27. The Women Who Helped Spark Resistance in a Death Camp
Nineteen-year-old Ester Wajcblum and her younger sister Hana, aged fourteen, arrived at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and death camp one dismal day in the spring of 1943. Polish Jews, the siblings were among a minority of new arrivals spared from the gas chambers, and were put to work as slave labor in a munitions factory. There, they met Ella Gartner and Regina Safirsztajn, two women engaged in resistance against the Nazi regime. They soon included the newly-arrived Wajcblum sisters in a plan to mount resistance and launch a revolt.
Along with a fifth woman who worked in the camp’s clothes depot, Roza Robota, they began to smuggle explosives out of the munitions factory. Their destination: the men of the Sonderkommando (“special unit”) in a neighboring camp. The Sonderkommando were prisoners, usually Jewish, granted special privileges to dispose of corpses. The bodies were mostly of the Holocaust’s gas chambers’ victims, but also included prisoners who had perished of other causes. The women often smuggled explosives on or in the corpses of friends, sent to the Sonderkommando for disposal.
