“The Partisan’s Daughter” by Michael Behagen

Aaron is now in a retirement home in Israel. His granddaughter regularly visits, and he’s told her almost all the stories about his life and the life of her mother Machale when she was a child. But there’s one story he hasn’t told, mostly from a sense of shame. 

In 1940, the German government created the Warsaw ghetto in Poland, an area of 1.3 square miles into which were herded tens of thousands of Jews. Including Aaron, his wife Raizel, and their daughter Machale. For the next three years, groups of Jews would be taken by rail cars to the Treblinka concentration camp and killed.

 

Even though the stories of deportation and death are always denied, even from many of the Jews themselves, Aaron and Raizel know better. And they decide they have to do something to get their daughter to some kind of safety. A Polish friend helps; a bribe to a ghetto guard helps Machale escape. But Raizel is killed at the ghetto hospital where she works, and Aaron is sent to Treblinka. The family that had agreed to hide Machale decide to get rid of her when the money Aaron paid runs out. 

 

Michael Behagen

And the story Aaron tells his granddaughter begins there, with all that as the backdrop.

 

The Partisan’s Daughter by Michael Behagen is the story of what happens to Aaron and Machale, as the war grinds on. And Aaron will learn much about the Poles, the Germans, and himself before the story comes to an end. The story unfolds as both a kind of documentary about Aaron’s war years and escape from Treblinka and his confession about a terrible injustice.

 

Behagen is a filmmaker and writer best known for a 1980s thriller television series called “Late Night Stories.” He’s written and produced a number of documentary and feature films, and he published hi first novel, Lullaby, in 2002. A native of Israel, he lives in both Israel and France.