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Before Tosia Altman became a fighter in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, she was a young Zionist preparing for a different life.
She studied Hebrew. She joined Hashomer Hatzair, the socialist-Zionist youth movement. She trained for agricultural life and hoped to immigrate to Mandatory Palestine, where she could help build a Jewish homeland.
History offered her another path—escape from occupied Poland—and she came close to taking it.
When the Second World War began, Altman reached Vilnius, where some Jewish activists still hoped to find a route out of Europe. She might have continued searching for her own passage to safety.
Instead, she returned to German-occupied Poland.
She understood that the young Jews who had looked to Hashomer Hatzair for instruction, community, and hope were now isolated inside ghettos. Their leaders had to decide whether Zionism was only a plan for a distant future or also a responsibility to Jews facing danger in the present.
Tosia Altman made her choice.
She went back.
