Escape from the Pit: A Woman’s Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Poland, 1939–1943

Renia Kukielka’s memoir, first published in Hebrew in 1944, is one of the earliest firsthand accounts of the Holocaust, written when she was just nineteen. She tells the gripping story of her years living in disguise as a Polish Catholic and her work as a courier for the Zionist underground, smuggling weapons and messages between ghettos. After being captured and tortured by the Gestapo, she managed a daring escape and fled to British Mandate Palestine. Her memoir offers a rare female perspective on resistance during the Holocaust and sheds light on what was known about Nazi atrocities while the war was still ongoing.