Travel case in hand, dressed in fashionable clothing and wearing a practiced, coquettish smile, Hela Schüpper Rufeisen sat aboard the train to Warsaw, Poland. No one on board would have suspected that beneath the coat of the young woman were strapped assorted handguns and several cartridge clips.

Schüpper Rufeisen, who was Jewish, relied on this dissonance between appearance and reality to ferry items into, out of and between the Warsaw and Krakow ghettos. Her carefully cultivated “Aryan” image and false papers listing her as Catholic made it possible to cross borders and survive encounters that would otherwise have ended in death.

During the Holocaust, trying to “pass” as non-Jewish was often more feasible for women than men. Some Jewish women, like Schüpper Rufeisen, took the risk in order to join resistance efforts against the Nazis and their collaborators. Most Jews who tried to pass, however, did so simply to remain alive in a system designed to murder them.

Passing took many forms. It enabled some women to transport weapons, papers or messages, while allowing others to work as domestic servants, move between cities, secure food or sleep safely for another night. What united these experiences was the pressure of living under constant threat. Blanca Rosenberg escaped the Kolomyja ghetto – then Polish, now part of Ukraine – in 1942. As she recalled afterward, “I tried to force myself into the mind of the woman I was to impersonate … I was now an Aryan, with a right to life, and no longer a Jewess, hunted like prey.”

Over years of research on Jews who evaded capture during the Holocaust, what struck me most was not the daring of these acts, but how often survivors described them as something done to get through the day........

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