Document 26 A youth movement member becomes an underground courier
Bronia Klibariski, who recorded the oral histories from which this text is composed, was a member of the Zionist youth movement Dror. Once she joined the Jewish underground in her home town of Grodno, she obtained a false identity card as a Pole named Jadwiga Szkibel. Under this assumed identity she was able to carry news between ghettos. The text is a composite of two testimonies given during the 1990s.
In January 1942, Mordechai Tenenbaum came to Grodno from Wilno, where he had experienced the mass killing of Jews. He was one of the most important organizers of the Jewish underground and Jewish fighters in the ghettos in Poland. At that time life in the Grodno ghetto was very difficult, but there was no killing. Mordechai told us what had happened in Wilno. I think he was one of the first and the very few who understood that the mass killing of Jews from Wilno was not just a caprice of the Germans but part of a general German policy to kill Jews ...
After a month, another girl from our movement came to me in the ghetto in Grodno and informed me that I had to go to Bialystok to attend a gathering of the members of our organization ... My problem was how to leave the Grodno ghetto and how to come back in, since I had no papers. But I was lucky to have a very not-Jewish face. I went out of the ghetto by some hole in the wall and I went to the train station. Of course it was dangerous because there were many non-Jewish people who knew me. But even Polish people had to have permission to buy a train ticket. Of course I had no permission. And I didn’t know exactly how to buy a ticket without permission. Then I saw a German at the station. I went to him and I smiled nicely and I asked him if he could buy me a ticket to Bialystok.
He said, ‘All right’. So I gave him the money and he bought me the ticket...
After the meeting I returned to Grodno. Later I was asked to go to Bialystok and stay there. When I left I didn’t know I was leaving my family forever. I didn’t tell them where I was going because it was a secret...
This time I went with a boy, a member of our organization. We traveled on foot and sometime by horse cart. On the way from Grodno to Bialystok we passed different villages where there were ghettos. One was even a labor camp. We visited them to meet members of our organization. But it was more to support our members and tell them ... they must not be passive. They had to do something. Maybe they had to fight...
One day Mordechai Tenenbaum suggested that I cross to the Aryan side to serve as a liaison officer for the movement. In late 1942 only one liaison officer, Tema Shneiderman, remained alive. Other experienced officers had been caught by the Germans, and I was to replace them. At that time, the Polish population of Bialystok was ordered to apply for German identity cards. I did so, too, using a forged birth certificate as proof that I was a Christian. I had to leave the ghetto frequently to carry out each stage of these arrangements ...
It was dangerous to cross to the Aryan side. I was to leave the ghetto early in the morning with a group of Jewish laborers. Then I would swiftly take off my yellow stars and would leave the group at a suitable moment... Each step had risks: I could be caught leaving the ghetto; the Germans might discover that I was Jewish or that my birth certificate was forged. But luck was with me ... On the Aryan side, Tema Schneiderman helped me find a room and a job as a maid in the apartment of three German railroad operators. I later used their help when I rode the trains to purchase arms and deliver them to Bialystok ... This, my main task, was the most dangerous of all...
On my very first day on the Aryan side, the fact that I was living alone, which was not customary for a young woman of my age at that time, naturally provoked my neighbors’ suspicions that I was Jewish ... [T]o this day I am puzzled about how I managed ... to avoid arrest ... Because of my reserved, polite, and detached demeanor, the Poles perceived me as a girl of fine upbringing who did not fear to speak her mind. This image, my non-Jewish appearance, and my knowledge of Polish permitted me to survive and act as I did ...
We lost several brave women; one tragedy occurred when several veteran couriers and liaisons were stopped at the checkpoint between Bialystok and Warsaw and were caught with money that had been given them for delivery to the underground ... Others, such as Tema Shneiderman, were killed in resistance operations in the ghetto.
(Mais, 2007: 74-76; Ofer and Weitzman, 1998: 180-182)
