During the German occupation, teenager Lodzia Hamersztajn and her family were imprisoned in the Warsaw ghetto. Her father and grandmother slowly died of starvation. As life grew more difficult, Lodzia escaped the ghetto by jumping on a streetcar. Then she was alone, hiding her Jewish identity, while working in a German military hospital.
“It’s a terrible feeling,” Lodzia recalled much later. “There is nobody you can go to ask for help. … You had to make life-threatening decisions all by yourself.”
Lodzia’s life changed when she became a courier. Now hiding both her identity and her activities, Lodzia secretly shuttled messages, food, and even people between ghettos, camps, and the forest. She was still in grave danger, but “felt needed.”
The new role did wonders for her psyche, she said. “You know what it meant to come to a hiding place where people, Jewish people, were treated like they were reduced to a status of pets and to bring them food, money, medicine, sometimes a newspaper. It was a feeling that you are really doing something good.”
Many of the couriers in Nazi-occupied Poland were young Jewish women who could blend in with the non-Jews around them, think on their feet, and decide who could be trusted.
In this video feature, one survivor shares what it was like to be a courier. >>
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