 Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book by an incarcerated or formerly incarcerated author.
Escape From the Pit: A Woman's Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Poland, 1939-1943, by Renia Kukielka I first learned about Renia Kukielka when reading The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler's Ghettos. She was just 15 when the Nazis invaded Poland, and she gives an up-close account of the net rapidly tightening around Jews there: being forced into smaller and smaller spaces, forced labor, "deportations," the gleeful violence of Nazis and complicity of many Polish gentiles. Bribery became a way of life for basic necessities. Soon Renia was living underground, in attics, basements, and makeshift bunkers. She began working with a resistance group that was about a third women. She could pass for a gentile, and she worked as a courier, smuggling messages, money, forged documents, and occasionally weapons. At one point she was caught with false papers and tortured, but was rescued by her sister and another woman resister. The most terrifying part of the book was not the Nazi prison, but the way so many of her fellow Poles cooperated with Nazi attacks on Jews, whether in hopes of looting their belongings, or just out of anti-Semitism. Other Polish resistance groups refused to work with Jewish resisters. And there were the hated "Jewish Councils" who rounded up other Jews for deportation, in the vain hope of saving themselves. So much of survival was luck. Renia escaped the country and lived to be 90. Her sister, scheduled to leave with the next group, was caught and killed. Escape From the Pit, Renia's memoir, was published in 1944, when the world was first facing the horrors of the Holocaust. In yet another twist of fate, the book was the reason that her two surviving brothers (out of 7 siblings) found out she was still alive, and were able to reunite with her.
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