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| In the photograph from the Ha-Shomer Ha-Tzair seminar in Michalin, a young girl with an oblong face sits on the ground to the left of Janusz Korczak (here in the left corner). This is Chajka Klinger—one of the most important heroines of the Jewish resistance movement in Poland during World War II. |
Condemned to Life: Chajka Klinger, Co-founder and Leader of the Jewish Fighting Organization (ŻOB) in Będzin.
In the photograph from the Ha-Shomer Ha-Tzair seminar in Michalin, a young girl with an oblong face sits on the ground to the left of Janusz Korczak. This is Chajka Klinger—one of the most important heroines of the Jewish resistance movement in Poland during World War II. It is extraordinary that this single photograph captured not only Klinger and Korczak, but also two other young women who were later recognized as legendary heroes: Tosia Altman, who became a key courier and hero of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and Chajka Grossman, a leader of the Białystok Ghetto Uprising and later a member of the Knesset. At that moment in Michalin, they were simply students and dreamers; soon, they would become the 'lionesses' of the underground.
Chajka Klinger was a key figure of the underground in the Będzin Ghetto and was the first to deliver written testimonies about the ghetto uprisings (including Warsaw) to Eretz Israel. She was born in Będzin to a poor Hasidic family. Despite a traditional upbringing, she secretly graduated from a modern gymnasium and, in 1934, joined the left-wing Zionist youth movement Ha-Shomer Ha-Tzair. She devoted herself entirely to the organization—becoming an instructor, then an editor of the movement's newspaper, and a member of the leadership. The organization filled the role of a family and became an alternative to her traditional home.
In 1938, Chajka went to Kalisz for hachshara (pioneer training), where she spent a year preparing for emigration to Palestine to join Kibbutz Galon. She and her fiancé, Dawid Kozłowski, had their departure scheduled for September 5, 1939.
Mordechai Anielewicz secretly arrived in Będzin from Warsaw and shared information with the shomerim (members) about the approaching Holocaust. He proposed that the youth participate in the Jewish conspiracy. Chajka was enchanted by Anielewicz and the idea of struggle. She would later write:
'We do not want to defend ourselves, for we cannot—but to die with dignity, as humans. (...) No revolutionary movement, let alone a youth movement, has ever faced such problems as we have—faced with death. We stood face to face with it and found an answer. (...) Guerrilla warfare and defense.' 'The Jewish Fighting Organization (ŻOB) was created. It was built on principles quite different from educational organizations like Ha-Shomer Ha-Tzair; here, iron-clad, hard discipline and military efficiency prevailed.'
During the occupation, she was one of the founders and leaders of the ŻOB in Będzin. She organized self-defense, acquired weapons, and prepared bunkers for the fighters.
She was 'Condemned to Life' because, during the liquidation of the ghetto, her comrades decided that Chajka must survive to tell the world about their struggle and the fate of the Jews in Poland. During the final liquidation of the Będzin Ghetto (August 1943), Chajka was hiding in a bunker. She was captured with a weapon in her hand and subjected to brutal torture by the Gestapo. Battered and wounded, she was sent to the barracks of the transit camp (Umschlagplatz), from where Jews were loaded into cattle cars destined for Auschwitz. Because she was briefly assigned to a group cleaning the ghetto area, she managed to slip away unnoticed and escape to the 'Aryan side.' For about four months, she hid with Polish families—the Kobylecs and the Banasiks—in Michałkowice and Dąbrówka Małej, where she wrote down her testimony of the Holocaust.
Her harrowing diaries became one of the earliest and most detailed documents of the Jewish resistance. In them, she described, among other things, the attitude of the Judenrats, which she judged very harshly. In 1944, she reached Palestine, where her reports caused a shock. For the rest of her life, she struggled with 'survivor’s trauma' and the guilt of not having died alongside her brothers-in-arms. She committed suicide on April 18, 1958, the eve of the fifteenth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising."
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| Eliazer Geller and Mordechai Anielewicz secretly arrived in Będzin from Warsaw and shared information with the shomerim (members) about the approaching Holocaust. |
