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Women of Peace and Those Sided the Wrong of World War II

Khalid Elhassan November 20, 2020 32 min

World War II - Italian resistance movement — Women of the resistance in Italy. Wall Street Journal

29. This Heroine’s Last Words With a Noose Around Her Neck Were Words of Defiance

The Auschwitz-Birkenau uprising was crushed, and most escapees were killed or recaptured. 451 Sonderkommando died that day: about 250 were killed during the fighting, and another 200 were executed immediately afterward. Some were temporarily spared for interrogation, during which they were tortured into giving up names, including the names of the women who had smuggled the explosives. Ella Gartner, Regina Safirsztajn, Roza Robota, and Ester Wajcblum were seized.

They were made of stern stuff. Despite months of beatings, torture, electric shock to their genitals, and rape, they only gave the names of already-dead Sonderkommando. On January 5^th, 1945, the four heroines were hanged in front of the camp’s assembled women. With the noose around her neck, and just before the trapdoor dropped, Roza Robota shouted her last words: “Be strong and be brave!“

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.