11. From Guerrilla to Mayor
Eta Wrobel helped found an eighty-member Jewish partisan group, and took the fight to the Nazis. She ambushed the occupiers’ supply convoys, mined roads, conducted hit-and-run raids, and otherwise did her best to hurt the Germans. The partisan life was a harsh existence, without adequate shelter, supplies, or medical care. On one occasion, Eta was shot in the leg, but the group’s only doctor was busy taking care of somebody more seriously injured. So Eta extracted the bullet herself: she dug it out of her leg with a knife, then sterilized the wound with vodka.
When the Nazis were forced to retreat in 1944, Eta was asked to become mayor of her town. She got married later that year, and moved to the US in 1947, where she raised a family. Looking back at her partisan years, Eta reasoned that: “The biggest resistance that we could have done to the Germans was to survive“.