Gusta Dawidsohn-Draenger

Gusta Dawidsohn-Draenger, whose nom de guerre was “Justyna,” kept a Polish diary in which she documented the saga of the Jewish armed resistance. Born in Kraków to a family of Ger Hasidim, she was a member of the Zionist Akiva youth movement. When World War II broke out, she and her husband, Szymon (Szymek) Draenger, worked underground forging identity documents and publishing Heḥalutz haloḥem, in Polish. Referring to herself in the third person, “Justyna” dictated her diary to her fellow cellmates over a three-month period during her imprisonment in 1943. It was recovered and published after the war.