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"The Girl Ban­dits of the War­saw Ghet­to: The True Sto­ry of Five Coura­geous Young Women Who Sparked an Uprising"
Eliz­a­beth R. Hyman
Review By Gila Wertheimer – October 6, 2025

To many, the name Mordechai Anielewicz is syn­ony­mous with the War­saw Ghet­to Upris­ing of 1943. Less well-known, among some 750 ghet­to fight­ers who held out for near­ly a month against the over­whelm­ing Nazi forces were many women who fought — and fell — along­side the men. Their names are scarce­ly invoked or remem­bered. Now, Eliz­a­beth R. Hyman has focused on five of these women to shed new light on the remark­able sto­ry of that resistance.
The women Hyman brings into the fore­ground are Zivia Lubetkin, Adi­na Bla­dy-Schweiger and Vlad­ka Meed, who all sur­vived the war; and Tosia Alt­man and Tema Schnei­der­man, who did not. Oth­er women also fig­ure promi­nent­ly in Hyman’s recount­ing of events.
As they await­ed the Ger­man attack on the ghet­to, Zivia — a leader and part of a group of thir­ty fight­ers — wrote, “A tremor of joy mixed with a shud­der of fear passed through all of us. But we sup­pressed our emo­tions and reached for our guns.” They knew, of course, that they were out­num­bered. Zivia, wrote one of the com­man­ders, Marek Edel­man, “sees her­self as a sim­ple sol­dier, but her author­i­ty among the fight­ing groups is very strong.” It was April 19, 1943, “a love­ly spring day,” observed Edel­man. It was also the start of Passover.
That ini­tial Ger­man attack on the ghet­to and the resis­tance to it had gone on for two hours, when, to the amaze­ment of the ghet­to fight­ers, the Ger­mans retreat­ed, leav­ing not a sin­gle Jew­ish casu­al­ty. “We were stunned and left breath­less by our vic­to­ry,” wrote Zivia. The Ger­mans, alas, would reen­ter the ghet­to — this time with tanks.
The women who par­tic­i­pat­ed in the upris­ing fought in the resis­tance, but they also served as couri­ers; pass­ing as Aryans, they had free­dom of move­ment. As such, not only did they relay infor­ma­tion in and out of the ghet­to, but they also acquired guns and explo­sives, and smug­gled them inside. Their male coun­ter­parts called the women “girls”; the Nazis referred to Jews as ban­diten. Thus does Hyman arrive at her title, fash­ion­ing epi­thets of inequal­i­ty and racism into an appel­la­tion of honor.
With exten­sive use of pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary sources, Hyman has retold this famil­iar sto­ry of resis­tance and upris­ing with an infu­sion of detail and dra­ma. The courage, orga­ni­za­tion, ded­i­ca­tion, and inven­tive­ness of the fea­tured young women, who faced life-and-death sit­u­a­tions on a dai­ly basis, con­tin­ues to amaze.
While the uprising’s end­ing is known, The Girl Ban­dits of the War­saw Ghet­to tells a sto­ry of such hero­ism, and Hyman’s researched por­trait is so cap­ti­vat­ing, that this retold piece of Jew­ish his­to­ry is dif­fi­cult to put down and impos­si­ble to forget.