Born: 24 August 1919, Belarus
Died: 26 May 1943
Country most active: Poland
Also known as: טוסיה אלטמן
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
In the 2001 miniseries Uprising, about Jewish resistance fighters in the Warsaw ghetto, Judy Batalion writes in her non-fiction book, The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos, that women leaders were turned into minor characters, merely the girlfriends of the male protagonists. The only female lead is Tosia Altman, and while she is shown fearlessly smuggling weapons, she is presented as a beautiful, shy girl taking care of her sick father, passively swept up into the resistance. In actuality, Tosia was a leader of the Young Guard movement long before the war, with a reputation as a brazen glam girl. By rewriting her into a more palatable version, Uprising discarded not only her truth, but the context and realities that formed her.