The Women Who Fought Their Fate

PARTIZANKAS

PARTIZANKAS: Jewish and Christian Women Who Resisted the Holocaust

Coming 2027 Wicked Son Publishing
Black-and-white photograph of a woman partisan in a quilted jacket and fur cap, aiming a scoped rifle in a forest
About the book

They Stood in Defiance

Many know that Nazis and their collaborators murdered six million Jews. Many believe Jews did not resist. PARTIZANKAS: Jewish and Christian Women Who Resisted the Holocaust refutes and disproves this antisemitic lie.

PARTIZANKAS is based on never-before translated Yiddish memoirs, diaries, and interviews about Jewish women and girls who resisted the Nazis in the ghettos, forests, and camps, and the Christian women who helped them. These women had nothing more than a few home-made explosives, antiquated weapons, guile, and guts. PARTIZANKAS depicts the actions of these female resistance fighters, from Niuta Teitelbaum, a Hasidic girl of 21 who turned herself into an assassin of Nazis with a bounty on her head, to Hadasa Prives, a middle-aged pious mother of two, who defied the Nazis from the moment she and her teenage daughter entered the hell of Auschwitz.

  • fought
  • fed
  • hid
  • warned
  • forged
  • carried
  • refused
Pre-publication praise

Early readers

“Deborah Green has authored a marvel of absolute and profound truths… Green, a native Yiddish-speaker, the daughter of people who lived harrowing tales to survive the Holocaust, and a four-decade-long highly successful attorney, is ideally and uniquely suited to tell these stories.

“The absolute truths in this book—the war, ghettos, partisan forests—are not yours nor mine, and we’re fortunate for that. But believe me, everything else here, wicked and good, is ours. It is terrible, even as it is hopeful, to tell you that the women in Deborah Green’s PARTIZANKAS: Jewish and Christian Women who Resisted the Holocaust, are, and always have been, you and me. Don’t look away.”

David L. Robbins
New York Times Best Selling Author

“Through extensive research and sheer determination, Deborah Green has brought to light the story of women who joined the resistance against the Holocaust. Their stories, both correct the terrible canard that Jews did not resist the Nazis and also lift up the unappreciated contribution of heroic Jewish women in battling against the kingdom of night. This book is an extraordinary achievement.”

Marc Gellman, PhD.
“God Squad” co-founder with the late Monsignor Tom Hartman

“Deborah Green, in this remarkable book, shares with us a largely unknown part of the story of courage, bravery, and heroic resistance to evil by women—heroines who were female role models of unimaginable valor. They surely deserve that their stories be told, and that they ever be remembered.”

Rabbi Benjamin Blech
Professor of Talmud, Yeshiva University
Rabbi Emeritus of Young Israel of Oceanside
Four places

Each tells a different story

  • Vilna

    Yitzhak Wittenberg, Abba Kovner, Vitka Kempner and others formed the first of the Jewish resistance organizations in Vilna. Wittenberg later surrendered his life to save the ghetto from liquidation.

  • Warsaw

    Europe's largest ghetto rose up against the people sent to destroy it. The uprising was not a military victory, but it became a lasting statement of Jewish self-defense, and Yom HaShoah is observed close to its anniversary.

  • Minsk

    Many Jews escaped to the forests, often with help from non-Jewish neighbors and friends. Their help was a choice, made when others chose otherwise.

  • Bialystok

    Mordechai Tenenbaum and his fighters rose in August 1943. The ghetto stands for the hundreds like it across central and eastern Europe, just as these women stand for thousands more.

The author

Deborah A. Green

Deborah A. Green is an author, translator, and presenter, and a native Yiddish speaker. She is the daughter of Holocaust survivors, grew up in Brooklyn attending secular Yiddish schools, and practiced law in New York and Florida before retiring to translate full time.

For decades she has translated Yiddish memorial books and mid-twentieth-century reportage. In the pages of those books she kept finding resistance fighters whose stories English-language histories barely mention. She writes to bring those accounts forward, told by the people who lived them.

She lives in Boca Raton, Florida.

Full biography
Also available

Translation

White Goat Press, July 2024

Journey Through the Spanish Civil War

The Hinterlands by S. L. Shneiderman, translated from the Yiddish with an introduction by Deborah A. Green. Shneiderman, called the first Yiddish war reporter, filed on-the-ground reports from Spain in 1938. This is the first English translation. Kirkus Reviews named it one of the Best Indie History Books of 2024.

“A valuable, intimate narrative of war.”

Kirkus Reviews

“The book makes splendid reading.”

Joe Butwin, Associate Professor Emeritus of English, University of Washington, in The Volunteer

“Her translation is pitch perfect.”

John S., on Amazon
Amazon Yiddish Book Center Kirkus review
In anthologies

Also in print

Bloomsbury Academic, 2022

Jewish Imaginaries of the Spanish Civil War: In Search of Poetic Justice

Edited by Cynthia Gabbay. Includes Deborah A. Green’s translation from the Yiddish of “The Holy War on Fascism.”

Pakn Treger, 2019

Avrom Avinu Receives a Letter and other Yiddish Correspondence

The 2019 Pakn Treger Translation Anthology. Includes Deborah A. Green’s translation from the Yiddish of “Letters from the Spanish Civil War: Selected Letters from Memories of a Botwinist.”