“Because they say that the Jewish people went to death like lambs to slaughter, I have to bring this up,” said Lusia Haberfeld, who was barely a teenager when she was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp, during an interview with the USC Shoah Foundation. “One Saturday … all of a sudden we hear shooting and shooting and terrible explosions. And what happened was that the Sonderkommando ... they exploded a crematorium. They made a revolt. An uprising. … Unfortunately, we heard later on that they were all re-captured. … How this uprising came all about was there was a young woman ... whose name was Roza Robota.”
The exact year of Roza Robota’s birth isn’t certain. She was born in Ciechanow, Poland, about 60 miles north of Warsaw, in 1921 or 1923. During her youth, she joined the Ha-shomer ha-Za’ir, a socialist-Zionist Jewish movement. In 1939, when Roza was in her late teens, Nazi Germany invaded and took control of Poland. Roza and her family were moved to Jewish ghetto areas of Ciechanow where she continued working with Ha-shomer ha-Za’ir’s underground resistance efforts.
In 1942, Roza and her family were deported nearly 250 miles south to the concentration camp in Auschwitz. Auschwitz is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the website describes what happened to new arrivals: “After all kind of humiliations and margination, expropriations, and reclusion in ghettos in inhumane conditions, prisoners from all occupied Europe were transported in fully crammed freight cars, with no water nor food, to Auschwitz. After a journey that sometimes took days and killed many, they arrived at the long platform of the camp, known as die Rampe (The ramp).” The camp, already a full two years into operation, had its ghastly routines established by the time Roza and her family arrived.
The site’s narrative continued, “At the end of [the ramp] were several SS [Schutzstaffel, a category of elite Nazi] doctors that in a few seconds decided the fate of the deportees and resolved who would become a slave and die from exhaustion, hunger or torture, who would serve as a ‘guinea pig’ in pseudo-scientific experiments and who would be killed straightaway (statistically 75-80 percent of the deported).” Following this selection process, Roza—still just barely in her 20s—never saw her any of her family again.
She was put to work in the nearby Birkenau camp, sorting the clothing and belongings of the murdered. She’d been a resistance fighter and a member of the underground before Auschwitz and that continued inside its fences. “Those who survived the initial selections endured abject living conditions, daily psychological and physical abuse, and awareness that they could be killed indiscriminately,” wrote Thomas V. Maher in “Threat, Resistance, and Collective Action: The Cases of Sobibór, Treblinka, and Auschwitz” for the American Sociological Review in 2010. “Many focused on day-to-day survival; others chose to resist. Indeed, work slowdowns, sabotage, contentious talk, and escapes—what [James C.] Scott calls ‘weapons of the weak’—were, in fact, common in many of the labor and death camps.” Roza connected with the Polish Underground networks among the prisoners. Many of these efforts within the camp were small-scale, such as the pilfering of extra food or comfort items. Others, however, had larger goals.
Roza’s post was near the crematoriums where smoke poured from smokestacks as those chosen for death were gassed, stripped, burned, and disposed. The men who worked the required machines were called the Sonderkommando, “special commando unit,” themselves prisoners, often Jewish, given the choice to help or be killed themselves.
“Work in the Sonderkommando was physically exhausting and psychologically destructive,” reported the US. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust Encyclopedia. “These prisoners were forbidden from warning the incoming victims of their fate and were forced to participate in the process of killing. The prisoners' days were numbered. Members of the Sonderkommando were routinely shot. Of all the prisoners in the camp, they knew the most about the Nazi ‘Final Solution’ and could not be permitted to survive to testify. They were usually kept completely apart from the rest of the prisoners, either in the gas chamber complex itself or in separate barracks.”
The men who worked as Sonderkommando have been viewed with both criticism and compassion. That exploration is beyond the scope of this article and this author. As Thomas observed, “Prisoners were forced to make ‘choiceless choices’ about their lives and the lives of others, based on limited (and often intentionally manipulated) information, while negotiating brutal conditions.” The work of the Sonderkommando was horrific; this is true. What is also true is that some attempted to fight back. And when the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz’s Crematorium IV began planning, they reached out to Roza Robota.
Well-connected Roza enlisted the help of three women: Regina Safirsztajn, Ester Wajcblum, and Ala Gertner.
Regina Safirsztajn was a few years older than Roza, born in 1915 to Josef and Roza Gold Safirsztajn in Bedzin, Poland, not even 30 miles from where she was imprisoned in 1943 at age 28. She’d grown up with six older siblings and one younger brother in the restaurant and bar that also served as their home. Her mother died and one older brother immigrated to the United States before the war began.
Once it had, 24-year-old Regina’s whole family was rounded up and put into the ghettos designated for the Jewish. There, Regina found both love and grief. Her father died of a heart attack in the ghetto. She also met and married Josef Szaintal during these years, but Josef would not survive long enough for their marriage to flourish and Regina never took his surname.
In 1943, Regina and all her living family members still in Poland were deported to Auschwitz. They, too, walked down that ramp and into the selection process. All but one of her young nieces and nephews were killed. Regina, her sisters, sisters-in-law, and one niece were put to work in the camp, though not near each other. Regina never saw any of her family again, and only her niece and her brother in the United States would survive until the end of the war.
Ester Wajcblum, also sometimes called Estusia or Esterka, was born Jan. 16, 1924, in Warsaw to a prominent Jewish family. While Ester, older sister Sabina, and younger sister Anna (sometimes called Hanka or Hannaleh) were all hearing, their parents, Jakub and Rebeka, were both deaf and the girls were also raised by a deaf nanny. Father Jakub ran a factory and employed primarily deaf workers.
When the war started, the ghetto formed around 15-year-old Ester’s family home. They lived in the Warsaw neighborhood where families like Roza’s and Regina’s were forcibly relocated. Ester and little sister Anna both, like Roza, joined the resistance efforts of the Ha-shomer ha-Za’ir. With the danger so clear around them, Jakub and Rebeka’s daughters had to make a choice: Flee or stay with their parents. Older sister Sabina left with her tutor (who would later become her husband) and eventually settled safely in Sweden. Ester and Anna chose to stay.
They were there, on April 19, 1943, for the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising when Nazi troops arrived to claim massive numbers for deportation. As the Holocaust Museum site described it, “About 700 young Jewish fighters clashed with German forces, sometimes in hand-to-hand combat. These fighters were poorly equipped and lacked military training and experience. ... In the end, the Germans razed the ghetto to the ground.”
In May of that year, Ester and her remaining family were deported to the Majdanek concentration camp in Lublin, Poland. There, like the arrivals at Auschwitz, a cruel selection process began. Parents Jakub and Rebeka were immediately killed. Nineteen-year-old Ester and 14-year-old Anna survived to be sent to Auschwitz the following September.
Ala Gertner’s birth year, like Roza’s, is uncertain, though it’s estimated to be 1912. Like Regina, she was born in Bedzin, Poland. Much of what we know of her is glimpsed through the letters written to and protected by her friend Sala Garncarz. In 1939, Sala stood with her family among hundreds of others at the train station to be transported to a Nazi labor camp. “A well-dressed woman in her 30s saw the family’s distress and offered to help,” recounted the New York Public Library’s special exhibition on Sala’s letters. “The woman, Ala Gertner, promised to take care of 16-year-old Sala, and together they boarded the train to the Geppersdorf labor camp.”
At Geppersdorf, just one of 50 or so “labor camp[s] associated with building the ReichsAutoBahn,” Ala worked in administration, a role she owed to her fluency in German. This job came with certain privileges, such as “more food and a private room,” which she shared with Sala. This post also permitted its workers brief visits home. During one of these, after a year at Geppersdorf, Ala secured a position with the local Sosnowitz Judenrat, or “Jewish Council.”
The NYPL overview continued, “The Judenrat was an important extension of Hitler’s government and was charged with solving the problems that arose in the occupied community. The Judenrat operated post offices, hospitals, soup kitchens, day care centers, and vocational schools. They also collected taxes and paid salaries for certain types of work.” Much like the Sonderkommando, the role of the Judenrat is, as the NYPL stated, “controversial and complicated.”
Ala’s boss at her post in Sosnowitz was Moshe Merin, who “promoted the principle of ‘rescue through work,’ arguing that the Nazis would be less likely to deport Jews who were productive. He sacrificed those who could not work to save the lives of those who could. Merin supplied the Nazis with a census identifying the work eligibility of every Jew. Using this list, Nazis deported able-bodied Jews to labor camps. The same list also facilitated selection of the weak, the elderly, and children for death camps.”
Sala returned to Geppersdorf alone, but her friendship with Ala endured. For years, the two would exchange “rare, optimistic, loving and energetic correspondence.” In Sosnowitz, Ala reunited with Bernard Holtz, a man she’d met while he was imprisoned, and the two married.
“I sent you pajamas and a nightgown to keep you warm,” Ala wrote to Sala in the letters Sala would hide and cherish in secret through seven camps, the end of the war, and her eventual travel to the United States. She shared the letters with her children only in her old age, in 1991. “Please write what else you need. I’m at your disposal any time.”
Ala wrote, “In the camp, I protected you... Don’t be afraid. I always think of your release.”
“[M]any Judenrat leaders operated under the assumption that they and their towns could escape virulent antisemitism through cooperation with the Nazis,” the NYPL historians said. “Were they trying to save themselves first? Did they think they could outlast the evil? Were they justified in sacrificing some Jews to protect the larger group?” Ultimately, compliance saved no one: Ala, her husband, her boss, and the rest of the Judenrat were sent to Auschwitz during the “final liquidation” of Sosnowitz in 1943.
That year, Regina, Ester, and Ala were all stationed in the Weichel-Union-Metalworke, a factory preparing munitions, when Roza Robota contacted them for their help.
For months, the three women smuggled gunpowder out of the factory day by day, teaspoon by teaspoon, hidden in the hems of the dresses or in handkerchiefs. “Roughly twenty other Jewish women prisoners took part in the operation, among them Hannaleh Wajsblum (Ester’s sister), Faige Segal, Mala Weinstein, Hadassah Zlotnicka, and others whose names are unknown,” according to the Jewish Women’s Archive. The names of Rose Grunapfel Meth, Marta Bindiger, Genia Fischer, and Inge Frank have also been connected to these secretive efforts.
Some of the contributors may only have understood their involvement in retrospect. As a survivor shared years later, and preserved on the German Resistance Memorial Center website, “One day Ester Wajcblum handed me a small, light parcel, asking me to keep it safe until she came for it or sent someone else... A few days later, [Roza] Robota, who worked in the clothing section, came to me and asked for the parcel. This happened several times... I later found out that the parcel contained gunpowder smuggled out of the Union factory. Ester never spoke about it, only once did she say to me: ‘We could free ourselves from this hell...’”
Roza passed this pilfered gunpowder to the men of the Sonderkommando. Dr. Jennifer Putnam, writing for the National World War II Museum, said, “It took a year to prepare and amass supplies. The Sonderkommando prisoners who went to get the daily ration of soup for their group were able to make contact with the Polish Underground and other prisoners. They also bribed guards to allow them into the women’s camp. The guards assumed this was to visit girlfriends, but the Sonderkommando members instead used this time to coordinate with women who had access to gunpowder and explosive materials through their work assignments.”
It's a matter of debate how many of those involved expected to live. “None of the members of the Sonderkommando had any illusion of surviving the uprising,” Thomas wrote, “but their goal was to die honorably rather than survive.” Yet, the Polish Underground, with their ears trained to news from outside the camp, wanted to time their actions for when Soviet forces were nearby, when the chance of rescue was at its highest.
They did not get the opportunity to wait for the perfect time. The SS soldiers overseeing the Sonderkommando became suspicious and took one of their number for interrogation. They shot him for his refusal to reveal information and organized a “preemptive strike.” As Jennifer explained, the Sonderkommando were forced to launch their plan early, on Oct. 7, 1944. They grabbed the knives and pole weapons they’d sharpened or fashioned by hand and attacked.
“During the ensuing battle, several Sonderkommando members rushed into Crematorium IV and set the place ablaze. The gunpowder and grenades they had stored in the walls ignited, and the building crumbled to the ground. Other prisoners ran to the fence and cut the wire so that they could escape. They then fled to the nearby forest, leaving in their wake 12 injured and three dead SS men.”
This was the “shooting and terrible explosions” that survivor Lusia Haberfeld still remembered decades later. Throughout the camp, believing a revolt was underway, prisoners grabbed whatever weapons they had, attacked their guards, and fled.
Eventually, however, all the escapees were relocated and murdered. In all, Jennifer reported, “Around 250 prisoners were killed in the uprising, including the leaders of the Sonderkommando resistance.”
Following these quick deaths and regaining power, the Nazi investigation into the uprising began. Interrogation of the few survivors yielded four names: Roza Robota, Regina Safirsztajn, Ester Wajcblum, and Ala Gertner.
All four women were viciously tortured, including beatings, sexual assault, and electric shocks. None of them shared a single name of any conspirator still living.
In early January 1945, Ala and Roza were executed before the prisoners during the night. Ester and Regina were executed in the daylight. Ala was 32 years old, Regina was not yet 30, Roza was no older than 24, and Ester was just days shy of her 20th birthday. Noah Zabludowicz, a member of the Polish Underground, shared that Roza’s last words to her friends were “Hazak ve-amatz (be strong and of good courage)!” Not even two full weeks later, with the war resolutely against them, the Nazis abandoned Auschwitz and all its remaining prisoners.
Ester’s little sister Anna, only 16, survived the war, though it was decades before she told her story. In a 1996 interview at the age of 67, she said, “There is no question in my mind that when you meet with adversity in life, you have to stand tall, and you have to do what is right, because you can’t divorce yourself from yourself. By the same token, I paid too big a price. Perhaps if we weren’t so ‘right,’ my sister would still be alive.”
Anna’s point is a meaningful one. It’s easy to lionize these women, or slot them into line beside heroic, tragic figures of fiction. They were certainly tragic and undoubtedly heroic, but this was not their destiny, nor the fulfillment of their character. The foundational disruption of an oppressive government narrowed their world to a nightmare inside a barbed wire fence. The lives they’d wanted had been stolen from them long before they were executed.
In the preface to his book, “Weapons of the Weak,” James C. Scott, an anthropologist and political scientist, shared this observation about resistance in environments not unlike those faced in the camps: Rigid control, deprivation of resources, the threat of instant and random violence. He wrote, “For all their importance when they do occur, peasant rebellions—let alone revolutions—are few and far between. The vast majority are crushed unceremoniously. ... The rare, heroic, and foredoomed gestures of a Nat Turner or John Brown are simply not the places to look for the struggle between slaves and their owners. One must look rather at the constant, grinding conflict over work, food, autonomy, ritual—at everyday forms of resistance.”
Roza, Regina, Ester, and Ala stand out in history—notable for the daring and impact of what they did—and perhaps stories like theirs can inspire the smaller, constant bravery needed from the rest of us. “Everyday forms of resistance make no headlines,” James continued. “But just as millions of anthozoan polyps create, willy-nilly, a coral reef, so do the multiple acts of peasant insubordination and evasion create political and economic barrier reefs of their own. It is largely in this fashion that the peasantry makes its political presence felt. And whenever, to pursue the simile, the ship of state runs aground on such reefs, attention is usually directed to the shipwreck itself and not to the vast aggregation of petty acts that made it possible.”
Anna was proud of her own actions, and even of the sacrifice of her sister, though she wished for a kinder world that hadn’t demanded it. She said, “The world is not going to change unless we believe in changing the world, but we have to pay a very, very high price. I know that for me, the answer is to stand for what I believe in.”
Sources:
Jewish Women’s Archive: Roza Robota
Auschwitz: The Arrival
Jstor: Threat, Resistance, and Collective Action: The Cases of Sobibór, Treblinka, and Auschwitz by Thomas V. Maher
Jewish Virtual Library: The Revolt at Auschwitz-Birkenau
Holocaust Museum Encyclopedia: Prewar Portrait of Ala Gertner, Sonderkommandos, Prisoner Revolt, Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
National WWII Museum: The Sonderkommando Uprising in Auschwitz-Birkenau
New York Public Library: Letters to Sala
USC Shoah Foundation: Lusia Haberfeld on the Women Behind the Sonderkommando Uprising; Was Her Sister’s Life Too High A Price?
German Resistance Memorial Center: Ester Wajcblum
European Holocaust Research Infrastructure: Safirsztajn and Gold families' photograph
Wikipedia: Roza Robota, Ala Gertner, Regina Safirsztajn, Ester Wajcblum, Anna Heilman, Rose Meth, Hashomer Hatzair, Ciechanów