_Lubetkin_before_WWII.jpg)
"We worked frantically and with
impatience, our hearts filled with prayer. We longed for the hour of revenge,
that it might come soon. And behold, the day came!"
Zivia
Lubetkin, active in Zionist youth movements before the war, was one of the
founders of the ZOB (Jewish Fighting Organization) in Warsaw. At the outbreak of
World War II, she was in eastern Poland, but she returned to Warsaw to
participate in the underground activities there. She was an organizer of the
earliest resistance movements in the Ghetto, and also fought in the first
attempt at armed resistance in the Ghetto in January 1943, as well as the final
revolt of April-May 1943. Several days before the fall of the Ghetto, Lubetkin
and a group of surviving fighters escaped to the "Aryan" side of
Warsaw through the sewer system. Lubetkin stayed in hiding in the Warsaw
underground through the end of the war, and fought in the Polish revolt of
1944. After the war, Lubetkin and her husband, Yitzhak Zuckerman, settled in
Palestine, where she was among the founders of Kibbutz Lohamei ha-Getta'otand Bet Lohamei ha- Getta'ot (Ghetto Fighters Kibbutz and Memorial).
Lubetkin appeared as a compelling witness in the trial of Nazi war criminalAdolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961.
“She
had blazing eyes and a penetrating glance,” recall those who knew Zivia
Lubetkin, adding that she “was simple and direct, demanding the maximum of
others and of herself. For her, thought and action were one.”
Zivia
Lubetkin was born on November 9, 1914 to a well-to-do, traditional Jewish
family in the town of Beten in eastern Poland. During the
Holocaust Zivia’s parents went into hiding but were discovered in 1942 and shot
on the spot. Zivia was one of seven children born to her parents - four of her siblings died in the Holocaust.
Zivia
Lubetkin studied at a Polish government school and received education in Hebrew
from private tutors. From early childhood she was a member of the Zionist-Socialist
youth movement Freiheit (Freedom), which sent her to the Kielce kibbutz. There, together with other young
people, she studied and worked (in the bakery, the laundry, the latrines and in
the fields). She answered the call to work for He-Halutz in Warsaw,
where she was appointed coordinator of the training department and travelled
from place to place, teaching and offering encouragement.
After spending her youth as an active participant in Zionist youth movements and representing those movements at conferences she began to assume leadership positions. After the Nazi invasion of Poland, Lubetkin found herself in Soviet-controlled Lvov where she became active in underground activities.
She was one of the pioneer group that left the Russian-controlled area for German-occupied Poland. In January 1940 she reached Warsaw and continued her
underground activity in the Dror house at 34 Dzielna Street, which served as a
support and information center for the members of Dror and Gordonia, and also
as a public kitchen. In the ghetto Lubetkin was responsible for the
organizational system and communications with the outside. She negotiated with
the Joint Distribution Committee and the Judenrat for funds for the everyday
needs of the movement members and their dependents. Within the movement, she
was a decision-maker at critical moments. When the situation in Lodz
deteriorated, she demanded that the women members who remained there be
evacuated so as not to endanger their lives. She also took an active part in
the discussions on establishing agricultural farms that would provide members
with work, an income and a social milieu as well as some distancing from the
degradation of ghetto life.
In
autumn 1941, Lubetkin’s attitude towards the Jewish condition in Europe crystallized. Realizing the extent of the annihilation, she decided to
resist. “After we heard about Vilna on the one hand and about Chelmno on the
other, we realized this was indeed systematic. … We stopped our cultural
activities … and all our work was now dedicated to active defense,” she
testified at the trial of Adolf Eichmann (1960–1962).
During
the aktions and the killing she was among the founders of the
anti-Fascist bloc, the first organization in the Warsaw Ghetto to engage in
armed combat against the Germans. On July 28, 1942, during the mass deportation
from Warsaw, she was among the founders of the Jewish Fighting Organization(Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ZOB), a member of its command and among those
who planned its organization. She was also a member of the Jewish National
Committee (Zydowski Komitet Narodowy), the ZOB’s political leadership, as well
as a member of the Jewish Coordination Committee (the committee that
coordinated with the Bund). Lubetkin participated in the ZOB’s first resistance
operation in January 1943 and in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April 1943.
After
the first days of fighting during the April 1943 uprising, the fighters
were trapped in the bombed and burning ghetto. During this period Lubetkin served as a liaison to the groups of
fighters who, together with the general population, had dug into the bunkers;
she went between the various bunkers and maintained communication between the
leadership of the rebellion and the fighters who remained in the burning
ghetto. The day before they were discovered by the Germans, the ZOB command,
located at 18 Mila Street, decided that Lubetkin should set out in order to
find a connection to the outside via the sewage tunnels that led to the Aryan
side. On May 10, 1943 she went through the sewers with the last of the
fighters. To the end of her days she was haunted by the thought that she had
abandoned her remaining friends to certain death. Until the end of the war she
hid in Polish Warsaw, serving in the underground and in the rebellion there
from August to October 1944, part of a ZOB company that joined the fighting
units of the Gwardia Ludowa (the People’s Guard, a Polish underground army
organization). Together with the last of the fighters, she was rescued from a
hideout in November 1944.
She was liberated in Warsaw in January 1945, together with Yizhak
(Antek) Cukierman (Zuckerman, 1915–1981). Among the strongest advocates for
revival of the movement and its rapid transfer to Palestine, she searched for
every Jew, meeting the trains carrying returnees upon their arrival from the
Soviet Union and establishing kibbutzim
and training places. “However, apart from all the different approaches, we were
all aware of one thing: we could not rebuild our ruined lives in Poland. … We
saw before us tens of thousand of Jews and knew that the only solution for them
was to get them out to Erez Israel immediately” (The Last Ones on the
Wall).
On
learning that there were fifteen thousand Jews in Lublin, she and Zuckerman moved there, meeting the surviving members of the pioneering group who had
gathered with Abba Kovner (1918–1987). Kovner presented his vision of a
great exodus from Europe, and Lubetkin decided to emigrate to Palestine as
quickly as possible. On March 1, 1945, equipped with a Greek refugee
certificate, she left Lublin together with Kovner and the members of his group
on the way to Romania. They were stopped at the border, arrested, questioned
and released by a Jewish NKVD officer. When they reached Bucharest, they
learned that the way to Palestine from Romania was blocked. Lubetkin returned
to Warsaw and was forced to wait more than a year to reach Palestine.
While waiting to emigrate Lubetkin worked with fellow survivors to create the frameworks of Youth Aliya to rehabilitate survivors
and absorb those who came from the Soviet Union, their intention being to
ensure the political unification of the entire pioneer community. As
in the past, she was an important support for the members of the emerging group
of young trainers and emissaries, who described her and
Zuckerman as the “spiritual leaders of the survivors.”
She left
Poland in May 1946, traveling via Alexandria and in June arrived in Palestine where members of the Labor Movement, the Haganah, the Palmahand colleagues gave her an extraordinary reception. The
couple did not know which kibbutz to choose as their new home. Zivia went to Yagur and
it is possible to perceive her arrival there as the start of the social group
of ghetto fighters. The first core group that later became Kibbutz Lohamei
ha-Getta’ot (the Ghetto Fighters Kibbutz) formed in Yagur at Lubetkin’s
initiative and through her energetic efforts. Alone or in small groups,
survivors came to Yagur and gathered around her. In June 1947 this group,
together with Lubetkin and Zuckerman (who were married that year), comprised
fifty-two members, who together with “the core group in memory of the ghetto
fighters,” numbered one hundred and forty. On April 19, 1949 the establishment
of Kibbutz Lohamei ha-Getta’ot was announced. The
groundbreaking ceremony took place on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto
Uprising.
Lubetkin and Zuckerman built their home and raised their family at Kibbutz Lohamei
ha-Getta’ot. Lubetkin attended the Zionist
Congress in Basel in 1946 as a representative of the United Kibbutz Movement.
As she stepped onto the podium, the Congress rose to its feet to cheer the
pioneer and fighter. She was embarrassed, but also deeply disappointed that the
Congress discussions did not relate at all to the Holocaust apart from a
ceremony devoid of any representative of the ghetto fighters.
Lubetkin
became an emissary of the movement and was later active in the secretariat of
the United Kibbutz Movement, the Histadrut and the Zionist Organization. She
combined manual labor on the kibbutz with public activity. Although she was one
of the founders of the Itzhak Katzenelson House of Testimony on the Holocaust
and Rebellion, she chose not to occupy herself with memorializing and
documenting. She likewise chose not to be a public figure. She lived as an ordinary member of her
kibbutz home until her death on July 11, 1978, at age sixty-four. Her children,
Shimon (b. 1947) and Yael (b. 1949), were born in Kibbutz Lohamei
ha-Getta’ot, where they still live.
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