Lisa

“It is deeply troubling to make laws about what historical narratives are allowed to be told—it shows a rulership interested in propaganda, not truth.”
― Judy Batalion, The Light of Days

“On the other hand, the government had just passed a law making it illegal to blame Poland for any crimes committed in the Holocaust, and that doing so could result in incarceration. After decades of Soviet repression and Nazi conquest before that, the Poles were in a new nationalist phase. Their own victim status in WWII was important. The Polish underground was hugely popular; its anchor symbol graffitied across Warsaw buildings. People wore T-shirts with sleeve decorations that mimicked the Resistance armbands.”
― Judy Batalion, The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler's Ghettos

“How do you ruin a people? Is it with fire? Is it with bullets? You can drag a man through the street tied to the back of a horse. You can incinerate a village. Can line families up in rows against a brick wall and fell them, one by one, like a forest. But all it takes is one survivor, and the story lives on. One survivor to carry the poems and the songs, the prayers, the sorrows. It isn’t just taking a life that destroys a people. It’s taking their history.”
― GennaRose Nethercott, Thistlefoot

“The government want to criminalize all abortion and disallow in vitro fertilization because it produced wasted seed...My two companions were outraged at the misogyny, incensed by their government's unjust treatment of women. It sounds like the Poland I write about of the 1930s and 40s was more feminist than now. In some ways, it was.”
― Judy Batalion, The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler's Ghettos