Partisan Women in the Jewish Resistance: A Long History of Fighting Back
- 21 hours ago
- 5 min read
I recently watched Every Day the Impossible: Jewish Women in the Partisans, a documentary narrated by Tovah Feldshuh that tells the stories of Jewish women who survived the Holocaust not as passive victims of history, but as fighters — partisans who took up arms in the forests of Eastern Europe and waged a guerrilla war against the Nazis and their collaborators. Jewish women partisans overcame the dangers they faced both as women and as Jews to become part of the vital infrastructure that sustained partisan movements throughout the war — tending to the sick and wounded, acting as decoys and smugglers, running sabotage missions, and fighting alongside the men. I want to share some of what they said, because I think the story of Jewish resistance deserves to be told as a story of resistance — not only of loss.
It's a long history. From armed revolt against Rome two thousand years ago, to uprisings in the ghettos of Warsaw and Białystok, to the thousands of Jews — men and women — who escaped into the forests to fight back, the instinct to resist has run through Jewish history far longer than the twentieth century. The women whose words follow are part of that lineage, even if their names are far less known than they should be.
"I was born a fighter"
The documentary opens with a woman describing who she was before the war: a girl who played soccer with the boys, who rode a bicycle through the streets in shorts when other Jewish girls didn't dare. Her father used to tell her she was dangerous. In her own words:
"I was born a fighter. I am free. I was always free."
That sense of self — defiant, physical, unwilling to be confined — turns out to matter enormously to what comes next. By the war's end, an estimated 30,000 Jews had escaped ghettos and labor camps to form or join organized armed resistance groups, the partisans. Among them were thousands of women.
The choice to leave
For many women, joining the partisans began with an impossible decision — leaving their families behind, often at a mother's insistence. One woman recalls her mother telling her she had to go into hiding, and her own refusal: if the family was going to face whatever came, she wanted to face it with them. Her mother insisted that at least one of them might survive. Soon after, her mother was killed — and only then did she go to the partisans, not out of hope, but because she had wanted to die alongside her mother and, by chance, hadn't. Survival, for her, wasn't a plan. It was almost an accident she had to learn to live with, and eventually to turn into purpose.
Earning a place
Joining a partisan unit wasn't automatic, even for those who made it to the forest. Commanders wanted fighters who could contribute — and the first questions one group asked a band of new arrivals were blunt: where are your weapons, how many trains have you dynamited? They had neither. What saved them was a single uncle trained as a scout, useful to a unit operating in unfamiliar territory. That was enough to be taken in.
Once inside, the scale of what greeted them was overwhelming — people fully armed, horses and wagons loaded with ammunition, everyone ready to fight. An officer simply asked, in Russian, whether they were ready. The answer was yes, and the response back was "now or never." Despite everything stacked against them, they went.
Women made up nearly 10% of all resistance fighters, and many entered the forest alongside family members — proof that this wasn't a fringe phenomenon, but a real and significant part of the partisan story.
The work of survival — and its dangers
The day-to-day reality of life in the forest camps fell heavily on women. Camp routines could be brutal in their own right: a woman might be given just two hours to fetch water, chop wood, build a fire, and cook and clean for the group — an impossible task without help, and one where failure carried real consequences. Women lived with the constant fear that if they couldn't pull their weight, they would simply be cast out of the unit, back into a forest controlled by the enemy.
The threat of sexual exploitation was also real, and the documentary doesn't look away from it. Men returning from missions sometimes brought back clothing and goods, and some women felt pressure to trade themselves for basic necessities — a dress, a pair of shoes — simply to survive. Women who still had family nearby to provide for them were spared this; many others were not.
At the same time, some units treated this as a matter of discipline and honor rather than something to be tolerated. In one unit, after a partisan raped a Jewish girl, the entire group was assembled in a circle, the offender — a commander — was placed in the center, and he was shot in front of everyone, as an example that this would not be permitted. Other accounts describe relationships built on genuine respect: one man recalled the woman who would become his wife, a fellow partisan he treated, in his words, "like my own sister," in a bond he described as entirely mutual.
Fighters, not victims
What emerges most powerfully from the testimony is the women's own sense of what they were doing — not hiding, not waiting, but fighting. Sabotage missions are described in vivid detail: silently taking out sentries at night, ambushing a base so thoroughly it felt "like an atom bomb erupted," and lying in wait with machine guns as a dynamited train derailed in front of them.
In one striking episode, two women were sent to destroy a small wooden bridge the Germans relied on to move ammunition and supplies between towns. When the local villagers hesitated to provide the kerosene and straw needed to set it ablaze, the women gave them five minutes — and made clear what would happen if they refused. The bridge burned. The commander called it a job well done, and they were decorated for it.
And in moments of direct danger — crossing open railroad tracks under fire from all sides — one woman describes feeling no fear at all, and a clarity about how she wanted to be remembered if it ended badly: not as a victim of antisemitism, but as a fighter who died fighting.
Survival as resistance
Perhaps the most important reframing in the entire documentary is this: that survival itself — not just sabotage, not just combat — was understood by these women as a form of resistance against an enemy whose explicit goal was extermination. Over a year and a half, one woman's group saved roughly 100 people. In her own words:
"I think that's the most important — that's the biggest resistance that we could have done to the Germans: to survive. To have survivors made me feel very good. Made me feel proud of myself."
Why this matters
I'm sharing this because I think we — the Jewish people — carry a long history that includes this kind of courage, and it deserves to be told alongside the history of suffering, not instead of it. These women were soldiers. They blew up trains, burned bridges, carried weapons, and faced down danger from the Nazis and, at times, from within their own ranks — and they did it while also keeping each other, and others, alive.
That's not a story of victimization. That's a story of defiance. And it's a story worth telling — again and again.
Quotes in this post are drawn from Every Day the Impossible: Jewish Women in the Partisans, narrated by Tovah Feldshuh. To learn more about armed Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, visit www.jewishpartisans.org © 2010 The Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation. All Rights Reserved.
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