Later, she says, she escaped into the nearby woods and helped form an all-Jewish partisan unit. There, she refused to do traditional women’s work. Instead, she would wear a cross and pretend to be a Polish Christian, finding small groups of Jews who were hiding and bring them back to her unit’s makeshift hideout in the woods. Wrobel says she helped her partisan group steal food and other needed supplies, and put mines in the road to slow German troops.

She told JPEF that she would make a clicking sound like insects, using it as a secret code with other partisans for safety. At one point she got shot, but the group’s doctor was busy, so she took the bullet out of her own leg with a knife.

“It’s very important to know, you know, they stereotype — ‘the Jews go like sheep’ — it’s not true, they never did,” Wrobel told JPEF. “Thousands of years ago they didn’t, and they don’t do it now.”

To Wrobel, fighting back wasn’t just about striking blows to German forces. It was primarily about saving other Jewish people and surviving hellish conditions. Every day was a struggle, she said.

“We saved about a hundred people,” she said. “This was my thing to do, because I think that’s the most important. That’s the biggest resistance that we could have done to the Germans is to survive.”

Other Jewish partisans felt the same way. The most famous example is the Bielski brothers and their group of partisans. Though they sought out and killed Nazi collaborators, these Jewish partisans in Belarus focused on saving their people from certain death. At its peak, their group contained more than 1,200 people hiding from the Nazis, mostly women, children, and the elderly. In Belgium, Jews and non-Jews formed the Committee for the Defense of the Jews, primarily to hide thousands of Jewish children from the Nazis. But they also successfully derailed a train headed for Auschwitz death camp and rescued the hundreds of people on board.

As JPEF explains in their study guide: “Jewish partisans saved thousands of Jewish lives, in some cases literally breaking Jews out of the confines of well-guarded ghettos, and in at least one situation, digging a tunnel to free 250 people from a ghetto.”

Most partisans during World War II — Jewish or otherwise — were men. But Wrobel was far from the only inspiring woman among them. Brenda Senders joined a 1,600-person partisan unit in eastern Poland when she was 17, according to the JPEF.

“If I was going to die, I wanted to die with a gun in my hand, fighting my enemy,” she told the foundation, which interviewed dozens of former partisans. “I wanted revenge.”

Some partisans were even younger. In France, 12-year-old Bernard Musmand helped the Jewish resistance by working as a courier, smuggling documents and false IDs. At age 13, he joined partisan military actions against the Nazis, according to JPEF.

When Nazis started exterminating Jews in Vilna, Lithuania, young activists led the resistance. In a now famous “Ghetto Manifesto” read to a Jewish youth group, 23-year-old Abba Kovner declared: “They shall not take us like sheep to the slaughter…It is true that we are weak and defenseless, but resistance is the only reply to the enemy! It is better to fall as free fighters than to live by the grace of the murderers. Resist! To the last breath.”

Vitka Kempner was 19 when Kovner made his declaration. Along with Kovner and others, she helped form the United Partisans Organization, and she carried out its first sabotage — bombing a nearby Nazi train line. Their group armed themselves by bringing weapons into the Vilna ghetto through the sewer system, and when they later needed to bring the guns out, they hid them in coffins, she told JPEF.