The Four Women of Auschwitz are Roza Robota, Ester Wajcblum, Ala Gertner and Regina Safirsztajn. Between them they organised the smuggling of small quantities of gunpowder out of the Union Werke munitions factory at Auschwitz over many months in 1944. The gunpowder was used by the male Sonderkommando in Crematorium IV to blow up that crematorium during the prisoner revolt of 7 October 1944. The four women were arrested in the search that followed, tortured by the SS for several months, and hanged at Auschwitz on 5 and 6 January 1945. Their hanging was the last public execution in the camp’s history. Soviet forces reached Auschwitz three weeks later.
The Union Werke factory
Union Werke was a German munitions company that operated a factory near the Auschwitz main camp from autumn 1942 onwards. The factory used Auschwitz prisoners as forced labour, including a workforce of around a thousand women drawn from the Birkenau women’s camp. The work involved producing detonators and other small explosive components. Each prisoner handled a small quantity of explosive material as part of her daily work. The factory was guarded but was not, apparently, expected to be a security risk; the SS assumed that the prisoners had no incentive to attempt sabotage and no organisational means to do so.
The four women worked in the factory throughout 1944. Roza Robota was a 23-year-old former member of the Hashomer Hatzair Zionist youth movement from Ciechanow in Poland. She had arrived at Auschwitz in November 1942 and survived more than two years there, longer than almost any other Jewish woman at the camp. Ala Gertner was a 32-year-old from Będzin. Regina Safirsztajn was a similar age, also from Poland. Ester Wajcblum was 20, from Warsaw. They came from different deportations and different parts of Poland and had become friends inside the camp.
The smuggling
From the spring of 1944 onwards, the four women each smuggled tiny amounts of explosive powder out of the factory. They hid the powder in scraps of cloth, in the lining of clothes, in folded paper packages tucked into their underclothes. The procedure was repeated, day after day, week after week. The risk was extreme: the SS conducted random searches of prisoners leaving the factory, and any prisoner found with explosive material would have been shot immediately. The women were taking an existential risk every working day for several months.
The smuggled powder was passed to the male Sonderkommando in the crematorium complex. The Sonderkommando were prisoners forced to operate the gas chambers and the crematoria. They had been planning a revolt for several months and had been preparing improvised explosive devices that they intended to use to destroy at least one of the crematorium buildings. The connection between the Union Werke women and the Sonderkommando was made through the underground prisoner organisation in the camp, which was made up largely of Polish political prisoners and which had elements at every part of the Auschwitz operation.
The revolt of 7 October 1944
The Sonderkommando revolt was triggered when the SS announced that part of the Sonderkommando workforce was about to be killed and replaced. The Sonderkommando knew this would happen periodically, because the SS did not want any of them alive long enough to give detailed evidence of what they had seen. They had been planning for some months but had not yet acted. The announcement forced their hand. On 7 October 1944 the Sonderkommando in Crematorium IV attacked their SS guards with hammers, axes and improvised firearms. They blew up Crematorium IV using the smuggled gunpowder. They killed three SS men and wounded several others. They tried to escape across the wire and into the surrounding fields. The SS counter-attacked with reinforcements. By the evening, around 450 of the 663 Sonderkommando in the camp had been killed. The four crematoria continued to operate.
The investigation
The SS examined the rubble of Crematorium IV and found gunpowder traces. They began an investigation of where the powder had come from. Suspicion fell on the Union Werke factory immediately. The SS arrested several women workers and tortured them for information. The torture continued for weeks. One of the women under questioning, broken by the torture, named Ala Gertner. Gertner under torture named the others. Roza Robota, when arrested, took responsibility for the smuggling and protected the wider underground organisation by saying it was her own initiative. The accuracy of the account is hard to recover, because none of the four women survived to give it.
The execution
The four women were hanged at Auschwitz on 5 and 6 January 1945, in two pairs, in front of the assembled women’s camp. The hanging was conducted in the standard public execution form: the prisoners on a wooden gallows in the Lagerstrasse, the camp’s main thoroughfare, with all available prisoners ordered to attend. According to the women who saw it, Roza Robota called out to the watching prisoners as she stood under the rope, telling them to be strong, that the war would soon be over, that they should remember what had happened. The Yiddish phrase she used was Chazak v’amatz, be strong and of good courage, the words Joshua spoke at the death of Moses.
Three weeks after the hanging, on 27 January 1945, Soviet troops entered Auschwitz. The crematoria they found had already been blown up by the retreating SS. The Sonderkommando revolt had partly destroyed Crematorium IV; the SS demolition completed the destruction of the others.
Why their story matters
The Four Women of Auschwitz are not as widely known as the male Sonderkommando, who have produced a substantial literature through their few survivors. The women left no memoirs because none of them lived. What is known about them comes from the testimony of women who were in the camp at the same time and who saw or heard parts of what they did. Their story is now part of the standard Holocaust narrative for two reasons. The first is the act itself: a sustained, deliberate, planned act of armed resistance carried out by women in the heart of the death camp, against odds that were not just impossible but visibly impossible. The second is what their resistance enabled: the only successful destruction of a Nazi gas chamber and crematorium by the prisoners forced to operate it, an act that did not save lives but that left a record of refusal that the SS could not erase.
See also
Sources
- Lore Shelley, The Union Kommando in Auschwitz, University Press of America, 1996
- Yuri Suhl, They Fought Back: The Story of the Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe, Crown, 1967
- USHMM: The Sonderkommando Revolt
- Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum: Roza Robota