b'BC_5782_2021final_cmyk_Layout 18/8/219:47 AMPage 20Chajka Klinger was born in 1917 in Bedzin. Judy Batalion, in The Light of Days,describes her as brainy and fiery, clever and passionate. Her family was deeplyreligious, but Chajka discovered the secular world on her own, becoming a memberof a group called the Young Guard (and the eventual leader of the local branch). Adevoted Zionist, Chajka had been scheduled to leave for Palestine on September 5,1939, but the German invasion on September 1 put an end to those plans. When the Germans closed all Jewish schools, Chajka and her friends establishedThe cover of the clandestine day care centers and schools. In the first months after the occupation, sheEnglish- helped organize farming activities and celebrations. A leader of the underground, shelanguage edition believed in Jewish revolt, and as a keen observer she kept diaries. She secretly marriedof Chajka her boyfriend, David Kozlowski, who was soon afterward killed by the Germans whileKlingersdiaries, fighting as a partisan in the forest. When the Bedzin ghetto was liquidated, Chajka andpublished in other fighters hid in a bunker in indescribably squalid conditions as Germans dug2017. An earlier around searching for them. Escaping to another bunker, she and her group wereversion, captured. Chajka was tortured and narrowly escaped deportation to Auschwitz. published in1959, was In December 1943, she and other survivors managed to cross to Slovakia. She broughtcensoredbecause it her diaries with her, as she considered it her mission to tell the story of the Jewishcontained views underground. She managed to reach Palestine in March 1944 and remained there thecritical of some rest of her life. She suffered from depression and took her own life in 1958. Her son,of the Jewishleadership in Avihu Ronen, later wrote: The avant-garde must die where its people are dying.Poland and Chajka Klinger repeated this dictum several times in her diaries. For her it was thePalestine. ultimate motive for the ghetto uprising.'