Resistance

Content Warning: This section mentions and describes wartime violence, death, antisemitism, and the Holocaust.

On October 5, 1942, 16-year-old Chaya Lindner flirts with a Nazi officer outside the Tarnow Ghetto in Southern Poland and manages to make her way inside. She works as a courier, and her job is to break into the ghettos and bring supplies to the Jews trapped inside. Chaya carries forged papers identifying her as “Helena Nowak”; with her looks and Polish-accented German, she can pass as a Polish gentile. Chaya pretends to be selling the shawls from the top of her bag, which in actuality conceal an illicit stash of potatoes. Once inside, she distributes the potatoes amongst the ghetto’s children and looks for her contact to complete the next part of her mission.

Chaya recalls her life and the incidents that took place between September 1, 1939, and April 22, 1941. During this time, Chaya lived in Krakow with her family: her parents, her younger brother (Yitzchak), and her younger sister (Sara). On Chaya’s 13th birthday, Germany attacked Poland and changed the capital from Warsaw to Krakow. With the occupation came new rules, beginning with the mandatory registration of all Jews, which facilitated their relocation to isolated ghettos.