalion

Episode Date: April 7, 2021

The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler's Ghettos by Judy Batalion One of the most important stories of World War II, already optioned by Steven Spielberg for a major motion picture: a spectacular, searing history that brings to light the extraordinary accomplishments of brave Jewish women who became resistance fighters―a group of unknown heroes whose exploits have never been chronicled in full, until now. Witnesses to the brutal murder of their families and neighbors and the violent destruction of their communities, a cadre of Jewish women in Poland―some still in their teens―helped transform the Jewish youth groups into resistance cells to fight the Nazis. With courage, guile, and nerves of steel, these “ghetto girls” paid off Gestapo guards, hid revolvers in loaves of bread and jars of marmalade, and helped build systems of underground bunkers. They flirted with German soldiers, bribed them with wine, whiskey, and home cooking, used their Aryan looks to seduce them, and shot and killed them. They bombed German train lines and blew up a town’s water supply. They also nursed the sick and taught children. Yet the exploits of these courageous resistance fighters have remained virtually unknown. As propulsive and thrilling as Hidden Figures, In the Garden of Beasts, Band of Brothers, and A Train in Winter, The Light of Days at last tells the true story of these incredible women whose courageous yet little-known feats have been eclipsed by time. Judy Batalion―the granddaughter of Polish Holocaust survivors―takes us back to 1939 and introduces us to Renia Kukielka, a weapons smuggler and messenger who risked death traveling across occupied Poland on foot and by train. Joining Renia are other women who served as couriers, armed fighters, intelligence agents, and saboteurs, all who put their lives in mortal danger to carry out their missions. Batalion follows these women through the savage destruction of the ghettos, arrest and internment in Gestapo prisons and concentration camps, and for a lucky few―like Renia, who orchestrated her own audacious escape from a brutal Nazi jail―into the late 20th century and beyond. Powerful and inspiring, featuring twenty black-and-white photographs, The Light of Days is an unforgettable true tale of war, the fight for freedom, exceptional bravery, female friendship, and survival in the face of staggering odds.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks chris voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with another great podcast we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Be sure to watch the video version of this because we've got an amazing author on. She is the author of The Light of Days, Judy Battalion, The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler's Ghettos. We're

going to be interviewing today about these amazing untold stories that were buried, lost in history, stuck in libraries, et cetera, et cetera. And one thing that's interesting is this book has been optioned by Steven Spielberg for a major motion picture. So we'll look forward to that. That should be pretty darn interesting. And today's episode is brought to you by our sponsor Restream. Restream Studio is a web-based live broadcasting solution. You can live stream a Zoom meeting or webinar to up to 30 plus social channels and platforms at the same time. We're actually using it to do our live broadcasting.

You can get $10 credit towards their services using our affiliate link at restream.io forward slash join forward slash Chris Voss. so you can take an order up the book the book is going on sale i believe in a short week and that will be at let's see i've got the wrong screen pulled up here that'll be april 6 2021 so you want to take and pre-order that so you can be the first one in your block to talk about it and know everything about it so go to youtube.com to see the video interview of judy and discussion about her book at youtube.com for just christmas go to goodreads.com for just christmas and all the different groups we have on all the social media sites judy is the author of white walls a memoir about motherhood daughterhood and the mess in. Her essays have appeared in the New York

Times, the Washington Post, the Forward, Vogue, and many other publications. Judy has a BA in the history of science from Harvard and a PhD in the history of art from the Courtauld Institute, University of London, and has worked as a museum curator and university lecturer. Born in Montreal, where she grew up speaking English, French, Hebrew, and Yiddish. She now lives in New York with her family and three children. Welcome to the show, Judy. How are you? I am good. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you very much for coming on the show and congratulations on your new book. This is awesome. Thank you. Awesome sauce. So give us your plugs where people can find you on the interwebs and

get to know more about you. Yes, you can find me on the interwebs at judy battalion.com. I'm on Instagram at Judy battalion on Twitter at Judy battalion. And just to spice it up a bit on Facebook. I'm at Judy Battalion author. There you go. There you go. I love authors that are on all the platforms. You got to go to all the different audiences on there. So that's good.

They can get ahold of you and you can order the book, go to your local booksellers or you can go to amazon.com and order the book. There'll be a link on our website. So Judy, this is an interesting book. It took a while to get here. What motivated you want to write this book?

And then I don't know if you want to give a little bit of story of how this thing's been struggling to see the light of day. Yes. The light of days is finally seeing the light of day. See what I did there? Yeah. You were super clever. What a way to begin. This book, I've been working on this book for 14 years. So I really am excited for it to see the light of day. I'll tell you, this book began, this project began in 2007. I was living in London at the time, and I was 30, and I was like finding myself, and part of that was I was exploring my Jewish identity. I come from a family of Holocaust survivors, and I decided I was going to write a piece about strong Jewish women. It was going to be a performance piece. And there's one woman who came to mind immediately.

She's someone I studied in fifth grade. Her name is Hannah Senesch. For those of you who don't know her, she was a young Jew, late teens, early 20s, who moved to, she was from Hungary. She moved to what was then Palestine before the war. But during World War II, she decided to go and fight back. And so she joined the Allied forces. She became a paratrooper. She went back to Nazi-occupied Europe. She was caught, but legend had it

that she looked her killers in the eye when they shot her. And so I always grew up with this idea of Hannah Senesch as a real hero. But at this time in my life, I wanted to write about Hannah, not Hannah the hero, but Hannah Senesch the person. I really wanted to understand like, what made someone go back and fight the Nazis? What motivated that behavior? What kind of, what was her psychology? What was she like? How could someone have that audacity?

So I was living in London. I decided to go to the British Library and look her up. So I looked up Hannah Sanish and there were not very many books about her. So I just ordered whatever they had. And I went to pick up the stash and I come and I noticed one of the books is quite unusual. It's an old dusty book, the fabric cover and the yellow, I mean, that golden kind of writing and the yellowing pages. And the book is called Freuen in die Gettos, Women in the Gettos. I always say what's even more unusual than the book is the fact that I speak Yiddish. So I was able to actually read this book.

And I start flipping through the book, looking for a story for Hannah Senesch. But I can't find her. And it turns out she's only the last 10 pages of the book. In front of her are 200 pages of stories of other young Jewish women who defied the Nazis. There are pictures and it was got a scrapbook with names and some photographs and little bio entries and some obituaries about women who were blowing, Jewish women who were blowing up German supply trains, who were, I say they were smuggling cash in their garter belts and dynamite in their underwear. And this was not like anything I had ever heard. So I knew this was a project I have to pursue. And how it began, I had no idea I was going to write a book about this

many years later, but that is how it all began. I couldn't get rid of it. It stayed with me. This is awesome. So give us an overall arcing stories in the book, how the book is framed and what's inside of it. Sure. So my book, The Light of Days, it's not a translation of that Yiddish book. It's inspired by the Yiddish book. I took these tidbits of information and I went out there and researched all these stories, figured out who these women were and found that Yiddish book had maybe 40 names. I found hundreds and hundreds of stories of Jewish women involved in organized resistance against the Nazis in Poland. So my book focuses on that. I have about 15 different characters,

but there's one main character. Her name is Renia Kukielka. She was also, she had the kind of longest tidbit in that Yiddish book as well. So I was drawn to her from day one. And she was a courier girl. That's what they were called. She was part of the underground. She disguised herself as a Catholic girl. And she was about 18 years old at this time. And she snuck out of the ghetto. She traveled between, she was in a town called Bajin. She traveled between Bajin and Warsaw, which is where the head of the resistance was, and transporting money, fake IDs, people, documents. She went to

cemeteries in Warsaw, worked with underground arms dealers, bought guns, taped them to her torso, and was going back and forth on trains, really supplying undergrounds with weapons and munitions. Let me ask you this. How many Jewish ghettos were there? Because a lot of people just, when they think of the Holocaust and everything, they just think of the Auschwitz and the big concentration camps. But how many were there of these different ghettos that were around Europe and all this activity and stuff that is in your storyline were going on? So my book really focuses on Poland and there are different answers to that question, but there are hundreds of ghettos in that area. And what I had no idea

about though at all until researching this project was that 90 European ghettos had armed Jewish underground units. Yeah. So. That was amazing. It's amazing. And a lot of these ghettos were formed to be small kind of prisons or neighborhood prisons. Yes. Sorry if I'm not explaining the context.

I've been studying this for so many years. You're great. I'm just trying to give us some foundations so that people understand how big this was. Jews were forced into ghettos. They were usually the least desirable poor areas of towns that were cleared out and tiny areas where thousands and thousands of families were forced in, depending on the size of the town. In Warsaw, you had almost half a million Jews in the ghetto at its largest. And Jews were forced to be in these ghettos.

If they left, they would be killed. And that is why the risks that these women, these Jewish women took, disguising themselves to appear and pass as Catholic or as non-Jews and leave the ghettos and traverse the country. Every step was risking death. This is amazing. I think the generation of these women is extraordinary. And they met a moment, I think, of this era. But this is the untold story that's never really been told to them. Because I think a lot of times, I saw you on an interview mention this, a lot of times, they weren't seen as full heroes because they were doing so much undercover stuff and there were stories. Why didn't a lot of these more of these stories see the light of day in your research?

This question, I was the question of why I didn't know this story for me was as big as what is the story. It was almost like my research had a flip side to it. So I was researching what these women did and what happened. And at the same time, I was trying to understand why this history hadn't been brought to light before. And I came up with, at one point I called my editor, I was like, maybe that's your whole book. She said no, but she let me keep in at the end of the book. I do have a little section that addresses this research I did into why didn't we know this? Why are histories constructed and told and remembered as they are? And to me, there were a number of factors for why this story was pushed to the footnotes, really.

Some of them were zeitgeist, social and intellectual zeitgeist, and what people want to hear at certain times. Some of them were political. There were specific reasons why stories were suppressed or not based on national politics, in particular in Israel and Poland. And then many of the reasons were personal. And here I feel I can speak to, I work with many personal sources. And so I really felt this. These women were often not believed. I hear this time and time again. They felt this sense that they were accused. They were accused of having fled to fight instead of taking care of families. They were accused of having slept their way to safety. There was this idea that the pure souls perished. So if you survived, you must have done something. And this silenced people. Many of these women also felt a terrific survivor's guilt. The women that survived, I'm thinking of one example, this woman, Hasia Bialyka, who her family was brutally murdered. And she became an underground operative in Bialystok. She worked with 18 Jewish, young Jewish women who by day, they pretended to be Polish girls.

By day, they had jobs working in Nazi homes as housekeepers and cooks. And by night, they were running an underground, bringing weapons into the ghettos. They were connecting. They were bringing weapons into the ghettos. They were connecting. They were doing missions for the Red Army. They started an anti-fascist league, including anti-Nazis. And were funneling the weapons from the Germans to the forests. An incredible story. But she said when she finally felt ready to talk about her story was in the 60s

when she finally felt able. And at that point, people were they were interested in Auschwitz. They were interested in the death camps. And she felt so guilty. She said compared to her fellow survivors who'd been through Auschwitz, she'd had it easy. Who is she to complain? And I'm really very moved by it. And the most incredible stories ended up getting pushed down too, because of that kind of guilt that I didn't suffer enough. Wow. A lot of these women also, I'm writing about women, and they felt a really strong like duty almost to have children to recreate the jewish people their families had been killed and it was very important for most of them to try to have normal families happy families and for them to try for many of them suppressing the stories helped them move on. So these things were not discussed for decades, really for decades.

I can see that. I had a friend who went to Vietnam, and he would never want to talk about it. He just, I really want to just live a normal life, Chris, and move on. So I can see there's a lot of different aspects. Everyone loves the heroic story of the soldier and surreal male sort of thing and the soldiers but these are great stories what made the women such so good at being able to you know sneak around and infiltrate and of course you have some stories of them killing nazis and all the great stuff it's like uh inglorious bastards with women but so what made women so good at this?

This is a very good question. And there are a few factors around this. So as I was explaining, to be part of an underground, to do this kind of work, they had to leave the ghettos. They had to pretend to be non-Jewish. And women, they were performing. This is a story of performance. And women were not, first of all, they were not circumcised. So they didn't have a physical marker on their body of their Jewish identity, which men did. And this, the kind of, if someone suspected someone, a man of being a Jew, at the time they were told, drop your pants. And this was horrific. But this is what happened. So women didn't have that. So that was a big part of why women went into this role. But also very interesting to me, in the 30s, when these women grew up, the 30s in Poland, also so fascinating. I'll come back to that. But there was mandatory education for men and women. And families often sent their sons to Jewish schools, which had a tuition or were more expensive, but they sent their daughters to public school, to public Polish schools. And so girls were more acculturated. They were more aware of Catholic custom, of Catholic religion. They

understood the prayers. And very important, and this is something they talked about all the time in their memoirs, they spoke Polish like a true Polish person without what they called the creaky Yiddish accent. Women had these, it was easier for them to pretend to perform non-Jewishness, to perform Christianity or to perform, to pass. And that's one of the big reasons why they ended up doing it. Also women were not suspected. Nazi culture was very sexist. I'm thinking of this woman, maybe you're Nusha, a title bomb who walked into a Gestapo apartment with three Gestapo men and just shot them in the head. And then two of them died. One of them was injured. He was taken to a hospital. She was not satisfied. She found a

doctor's coat, went into hospital, pretended to be a doctor, shot him and the police guard who was watching him. And she, the reason I bring her up is she walked around with braids in her hair and a kerchief. And she was, her name on all the Gestapo most wanted list was Little Wanda with the Braids. So women dressed in this kind of innocent, young, youthful way that they weren't expected to be assassins or to be blowing up trains. I think that's the brilliance of the story too. There's a sexiness of flirtation that women can use with the Nazis. And like you say, fascism is always built on male toxicity and dominance and reinstallment of the hierarchy after a rise of women's rights, disability, and marginalized communities rising up. And so it's always a blowback to that. So male toxicity just kicks right in. And so I think it's an amazing story. And so if Spielberg doesn't

follow through on the option on this, Tarantino needs to pick up this book because I'll watch that movie. Give us some highlights of some of the stories that I know there was something you skipped you wanted to call back to, but if not, give us some of the stories that I know there was something you skipped you wanted to call back to. But if not, give us some of the stories maybe that you want to stick out that will entice readers. I just told you about little Nusha who is shooting. And that's only one of her stories. One of my main characters was this woman, Frumka Plotnitska. She was a leader in the sort of youth movement in Poland before the war. And when

war came, she fled east to the Russian front. And she was actually posted near her parents' home. She was safe, but she decided, no, I have to go back. So she voluntarily went back to Nazi-occupied Poland, became a leader in the Warsaw ghetto, put on a kerchief and makeup and covered up her Jewish features and traveled throughout the entire country distributing information. Jews had, there were no radios allowed. There were no newspapers. Jews had no information. They didn't know in the get, in their locked ghettos, they didn't know what was going on in the world. She was telling them. She was telling them what the Nazis were doing. She, they were publishing underground books in the Warsaw Ghetto. She was telling them. She was telling them what the Nazis were doing. They were publishing underground books in the Warsaw Ghetto. She was distributing them. She was holding

seminars and lectures. All of this, obviously, extremely illegal. When the undergrounds became militias in sort of 1942, she was one of the first people to smuggle guns into the Warsaw ghetto. She smuggled them in a sack of potatoes, two guns under the potatoes. And these women, they used to, as you were saying, they used their feminine wiles to, one of them, she's famous for, she would have a bag full of contraband, full of ammunition, and she would ask the Gestapo men to carry it for her. Because that was, they had this kind of extreme confidence that really threw, no one would expect a Jew to do that.

So they would, she would have the bag of guns and instead of risking being searched, be like, oh, this is so heavy. Can you take my luggage? Of course they did. That's brilliant. That's brilliant. They carry it right across for you to the security.

Yes. I love the snippets. Yeah. There was something you were calling back to. You wanted to remember a story or something. I don't know if you wanted to hit that one. I think I was just going to say that. Oh, this was, I was just interested in Poland in the 1930s and how women, as you were saying,

I have a PhD in women's art history. And I always had this impression of like feminism. I started like in California in the 60s and bell bottoms. But actually 1930s Poland was so interestingly progressive by our standards. Women, mandatory education, they worked, they married later in life, they went to university, the fashion, amazing. It's all these short bob cuts and hair barats and low-heeled shoes. And the skirts were lifted way up. And the satirist at the time was always saying, oh, you could see the whole shoe and ankle. Women had, they dressed in these fitted blazers and even there was, I have images of some of them wearing ties and vests.

They were, they could move, they could run. They were educated. The little Nyusha who, little Wanda with the braids who I'm telling you about who shot, she had a degree in history from Warsaw University. These women were really, they were educated, many of them. And, and yeah, that's what I just wanted to talk about how interesting they came from a world where women, where women had, had more, more liberty than I think I imagined before doing this project. There you go. I think in the, I'm bad on history, but I think the twenties and thirties to the suffrage for vote for voting rights for women started didn't it too yeah and poland women had the vote in 1918 it's really before many western countries that yeah that's what i was trying yeah america so far behind always and yet we think we're

the greatest we're in the country in the world we've we have very few moments of that so this is really interesting there was one story that i thought was interesting that I just heard a snippet of in one of your interviews. And it was a story of a young lady who she collected. Oh crap. It's gone on me, but she, she blew up one of the crematoriums that they, it was. Oh yeah. Sorry. You're asking me like who these stories, there's so many, I like find it hard to even pick which ones to tell you. I might now I have 20 more to tell you. Okay, so this was a story, this is a side story in the book about a group of 30 women at Auschwitz, Jewish women, who stole, they were forced, at Birkenau, they did forced labor, slave labor, to work in a German weapons plant, a factory. And there were a number of undergrounds working, operating at Auschwitz,

and a plan was constructed among a number of groups to blow up a crematorium. And it was these Jewish women who worked in this factory who were given the task to get the gunpowder to do this. So the women that worked in the powder pressing room would put a little bit in a waste container. Other Jewish women would come collect it. They would go to the bathroom. It was tiny bits. They would wrap it in fabric that they had traded or ripped off from whatever clothes they had. They would hide it.

And there were layers that they would pass it on to someone else who would pass it on to someone else. And they would then smuggle it in fake bottoms of food trays or bowls, or sewn into the like the hems of work aprons to get it to the man side of the camp so that the men could blow up a crematorium, which they did. Wow. And so this was an organized effort among quite a large group of teenage Jewish women that like, how did I not hear of this? I love it. I love these stories of a triumph in the most hardest of times. I would have trouble just surviving one of these things because I just fall into deep depression and probably be one of the first people lost. But the beauty of these stories of where people are taking the most dire situations,

the most repressive situations, the most horrific situations, and the triumph of human spirit and will still trying to survive, still trying to make a difference is huge. Were you able to interview people that were still alive and tell us some of those stories, if you would, or at least the interviews? So by the time I really, I found this book a long time ago, but I didn't start working on it in this form until later on. So by the time I did that, most of these women were no longer alive. One or two were, and I did try to interview them, but they weren't really cognitively able. They're about a hundred now. They were all born in the teens and twenties. I wasn't able to really get a nuanced

interview, but I did speak to many of their families, about 20 different families and learned about, I was so fat. The whole end of section of the book is about what happened to, for the women that survived, what happened to them after the war? How did they go on and live? I was extremely interested in this. How did someone who had fought the Nazis like this gone on to have a regular life? So I met with many families to hear, and this was very different for different people. Yeah. I thought it was really cool. A large part of the end of the book is the notes in bibliography of a lot of your study and references and stuff. And it's quite interesting to read through because it tells where you pulled the data from and everything.

I have 900 footnotes. 900 footnotes. It took me six weeks full time just to edit them. Wow. Like just to edit the language it was so well i'm glad it's finally seen the light of day difficult yes difficult difficult i'll say that i'll say that word yes maybe it can be a trilogy if spielberg brings it to movie who would you like to see play the parts in the movie oh my goodness do you have any uh i don't know some authors get

like a thing some don't these women were really young so it's it would have to be i would pay to see it i'd pay to see this as a tarantino movie too i love tarantino i don't know it's inglorious bastards was awesome i thought that was awesome i think there's another movie that you did that was awesome too that dealt with the jews and nazis or maybe i'm thinking another movie but i'd pay to see their movie what spielberg did with schindler's list was just beautiful just extraordinary story and no one had really ever heard those stories but these stories need to be told especially i think let me ask you this i'll frame it this way do you think it's really important because it seems like this newer generation a lot of people nowadays you see

this holocaust either denial or Holocaust, they don't even know it took place. Like these people haven't learned history. Somehow this has gotten lost in school. Do you think this gives this story more resonance and importance to remind people of the horrors of what took place in World War II? I hope so. And it was very important for me in writing a book about resistance in World War II to also describe World War II. And because I understood that perhaps a large portion of my audience or readers don't know what Auschwitz was. I needed in the book to, it was very important for me to not make it seem like it was not that bad or too easy, you know, because I'm talking about people that thought back.

But it was also I needed to explain the atrocities and the torture and the difficulty. So that's there. And yes, I do hope people take from this both the history of what happened in the war and also the hope that, as you say, even against all odds, in the war and also the hope that as you say even against all odds in the most horrific and torturous circumstances people came together to fight for what they felt was fair and just and and for their freedom and for our freedom yeah and it just the stories of people going back and going back behind enemy lines is extraordinary like most people today and i don't know if most people do that but most people today

would probably just be i'm gonna i'm gonna retweet a hashtag about this is bad these people were like we're going behind enemy lines we're probably gonna die but this is where they're worth the effort they all thought they were going to die in fact, this was a problem in some of the big underground efforts that they didn't plan to live. So they would go through these, especially in the Warsaw Ghetto, they really did well. They survived the attacks. They shot the Nazis. They did it, but they didn't even have bunkers to go to because they didn't expect to live. They did better than they thought, way better. And that was like one of the problems in the underground. I think that's what makes these stories really compelling. You're going on a suicide mission. That's some bravery of an upper level that I'm not even sure I have that sort of moxie.

There's one story that you had that I had heard in one of your interviews where one of the women is laughing. I think she killed some Nazis and she's just laughing at him as they put her on the firing line i think not sure which one that is but you have to read the book to find out i even have to read the book to find out i thought i'd heard that on an interview but it was from last year so maybe it didn't make the cut or something's Things change now. But laughing was very important. This was part of the disguise. They had to look not Jewish,

which meant not sad and not scared. It didn't just mean having blonde hair. It also meant they literally were trained in how to laugh. They worked on that. They would have to walk down. They pretended they were women going for a day of theater.

Like that was part of the performance too. And the blonde hair, they would dye their hair with blonde to fit in and not look Jewish. And so I think this is extraordinary. The fight to survive, to get together. We even named one of our podcasts during the last four years of oppression, the resistance radio. And as a homage to the French resistance, and I imagine the Polish resistance and everything else.

But it was interesting to me how people bound together, how they fought together, how they stood up against what seemed at the time just a monster enemy from so many different fronts and the atrocity and i'm reading the book cast right now and and reading the parallels that she talks about the nazis of course the dehumanization and just the horrors of that war there were nazi neighborhoods that would just have ash falling into them and they'd just be like what's going on over there they knew full well what was happening sometimes the ash fell so bad they wouldn't let the uh their kids go out that day and they're like that's a big ash day it was just the monster horrific inhumane there's not even almost a word worse enough to describe it that went on and these people you write about your book they are doing everything they can in their power to survive save people save lives save each other fight against these this evil that's just monstrous.

I was just going to say, I don't think you have the latest copy of the book, but the book has photographs in it. And one of the photos I found, I loved doing the photo research. I went through thousands of photographs. And one of them that I included is a photo of a fun fair right outside the Warsaw Ghetto, right next to the warsaw ghetto so it's like a carnival that the nazis are having or the germans are having yeah polish german wow it's just it's extraordinary because i've heard people say oh the germans didn't know what was going on no they knew they freaking knew they and because of the dehumination of fascism and other things that gets done there they knew and they're fine with it because they didn't see people as real human beings and that's why these stories are important it's because they highlight how

human these people were and triumphant this story is a triumph trauma to triumph rising from the ashes all that sort of stuff and the fight of the jewish people wait this i don't even know how this generation whatever this young youthful generation that doesn't know the holocaust got through school i have no idea how that happened but it really needs to be fixed and more stories like this need to be told and stuff do you you put together a lot of stuff and it's a huge tome do you still have more stories to tell or do you see a second book coming from this or are you going to move on to other projects when you're done with this? Since this project has become more, first of all, it's a huge tome and the first draft was double the length. So there's plenty that's not in there.

And since there started to be more publicity around the project, my inbox is filled with emails from people saying my aunt was also a courier in the resistance. Can I send you the family research I did? My cousin saved people in the Bialystok ghetto. Can you help me find out more about her? My great-grandmother, all day. So I'm right now thinking about, how can I archive all this material? There are more stories than I could ever have imagined. And they're still coming. They're like even now

coming even more now that this project is public. There are so many stories out there about women who were in the resistance and in the underground. I do not think I will be writing another book about this. This was very hard. It was hard intellectually. It was hard practically. It was very hard emotionally to work on this, which is partially why it took me so long. It took me until a bit later in life to really be able to sit with these

memoirs and testimonies all day. So even if I do write about this again, I need a little break from it. A little vacation in between. A little bit of humor writing, maybe. There you go. Now, I know there's a giant library, and I forget the name off the top of my head, so my apologies to everyone. But I think it's the holocaust survivors library or the

jewish there's a library that keeps all these stories inside of it are these stories being submitted to them are they being tracked or put in there are they already in there um there are a number of libraries and archives around the world that that have testimony and i drew on their resources i mean i traveled and went to a lot of libraries and archives looking for these stories. And yes, now there are more stories coming through. Yeah. Yeah. It would be great if that all could be documented and stored and resourced and just not lost in the history of people's life stories and their minds and everything else. Anything more we haven't touched on the book that you'd like to plug in and entice people to order up the book

jewish women shooting nazis in the head working out yeah yeah i you know my main character oh here she was caught she was caught and she was but they didn't think she was jewish because she observed it so well so she was caught they thought she was a polish catholic spy and she was put in a gestapo political prison and brutally tortured as a pole not as a jew and she escaped ah and it's an incredible tale of escape so i don't even that's i'll leave it there there you go a teaser you gotta find out a don't even, that's, I'll leave it there. There you go. A teaser. How do you escape a Gestapo political prison? That's the kind of people that I write about. Hell has no fury is a woman tortured in a gulag and then escapes. That's gotta be payback time. There

you go. Judy, it was wonderful to have you on the show. I think this is an important book on the show. We place a lot of importance on social justice, women's and different race class issues, trying to shine a light on all these different things. So this is an important interview for me and hopefully my audience to listen to, read about, share, order up the book, let people know because we need to pass around. I was just, I'm still aghast to this day. I'm like, people don't know what happened during the Holocaustust of this new generation like they need to go back to school i i should also mention there is a children's version of the book coming out too next week it's a young readers edition so it's at geared at ages sort of 10 to to 15 10 to 15 so good this should be taught to young people. The triumph of the human spirit is always such a beautiful story.

Sadly, we have to go through these horrible acts to see that or highlight it. But hopefully this becomes a beautiful film. The whole epic story gets told and people share it out. And just the book sells like pancakes or hotcakes. So thank you very much, Judy, for spending your time and sharing this beautiful book with us. Thank you for asking such good questions. I try. Thank you. Give us your dot coms where people can get to know you better, follow you more and find out more about what you're doing and then order up the book. Yeah, I'm at www.judybattalion.com. And again, on Twitter at Judy Battalion and Instagram at Judy Battalion. And on Facebook, it's Judy Battalion Author. There you go, guys. Follow her up, order the

book, go to your local bookstore, support those folks because coronavirus has definitely been a pain for them. And so we wanted them to survive. You can also record her on the Chris Voss Show website. There'll be a link you can take and click to order up the book on Amazon. The Light of Days, the untold story of women resistance fighters in Hitler's ghettos. This is going to be out on April 6th. You can preorder it now in all the different formats. And then you can be one of the first people to tell them you read the book. Option by Steven Spielberg. You want to get the jump on this before it hits your movie

theater because the book is always better than the movie no slight to mr spielberg but the books it's got all the great stories in it thanks to my honest for tuning in to see the video version let's go to youtube.com for chest chris foss hit that bell notification button also go to goodreads.com for chest chris foss all the different groups we have on facebook linkedin and instagram thanks for tuning in wear your mask stay safe and we'll see you next time