The Underground Army
By Chaika Grossman
Originally published in 1965, Chaika Grossman’s The Underground Army has become a classic of Holocaust testimonials.
Chaika was born in Bialystok, Poland, in 1919, and joined the Hashomar Hatzair Youth movement as a teenager. When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939 and began their brutal persecution of the Jews, she became one of the most prominent and active members of the resistance. Disguised by her Aryan looks and false identification papers, she acted as a delegate between Jewish ghettoes in Lithuania and Poland. She acquired arms for the fighters and when the famous Bialystok Ghetto Uprising took place in 1943 Chaika was there, fighting in the streets. After escaping the battle she organised rescue operations and the transfer of survivors into the surrounding forests. She was just twenty four years old.
The Bialystok Uprising was one of the great acts of resistance by the Jews in the horrific tragedy of the Holocaust. This book is both an important historical record and a dramatic, first-hand account. Chaika Grossman was a heroine, but she downplays her own role, always focused on the suffering of her fellows. Nonetheless, she emerges from the page as an extraordinarily courageous, resilient and brilliant young woman. Her astonishing story is told with clarity and immense sympathy, utterly engrossing and at times heart rending.
After the war Chaika Grossman served on the Central Committee of the Jews of Poland and was awarded Poland’s highest medal for heroism. It is estimated that of almost 60,000 Jews who lived in Bialystok before World War Two, only a few hundred survived the Holocaust.
Praise for The Underground Army:
‘The most heroic chapter in the dark history of the annihilation of European Jewry was written by teenagers with guns. Brave beyond imagination, starving, desperate, childless, parentless, unloved by their countrymen – Chaika Grossman’s The Underground Army is a gripping and richly detailed account of her life as a ghetto courier, organiser and fighter’ – David Samuels, Tablet Magazine, New York
‘The fight of Jewish women, the pre-eminent place of the woman in the ghetto resistance movement, her specific role and her qualities of leadership all come out very clearly. We had to wait a long time before Chaika Grossman’s story was published. Better late than never. It deserves to be read, studied and remembered’ – from the introduction by Yehuda Bauer, Holocaust historian
‘A valuable text, telling the story of a little known resistance group and paying tribute to the courage, inventiveness and stamina of the Bialystok ghetto fighters’ – Publishers Weekly
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