 | By Peter Catapano Senior Staff Editor, Opinion |
I'm not much of fighter. Given the choice, I typically prefer to run away. When I say "I got your back" (which I do pretty often) it means I will use my rhetorical skills to argue strenuously on your behalf. It does not mean I will be throwing a punch. I'm not that guy. |
There are clearly some situations where I would stay and fight. Does Adversary X intend to harm a family member? Check. Is an act of depraved cruelty taking place before my eyes? Check. Is the safety of an infant, a small child or defenseless animal involved? Check. Double check. |
This is not special. Anyone with a conscience has a short list of situations that will flip their switch from flight to fight. But some situations defy our moral logic. War does. Genocide does. |
In a 2016 essay, the philosopher Jason Stanley, reflecting on how World War II shaped his family's view of the world wrote, "my mother's most frequent advice was about knowing when to get out of a dangerous situation. The moment where one must accept that a situation is genuinely dangerous is usually well past the time when one can exit it. Her advice would come out especially during any patriotic moment. She was afraid I would develop an attachment to a country and would not flee early enough." |
Today's essay by Judy Batalion, the author of the forthcoming book "The Light of Days," recounts the story of women Jewish resistance fighters during World War II. It is both a celebration of the fearlessness and daring of the resistors and a reflection on questions of fight and flight at the heart of her own Jewish family history — and now as a mother. |
Batalion's research began in 2007 with the Nazi-fighting Jewish-Hungarian paratrooper Hanna Senesh, who was said to have defiantly looked her killers in their eyes as they shot her. "That tale of audacity was exhilarating to me. I was the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors who had escaped from Poland; in my family, flight meant life." Senesh's story drew her in. "I wanted to grasp what had motivated her boldness," Batalion writes. |
It was the start of a mission to reclaim the stories of dozens of Nazi-fighting women that spanned 12 years and several countries. Accounts of these women who "flung Molotov cocktails, bombed train lines, organized soup kitchens, and were bearers of the truth about what was happening to the Jews," she writes, couldn't have been more different than her own experience, but they were also now part of her legacy as a Jewish woman raising her own children. Their unflappable courage was a lesson to her: "Running is sometimes necessary, but at other times, I can stop and fight, or at least, pause and discuss." |
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