"We suffered losses in those situations, and so I gave orders not to take girls prisoner, not to let them get too close, but to finish them off with submachine guns from a distance."
Other Jewish Female Resistance Activities Because of their gender and ability to camouflage their Jewishness, women were uniquely suited to engage in important and life-threatening tasks such as couriers. As fighter Chaika Grossman said: "The Jewish girls were the nerve-centers of the movement." Historian Emanuel Ringelblum, a Warsaw Ghetto chronicler, wrote about the Jewish courier girls at the time: "Without a murmur, without a second’s hesitation, they accept and carry out the most dangerous missions. How many times have they looked death in the eyes? The story of the Jewish woman will be a glorious page in the history of Jewry during the present war." The courier girls’ psychological skills were especially important in the most dangerous task of smuggling weapons and ammunition to ghettos and camps. For example, Jewish courier Bronka Klibanski was smuggling a revolver and two hand grenades inside a loaf of country bread in her suitcase. A German policeman at the train station asked her what she was carrying. She managed to avoid having to open her bag by “confessing” that she was smuggling food. Klibanski’s “honest confession” evoked a protective response from the policeman, who instructed the train conductor to make sure no one bothered her or her suitcase.[11]
Jewish courier Hela Schüpper, who was sent to Warsaw to buy guns, knew she would be spending 20 hours undercover on trains. She dressed stylishly so that she looked like she was on her way to an afternoon at the theater. Schüpper flirted shamelessly on the train, flashing her provocative smile, giving the impression that she might be going on a vacation. Instead, she met a People’s Army contact at the gate of a clinic. Schüpper received five weapons, four pounds of explosives, and clips of cartridges. These weapons were later used against German forces.[12] Jewish courier Chasia Bielicka worked with 18 other Jewish girls in Bialystok to arm the local resistance. They leased rooms from Polish peasants and held day jobs in German homes, hotels and restaurants. While working as a maid for an SS man who had an armoire filled with handguns, Bielicka periodically grabbed a few bullets and dropped them into her coat pocket. The courier girls passed machine-gun bullets and other ammo to the ghetto through the window of a latrine that bordered the ghetto wall. This courier ring continued to supply intelligence and arms to numerous partisans after the Bialystok Ghetto’s liquidation.[13]
Soviet Jewish Partisans Partisan warfare has traditionally been considered illegal, since it undermines the convention of uniformed armies directing violence against each other rather than against civilian populations. Soviet partisan warfare was extremely brutal and capable of severely disrupting German military planning. Because German forces were always limited and always in demand at the front, German military and civilian authorities were all the more fearful of the disruption partisans could bring. Consequently, German army officers were trained to take a severe line against partisan activity in the Soviet Union.[14] The combat of Soviet partisans in forests and swamps was regarded by German troops as the most dangerous of all types of warfare—favoring the hunted rather than the hunter. The partisans almost always killed captured German soldiers, frequently after inflicting brutal torture. The German anti-partisan forces operated in an extremely unpleasant environment that made the German units resent the partisans whose activities had caused them to be there. In summer huge swarms of flies and mosquitos made life miserable; in winter frostbite and trench foot were rampant.[15] Letters from German soldiers reveal the danger of partisan warfare. [continued]
