Renia and Anna
Mysłowice. They entered a large courtyard in the darkness. Giant dogs leapt at them from all sides. Armed guards roamed the yard, ready for action. The Gestapo man went inside to hand her testimony to the office, then returned to the cab and was driven off. A new Gestaponik, about twenty-two years old, looked at Renia. “They really plowed your skin good, didn’t they?”
Renia didn’t answer.
With his fist, he gestured for her to follow him.
He locked her in a cellar. She squinted to see in the dark. One bed. She couldn’t sit, couldn’t lie down because of the pain. Unbearable pain. Finally, she managed to stretch out on her stomach. Her bones, ribs, and spine felt like they’d been broken to pieces. Her whole body was swollen. She could not move her arms or legs.
How she envied those who’d died. “I never would have thought any human being could endure such beatings,” she later wrote. “A tree would have broken like a matchstick if it had been struck like I was, and still I’m alive, breathing and thinking.”
Renia’s memory was off, though; things were confused in her mind. She was lucid enough to tell that her thoughts were not lucid. This, of course, was not ideal.
Her condition worsened. She lay on that bed in bandages for days. For lunch, she was given diluted soup and a glass of water, which she used to wash her mouth and face. She hadn’t showered. There was nowhere to relieve herself. The stench was suffocating. So was the darkness. She’d been buried alive. “I await my death, but at no avail” is how she later described her state of mind. “You can’t order death.”
* * *
A week in, a young woman arrived at her cell. She brought Renia to an office. A Gestapo agent questioned her and took down details. Renia was surprised. Why had she not been executed? Would they lock her in another cell? The woman took her to a bath and, seeing her pain, helped her undress.
Now Renia saw the results of the beatings. There was no white flesh left on her body, only yellow, blue, and red skin, with bruises black as soot. The bath attendant sobbed, speaking in Polish, caressing and kissing her, full of pity. Her concern brought Renia to tears. Could someone still care about me? Are there Germans left who are capable of compassion? Who is this woman?
“I’ve been imprisoned for two and a half years,” the woman told her. “I’ve spent the last twelve months here. This is an interrogation camp, where they hold people until they’re done with questioning. There are two thousand prisoners at Mysłowice.”
She went on. “Before the war I was a teacher,” “But when the war began, all those suspected of political activity in my town of Cieszyn were arrested. My friends were all imprisoned. I hid for a while but was caught. I too suffered.” She showed Renia the marks on her body, scars from being beaten with chains and having red-hot metal pins shoved under her fingernails. “My two brothers are also here. They’re half dead. They’ve been chained to their beds for six months, constantly guarded, beaten for any little movement. They are suspected of belonging to a covert organization. Terrible things are happening here, unimaginable. Not a day goes by that fewer than ten people are whipped to death. There’s no distinction here between men and women. This camp is for political prisoners. Most will be executed.”
Renia soaked in her bath, all this new information sinking in.
The woman offered to be Renia’s friend. She would get her whatever she needed. “Up to now, I was locked up in a cell, but now I manage the bath,” she told Renia. “I’m still treated like a prisoner, but at least I can walk around the grounds freely.”
Renia was brought into a long room with two metal-mesh-covered windows. Bunk beds lined one wall. Next to the door stood a table for the room monitor, one of the nicer prisoners, who was responsible for cleaning the room. In the corner, a pile of slop bowls, the type used to feed piglets.
The prisoners—including many teachers and society people—surrounded Renia, examined her carefully, and peppered her with questions. Where was she from? Why had she been arrested? How long was she in for? Hearing that she was caught only two weeks ago, they asked about the outside world. Renia felt like a stranger among these women, a mixed group: nice and evil, young and old, accused of both severe and petty crimes. One of them, probably insane, started dancing for her and sang nonsense.
Mean women taunted her. “You just arrived from freedom and already look awful. How will you manage? The hunger is so bad it whistles in your gut. Do you have a slice of bread? Give it to me.”
Renia was taken by one young girl, maybe ten or fifteen, who had a pleasant face. Before they even spoke, she’d developed a fondness for her. This girl stood on the side and stared at Renia. Only later, she found the courage to approach and ask questions. “Are there any Jews left in Będzin and Sosnowiec?” Mirka was Jewish. She’d been deported from Sosnowiec but, with her sister, jumped off the train. Her sister was badly wounded but lived. Mirka, not knowing what to do, went to the nearby police station. They handed her over to the Gestapo. Her sister was apparently transported to a hospital, but she’d had no word from her; she was probably shot on the spot. Mirka was brought to Mysłowice and had been there for three weeks.
“I have such a passion for life,” said little Mirka, even though she walked around like a zombie. “Maybe the war will end soon. Every night I dream about the prison gate opening and becoming free again.”
Renia comforted her: “The war will end soon. You’ll see, you’ll be free one day.”
“When you’re released, madam, please send me help, anything, even a little food package.”
Mirka eased Renia into prison life, teaching her how to behave, making sure Renia always got a bowl of food and a straw pillow at night.
Then Renia started to leave her soup on the table and whisper to Mirka to take it. “What about you?” Mirka was concerned, but Renia told her not to worry. How she longed to tell her the truth, to prove her own existence.
The ward held sixty-five women. Each day, a few were sent out—for interrogations and beatings, to another prison, or to their deaths. Each day, new women arrived to replace them. A factory line of torture.
Renia’s jail supervisor was vicious, a true sadist, waiting for any excuse to use her bundle of keys or whip. At any moment, she could spontaneously attack a prisoner, beating her badly. Not a day went by without her provoking an incident for absolutely no reason. When the war ends, we’ll tear her to pieces and throw her to the dogs, the women fantasized, swallowing their anger, lumps in their throats. Everything was postponed until after the war. One prisoner told Renia that before the war, the cruel supervisor and her husband had owned a little shop for combs, mirrors and toys, selling their merchandise at markets and fairs. At the beginning of the occupation, the husband died of starvation, and the supervisor escaped her house, changed her identity, and became a folksdeutsche. Her status went from impoverished widow to “German lady” in charge of five hundred prisoners. “You are Polish pigs!” she would yell while hitting them. The Gestapo liked her style.
Renia’s daily routine was both tedious and horrifying. She was woken up at six in the morning. The women went to the bathroom in groups of ten, where they bathed in the sink, in cold water, and hastily, since others were waiting. At seven, the sadistic supervisor arrived, and nobody dared be in the hallway. They all stood in formation, three to a row. The hall monitor counted them and reported the number of prisoners to her two Gestapo supervisors. Afterward, a fifty-gram slice of bread, sometimes a little jam, and a cup of black, bitter coffee. The cell doors were locked, and the prisoners sat idle and starving, the food only teasing their appetites; they counted the minutes until eleven, when they were allowed a half-hour walk in the yard. Here, they heard whip lashes and bestial screams. They saw men being taken to or from interrogation, living corpses, their eyes bloody and gouged out, their heads bandaged, hands and teeth broken, limbs twisted out of sockets, faces yellow as wax, covered with scars and wrinkles, and torn clothes showing off rotting flesh. Sometimes Renia saw dead bodies being loaded onto the buses that were taking prisoners to Auschwitz. She would have preferred to stay inside.
In the cell, silence. No one dared utter a word. Guards patrolled the hallway. Renia’s stomach ached from hunger. Each woman held a bowl. When they heard the clattering of pots, they knew it was noon. Food was served by two prisoners accused of petty crimes, accompanied by an armed guard. The others waited in a straight line. The supervisor stood at the door. Despite a hunger that made them tremble, no one pushed. “Order is first and foremost,” was Renia’s dry description of the Nazi prison system.
Her bowl was filled with watery broth and some cooked cabbage and cauliflower leaves. Insects floated on top. The women got rid of any worms they could see and ate the rest, including the leaves. “Even dogs don’t eat this kind of soup,” she wrote later. No one had spoons, so anything thicker than liquid was eaten with fingers. If a prisoner got more leaves than usual, she considered herself lucky, able to relieve her hunger for a little while. Some women got only liquid. Unfortunately, there was no one to complain to about the service, Renia remarked sarcastically. For hours after eating, she wanted to vomit up the bugs and the spoiled vegetables. Her stomach felt like a stuffed sack. And yet she was grossly unsatiated. She could feel her insides contracting. She remembered how she initially had refused the soup. But now, if only she could get more . . .
Afterward, the prisoners sat idly on benches along the wall. Waiting for supper took a lifetime. Once they were freed, the women dreamed, the first thing they’d do is to eat until they were sick. They did not fantasize about cakes or delicacies, just a loaf of bread, sausage, soup without worms. “But who among us will get to leave here alive?” Renia wondered, the knowledge that she would not sinking in.
At seven o’clock they stood in formation for supper: a hundred-gram slice of bread with margarine and black coffee. They devoured the bread and sipped coffee to feel full. At nine, bedtime. The pangs of hunger that ripped through Renia’s insides made it hard to fall asleep.
Mysłowice was cleaner than Katowice. In 1942 a fatal typhoid epidemic had broken out there due to malnutrition and unsanitary conditions. Since then, the jail was strict and provided the prisoners with mattresses—but they didn’t have enough straw filling, so the bed boards stuck into their flesh. Renia covered herself with blankets that were clean, if torn. The prisoners slept in their dresses in case the partisans attacked and they’d need to flee immediately. All night, armed gendarmes patrolled the hallway, alert to any noise. Women could never leave their cells after bedtime; Renia relieved herself in a pot.
From time to time, the women were jolted awake by gunshots. Probably someone in the men’s ward tried to break out, Renia figured. Escape was impossible: the windows had metal screens, the doors were locked, the prison walls were dotted with lookout posts. Guards surrounded the building and changed every two hours, shooting three times at anything suspicious.
Some mornings, she heard that men had hung themselves during the night, or that a woman tried to flee from the bathroom and was beaten and locked in a dark cell.
Renia spent sleepless nights thinking of escaping. But how?
* * *
One day five Jewish women from Sosnowiec arrived. They’d bleached their hair in disguise but were caught at the Katowice station. A Polish kid suspected them and alerted the Gestapo. All their possessions had been confiscated. Renia spoke to them at night, but was careful to hide her own Jewish identity; would they recognize her from the area? At the same time, recognition of her identity was one of the things she craved most. No one in the world knew where she was; she needed to tell someone, in case she died, so they would know. So someone would know.
Every few days, more Jewish women arrived. One was caught during a routine paper inspection. Another was hiding in the house of a gendarme’s friend; she didn’t know who exposed her. The entire German family was arrested. An elderly mother and her two daughters were caught on the train with bad papers—one cried and confessed to being Jewish. Most of the women, Renia wrote, had been turned over to the Gestapo by Poles.
When a group of twenty Jewish women was assembled, they were sent to Auschwitz. Renia’s heart heaved seeing them leave. These were her people, even though they didn’t know. They are being sent, and I stay behind. They deluded themselves until the last second—maybe the war would end!—but as they left, they wept, knowing full well they were going to die. Everyone cried with them.
Names of women wanted for interrogation were announced without warning. Some women fainted when they heard theirs called and were brought into the examination room on stretchers. The next day, they’d return beaten to a pulp. Sometimes they came back dead.
Most of the prisoners were suspected of political activity. Among them were entire families. Mothers and daughters were with Renia; the husbands, in the men’s ward. A woman might be told during an interrogation that her husband had been killed or sent to Auschwitz. Mothers received this type of notification about their sons and daughters all the time. They would lose their will to live; everyone was affected.
Renia learned that many Polish men and women were executed for helping Jews. They hanged one woman who was suspected of hiding her Jewish former employer. Just twenty-five, she left behind two young children, a husband, and parents. Some prisoners were women in mixed marriages, brought in as hostages because their Jewish husbands were hiding from the police. Some didn’t even know why they were arrested. They’d been locked up for three years, without formal accusations or anyone looking into their cases. It was also common to be sentenced in absentia: the incarcerated person would not know why or when she’d be executed. Once, an entire village—several hundred people—came in together. Apparently, the villagers had been in contact with a partisan.
One day Renia was in the yard during a break, and four trucks full of children arrived. Partisan gangs operated in that area; the Germans took revenge by tormenting innocent people, stealing their kids. The children lived in a special cell under the care of an elderly prisoner. They were fed and interrogated just like the adults. Seeing the whip, children would confess to anything and everything. These forced confessions were good enough for the Nazis. The children were sent to schools in Germany, where they were “educated” to become “respectable Germans.”
One Polish woman showed Renia her hands: no fingernails. They’d fallen out after hot pins had been stuck underneath them. Her heels were rotten from being beaten with burning metal rods. Her armpits showed the marks of chains. She’d been hung for half an hour and beaten; then they’d hung her upside down and continued. The top of her head was bald where her hair had been pulled out. And what did she do to deserve all this? In 1940 her son had disappeared. Rumor had it that he was leading a gang of partisans. They suspected that his relatives had contact with him. She was the last person alive from her entire family.
Renia’s fellow prisoners included petty offenders: women arrested for selling goods on the black market, or turning on the light during a blackout, and other such “nonsense,” as she called it. Those prisoners’ lives were a bit easier. They were allowed to receive food and clothing packages. The Germans riffled through them and kept the good items for themselves.
Why, Renia kept wondering, was she still at Mysłowice? Why hadn’t she been taken away? Why was she still alive? So many women died, so many brought in to replace them.
Then, one afternoon, her turn. A male supervisor entered the cell. He looked at Renia and asked what she was in for. She told him that she was arrested while crossing the border.
“Let’s go.”
What would it be? A bullet? Hanging? Medieval torture? Or Auschwitz?
She didn’t know the method. But she did know the result: This was her end. This.
* * *
Auschwitz, the crowning example of bestial brutality, was only a bus ride away from Mysłowice. But despite the notorious conditions, resistance brewed beneath the camp’s seams. The underground at Auschwitz comprised (often disagreeing) groups from several countries and philosophies, including young Jews who were not immediately sent to be gassed but selected for slave labor. (For this reason, many Jewish women tried to make themselves look younger at camps—they used red dye from shoe tassels as blush and lipstick, and margarine to slick back their hair and hide grays.) The transport from Będzin, with comrades from the movements, had contributed several members to the underground and renewed its energy.
Anna Heilman first heard about the resistance from one of her block mates, a Jewish girl who’d been taken for a Pole and had contacts with the Home Army. Anna, just fourteen years old, had arrived at Auschwitz a year earlier with her older sister Esther. The two girls, from a highly assimilated and upper-middle-class Warsaw family, had grown up with nannies and visits to gourmet ice cream parlors. Now they lived in the women’s camp in Birkenau, “working” at the Union Factory. The self-proclaimed “bicycle factory” was in reality a munitions plant in a large, single-storey, glass-roofed structure that fabricated detonators for artillery shells for the German army. Auschwitz had about fifty subcamps, and like the labor camps, many were leased to private industry.
Anna was thrilled by the news of rebellion. She’d joined The Young Guard in the Warsaw ghetto; it had been her spiritual savior. (Because of her lack of Hebrew or even Yiddish, the movement gave her the name Hagar—she was from another tribe.) Every evening, her group of Jewish friends and her sister sang songs, told stories, and thought about resistance. She’d seen the ghetto uprising; she craved more activity. Now she heard that the Home Army was organizing a revolt in Warsaw and had made contact with the Auschwitz underground. They were planning to attack the camp from the outside; when the inmates heard a password, they would attack from the inside. Men and women began to prepare. Anna and her group collected materials—matches, gasoline, heavy objects—that they placed in agreed-upon spots. They obtained keys to the farm toolshed, from which they would nab rakes and hoes. About five women in each block participated, coordinated by one leader. Only the leaders maintained contact in this secret and organized operation.
On Anna’s way to work each day, she’d pass a man who worked as a locksmith and was always smiling at her. One morning, she gutsily asked him for a pair of insulated wire-cutting shears (to break through the electrified barbed wires). He looked at her, stunned, and said nothing. For days, she worried she’d been careless and would be caught. Then one afternoon he put a box on her worktable. The factory girls cooed, “He’s your lover!”—the term for male protector. Anna put the container under her table and peeked. A whole loaf of bread! She was excited, but also disappointed. Thankfully, there was no inspection that day, so she smuggled the bread back to camp, hidden in a little purse, under her clothes.
Lovers often brought girls gifts. All possessions were forbidden, so, if caught, a girl would say, “I found it.” Huddled on her bed, Anna showed Esther the loaf. They noticed that the bread had been hollowed out. Inside: shears, beautiful shears, with red insulated handles. The sisters hid this treasure in their mattress and—in case they were out when the password was called—told their friends, including Ala Gertner, their elegant bunkmate from Będzin whose prewar portrait shows her posed coquettishly in a fashionable woman’s fedora and collared top.
Days later, Ala passed on a message from a friend, twenty-three-year-old Young Guard comrade Roza Robota, who worked in the clothing kommando, sorting the personal belongings, clothes, and underwear of murdered Jews. Roza had a lover in the work unit known as the sonderkommando, made up of Jewish men who manned the crematoria and moved the corpses. He told her that his group would soon be killed. (The sonderkommando were periodically “retired”—that is, killed off.) The revolt, he said, was coming.
They had no weapons, but it dawned on Anna: they worked in a factory with gunpowder. Anna asked Esther, one of the few women stationed in the Pulverraum (powder room), to steal some. According to other accounts, it was the men who implored Roza to ask the women for the powder, and she agreed immediately.
Steal from the Pulverraum? The entire factory was open, transparent, constructed especially to make secrets impossible, the tables surrounded by surveillance paths. The men in charge sat in booths from where they could watch. Bathrooms, food, a pause in work—all was prohibited. Anything led to an accusation of sabotage. The Pulverraum was barely ten by six feet. “Impossible, ridiculous, forget it,” Esther said. But she thought about it.
Despite endless surveillance, maddening thirst, sickening torture, and the threat of collective punishment, Jewish women in concentration camps revolted. When Franceska Mann, a famous Jewish ballerina and dancer at Warsaw’s Melody Palace nightclub, was told to undress at Auschwitz, the young woman slung her shoe at an ogling Nazi, grabbed his gun, and shot two guards, killing one of them. A group of five hundred women who’d been given sticks and ordered to beat two girls who had stolen potato peels refused to move, despite being beaten themselves and forced to stand in the freezing cold all night without food. At Budy, a farm-based subcamp, a whole group of women attempted an organized escape. At Sobibor, women stole arms from the SS men for whom they worked and gave them to the underground.
At Auschwitz, a Belgian woman named Mala Zimetbaum, who spoke six languages, was chosen to serve as an interpreter for the SS—a job that granted her freedom of movement. She used her privileged status to help Jews: bringing medicine, connecting family members, fudging lists of incoming Jews, finding lighter work for the weak, warning hospital patients of upcoming selections, and dissuading the SS from carrying out collective punishments and even asking them to let prisoners wear socks. Mala dressed up as a male prisoner and escaped the camp on a feigned “work duty”—the first woman to flee—but was caught trying to leave Poland. As her sentence was being read, she slashed her wrists with a razor blade she’d hidden in her hair. When an SS man grabbed her, Mala slapped him across the face with her bloody hand and snarled, “I shall die a heroine, but you shall die like a dog!”
Bela Hazan was at Mala’s execution. Bela continued to maintain her Polish disguise and went back to work as a nurse. After Lonka’s death, she was devastated, but then one day the marching band played a song that reminded her of a comrade from Będzin. Bela began to cry. One of the musicians noticed. The two talked, and it turned out the musician, Hinda, had been part of a youth movement. Bela took the risk and came out to her as a Jew. To be known was to be. The two cried together, desperate to hug, and spoke of resistance. Hinda’s group of Jewish girls who arrived on transports wanted to rebel, she told Bela. One obtained a tool to cut barbed wire. In the evenings, the guards were usually drunk. On a moonless night, they went to work, digging a tunnel to smuggle Jewish girls to safety. Two girls dug while four stood guard. Bela helped dig. The tunnel stretched under the barbed wire, starting where the trains arrived. Bela recalled that they once snuck in two fifteen-year-old girls from Germany. The girls were shocked when told to shut up and roll into a tunnel, but Bela was full of joy when they made it to the work camp. She tutored them on how to behave as illegals and dressed them in the clothes of dead patients. One Jewish girl who worked in the bathroom hid them there during roll calls. Bela stole potatoes and carrots to feed them. The young girls couldn’t understand why a Pole would help them.
Bela continually used her position as a nurse to help sick Jews, serving them soup that contained just a little bit more cabbage, gently caressing their foreheads while giving them sips of water, and volunteering to work in the Jewish scabies section. (Everyone assumed she took on this last task for her “Communist reasons,” or as she claimed, to prevent scabies from reaching the Poles and the Germans.) She warned patients before Dr. Mengele arrived for selections, and hid the sickest.
Bela knew that her kindness seemed not only strange to the Jewish prisoners but also suspicious. She, of course, understood their Yiddish mutterings about her possibly being a spy. Nevertheless, they were pleased when she granted the Jewish women who worked in the hospital permission to throw a Chanukah party. Privately, Bela was devastated that she could not attend but had to act more “Polish than the Pope.” Instead, she decorated a Christmas tree with Santa Claus figurines.
One of Bela’s supervisors, Arna Cook, was short, angry, and cruel. She insisted that Bela clean her room, deliver coffee, and shine her boots. One morning, Bela came in to perform her duties, and Arna did not hear her enter. Bela saw Arna lying on her bed with her legs splayed wide, having sex with her German shepherd. Bela shut the door and fled, fearing that if she’d been caught, she would have been killed.
Later, Arna beat Bela for not coming to work on time. She marched her back to Birkenau for slave labor and forced her to join a unit digging trenches—a horribly demanding task. No rest allowed, constant beatings; girls were shot if they collapsed. The others had to carry their bodies, to the tunes of the marching band.
Once, during work, SS men dragged one of the girls to the forest nearby. Bela heard her screaming. She never returned. It turned out, they’d forced her to have sex with a dog. She begged to be killed. The SS laughed. “This dog found a good subject for pleasure,” Bela heard them say. This was not the only time this happened. Another Auschwitz survivor related that the Nazis forced her to undress her young daughter and watch as she was raped by dogs.
Bela and her fellow inmates became terrified of going out to work. They decided that if it happened again, the entire kommando would rise up. After the third incident of dog rape, when they began to drag out yet another girl, the entire unit of twenty girls screamed. The SS put them in confinement in a basement, where they were forced to stand for days and nights on end, fed only once in ninety-six hours. They left solitary physically broken but comforted by the knowledge that they’d resisted. The women banded together and protected one another.
Women in many labor camps, including Auschwitz, rebelled by sabotaging the products they were being forced to make, marring productivity or quality. They weakened hemp threads in a spinning factory, mismeasured bomb parts, dropped a wire among ball bearings, and left windows open overnight so that pipes froze. Sabotaged munitions caused German weapons to backfire and explode. Fania Fainer, a Białystok native from a Bundist family, sometimes put sand instead of gunpowder in her product at Union.
When Fania was about to turn twenty, her friend Zlatka Pitluk decided that such a landmark needed to be celebrated. Zlatka, who loved crafts, risked her life to gather materials she found in the camp and used a mix of water and bread to glue them together and create a three-dimensional birthday card in the shape of a heart—similar to an autograph book, a popular item of the day. A small object with a purple fabric cover (ripped off Zlatka’s secret underblouse), the card had an F on the cover, embroidered in orange thread. Zlatka then passed the booklet to eighteen other women prisoners, including Anna, who wrote their birthday messages. On eight carefully constructed origami-like pages, opening into a clover, are the prisoners’ wishes, written in their diverse mother tongues: Polish, Hebrew, German, French.
“Freedom, Freedom, Freedom, Wishing on the day of your birthday,” wrote a woman named Mania, at the risk of being murdered.
“Not dying will be our victory,” wrote another.
One woman quoted a Polish poem: “Laugh among people. . . . Be light when you dance. . . . When you’re old, put on glasses, and remember what we once went through.”
Camaraderie, a defiance that was intimate and even illegal, gave women hope and helped them persevere.
* * *
In the end, Esther agreed to steal the gunpowder.
Anna’s sister worked twelve-hour shifts in front a machine that pressed the powder—slate gray, the consistency of coarse salt—into a checker-like piece. This part ignited the bomb.
Anna walked down the acrid-smelling, dust-filled hall, past several supervisors, and headed to the Pulverraum, as if she were on trash collection duty. Esther’s spot was near the door; she passed Anna a small metal box, the kind used for refuse. Esther had hidden bits of gunpowder, wrapped in knotted cloth, in the garbage. (Cloth came from ripping a shirt or trading bread for a kerchief.) Anna brought the box to her table, took out the cloth packets, and slid them under her dress. She met Ala in the bathroom, where they divided the packets and hid them in their clothes. At the end of the day, Esther transferred some to her own body before marching back to camp, in wooden shoes, nearly a mile in rain, snow, or sweltering sun. If ever there was an inspection, the girls tugged open the cloth and dumped the powder on the ground, rubbing it in with their feet. Ala gave the collected powder to Roza.
It wasn’t just them. A network of about thirty Jewish women aged eighteen to twenty-two stole good powder and instead used waste powder in their products. They smuggled explosives in matchboxes, and in their bosoms, between their breasts. They wrapped miniature 250-gram caches in paper and slipped them into the pockets of their coarse blue dresses. In one day, three girls could collect two teaspoons. Marta Bindiger, one of Anna’s close friends and a collector, held on to stashes for several days until there was a “pickup.” Four-level chains of girls, unknown to one another were involved. All of it landed with Roza, who liaised between different resistance factions.
Roza gave the powder to the men. The sonderkommando, who were allowed in the women’s camp to remove corpses, transported the explosives in a soup bowl that had a double bottom, in apron seams, and in a wagon used for removing the bodies of Jews who had died during the night. The gunpowder parcels were hidden under their corpses, then concealed in the crematoria. A Russian prisoner made the dynamite into bombs, using empty sardine or shoe polish cans as casings. Nearby, a teenager named Kitty Felix was forced to sort murdered male prisoners’ jackets and search them for valuables. She stole diamonds and gold and concealed them behind a toilet hut; they were traded for explosives.
The girls lived in fear and excitement. Then, one day, commotion. No warning, no password. The uprising, arranged meticulously over months could not go ahead as scheduled because the sonderkommando found out that they would be gassed to death immediately. It was now or never.
On October 7, 1944, the Jewish underground attacked an SS man with hammers, axes, and stones, and blew up a crematorium, where they’d placed rags soaked in oil and alcohol. They dug out hidden weapons and killed a handful of SS guards, injuring others; they threw a particularly sadistic Nazi into the oven alive. They cut through the barbed wire and ran.
But not fast enough. The Nazis shot all three hundred of them, then held a formal roll call for the dead bodies, laying each corpse out in formation. Several hundred prisoners fled during the mayhem; they too were shot and killed.
Afterward, the Nazis found the handmade grenades: tin cans filled with gunpowder that was traced to the Pulverraum. An intensive investigation ensued. People were taken, tortured, and there are many conflicting accounts of squealing and betrayals. According to Anna’s memoirs, their barrack mate Klara was caught with bread and traded her punishment for snitching on Ala. In turn, Ala, tortured, divulged that Roza and Esther were involved. In one version, the Nazis had an undercover agent, a Czech who was half Jewish, seduce Ala with chocolates, cigarettes, and affection until she revealed names.
Esther was taken to a punishment cell. Anna was horrified and despondent. One day, she, too, was brought in for questioning and beaten as a warning. They wiped the blood off her face. The “good cop” asked, in a fatherly tone: “Who stole the gunpowder? Why? Where? What did your sister tell you?”
Anna looked at him, dumb, silent.
“Esther confessed everything,” he said, “so you may as well tell us.”
“How can Esther confess to anything?” Anna asked. “She is innocent, and she is not a liar.” They released her and, thankfully, sent Esther back to her barrack. She was black and blue. The skin on her back was ripped into stripes. She couldn’t move or talk. Marta and Anna cared for her, and she was improving.
A few days later, however, the Nazis came back for Ala, Esther, Roza, and Będziner Regina, the Pulverraum supervisor.
The girls were sentenced to hanging. Anna went mad; Marta admitted her to the revier to stop her from suiciding. She tried to make contact with her sister, tried to see her, but never managed to.
A male underground member from Roza’s hometown used vodka to convince the guard of the torture bunker to let him see Roza. “I entered Roza’s cell,” Noah Zabludowicz recalled. “On the cold cement lay a figure like a heap of rags. At the sound of the door opening, she turned her face to me. . . . Then she spoke her last words. She told me that she had not betrayed [anyone]. She wished to tell her comrades that they had nothing to fear. We must carry on.” She was not regretful, not sorry, but wanted to die knowing that the movement’s actions would continue. She handed him a note for the remaining comrades. It was signed with the exhortation “Chazak V’Amatz.” Be strong and courageous.
Esther wrote a last letter to Anna and one to Marta, asking her to “take care of my sister so that I may die easier.”
“Camp sisters” were family.
On the day of the execution, the four women were hanged, rare public ceremonies intended to terrorize the female prisoners and dissuade them from further sabotage and rebellion. Two were executed during the day shift, two during the night shift. All Jewish women prisoners were forced to watch; they were beaten if their eyes strayed for a second. Anna’s friends hid her and held her down so she wouldn’t have to see. But she heard. “A thud of drums,” she later described the scene, “a groan from thousands of throats, and the rest was mist.” Bela Hazan was there too, as the Polish nurse assigned to carry out the corpses.
In her last breath, before the noose tightened, Roza cried out in Polish: “Sisters, revenge!”