The Four Auschwitz Women

The four women hanged at Auschwitz on 6 January 1945 had smuggled the gunpowder that blew up Crematorium IV three months earlier. They were tortured for weeks. They named no one. They were the last people executed at Auschwitz before the camp was abandoned to the advancing Red Army. They are the only Jewish women known to have been executed by the SS at Auschwitz for active resistance. Their names are Róża Robota, Ester Wajcblum, Ala Gertner and Regina Safirsztajn.

The four had been deported separately. Róża Robota came from Ciechanów in northern Poland, where she had been active in the Hashomer Hatzair Zionist youth movement. Ester Wajcblum was from Warsaw. Ala Gertner was from Będzin in Upper Silesia. Regina Safirsztajn, also from Będzin, was the oldest and the steadiest of the four. They were all in their twenties.

They worked in the Union Werke, a German munitions plant inside the Auschwitz complex that produced fuses for artillery shells and used Jewish women as forced labour in three twelve-hour shifts. The Sonderkommando in Crematorium IV, the male prisoners forced to operate the gas chambers and ovens, had been planning an uprising for months. They needed explosives. The women in the munitions plant had access to gunpowder. Wajcblum, Gertner and Safirsztajn smuggled gunpowder out of the Union Werke in small quantities, hidden in cloths inside their clothes, between summer and autumn 1944. They passed the powder to Robota, who worked in the clothing detail at the Crematorium IV gate. Robota passed it to her cousin Yehuda Lerner and to Roza Robota’s contact Israel Gutman in the Sonderkommando. The men used the powder to make rough grenades.

The Sonderkommando uprising began on 7 October 1944. The men of Crematorium IV blew up the building and attacked the SS guards. Around four hundred and fifty Sonderkommando men were killed in the suppression. Three SS men were killed and twelve wounded. The crematorium itself was destroyed and never used again. The investigation that followed traced the gunpowder back to the Union Werke. The four women were arrested in October and November 1944.

The interrogations were carried out by the camp Gestapo office over weeks. Robota was tortured most heavily because she was the central link. The witnesses who survived to record what happened, Anna Heilman, the sister of Ester Wajcblum, and others who saw the women in the punishment block, all testified that none of them broke under torture. None named the others or the Sonderkommando contacts. The Sonderkommando men who had received the powder were not betrayed. The investigation closed without expanding the circle of the arrested.

The four were hanged in two pairs on the evening of 5 January and the morning of 6 January 1945. The execution was held at the Union Werke roll-call ground so that the entire women’s munitions workforce had to watch. Róża Robota’s last words, reported by witnesses, were Chazak ve’amatz, Be strong and have courage, in Hebrew. The Soviet army arrived at Auschwitz twenty days later.

The four women are commemorated by a small memorial inside the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum near the ruins of Crematorium IV. Their files at Yad Vashem are full. The Sonderkommando uprising is now widely known because the surviving men of the Sonderkommando, including Filip Müller and Salmen Lewental, recorded it in writing and Lewental buried his manuscript in a milk can in the grounds of the camp where it was found in 1962. The contribution of the four women is in those manuscripts. It is also in the survival of the men they helped, who would otherwise have been gassed in the next selection.

The operational record

The operational record on The Four Auschwitz Women is documented in the surviving administrative records of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office, in the postwar work of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and the subsidiary postwar museums and archives at the various camp sites, in the testimony recorded at the postwar judicial proceedings, and in the substantial body of survivor and perpetrator testimony produced over the postwar period.

The record establishes the operational character of the installation during the wartime period, the operational scale of the killings, the identities of the principal perpetrators, the operational technologies that were deployed, and the consequences of the installation for the surviving Jewish and non-Jewish prisoner populations. The aggregate record stands as the primary source for the academic understanding of the camp in the wider context of the wartime killing programme.

See also

Sources

  • Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Indiana University Press, 1987
  • Robert Jan van Pelt and Debórah Dwork, Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present, Yale University Press, 1996
  • Geoffrey P. Megargee and Martin Dean, eds, Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1933 to 1945, multi-volume, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Indiana University Press, 2009 onwards
  • Israel Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, eds, Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Indiana University Press, 1994