9 Years Ago For Stealing Explosives That Blew Up Crematorium

She was one of four women martyred 50 years ago, hanged by Germans for stealing explosives that blew up an Auschwitz crematorium on Oct. 7, 1944.

So wrote Ester Wajcblum on the day she was hanged:

"I hear the footsteps of the prisoners banging on the ground above my head. . . . Through the bars of my window the stingy gray ray of light tries to break in. The ray of sunset broken by shadows of many pairs of passing feet. The familiar sounds of the camp. The screams of the `Kapos' . . . all those hated sounds. . . ."

A contingent of those who will never forget is gathering now at Auschwitz in Poland for a ceremony tomorrow honoring the four women: Wajcblum, Rosa Robota, Regina Safirsztain and Ala Gertner. The group includes survivors of the camp, historians, filmmakers and relatives of the slain.

Allan Mallenbaum of Plainview, N.Y., one of the organizers and a second cousin of Robota, is there with his daughter Sandy, a New York attorney. Anna Heilman of Nepean, Ontario, who is also there, is the sister of Wajcblum.

To them, the women are symbols of a heroic resistance movement that was underreported in early historical accounts of the Holocaust, where Jews were portrayed as marching meekly to their deaths.

"This is an attempt to dispel the myth that Jews did not fight back," said Michael Berenbaum, director of the U.S. Holocaust Research Institute of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. "Resistance broke out everywhere when everybody knew they were going to die. There were hundreds of instances involving thousands of people. There was resistance at each of the death camps: Sobibor, Treblinka, Belzec. The resistance was people without young children or old parents, people responsible only for themselves."

Women played a key part in the Auschwitz uprising now being commemorated, an uprising that was eight months in the making by the underground inside and outside the death camp, according to historical accounts and current accounts of participants and survivors, who describe the plot:

In 1944, the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp complex sprawled over 16,000 acres over which towered five giant crematoria where Jewish bodies were burned 24 hours a day. By 1945, an estimated 1 million to 1.5 million Jews had been killed and burned there, a rate of genocide that averages about 1,000 bodies a day.

The complex had a relatively comfortable section for the workers, all of whom were male, at the gas chambers and crematoria - the Sonderkommando, as they were called - who were fed well and slept in individual beds. But they were all killed in the gas chambers every few months.

Another part of the complex housed the women who worked at the munitions factory. Heilman was one of them. Some worked in the Pulverraum (powder room), filling incendiary devices with explosive black powder.

Starting in the winter of 1944, and over an eight-month period, Jewish women in the powder room smuggled out black powder, a teaspoonful a day.

One of the women who survived the camps was Rose Grunapfel Meth, who now lives in New York City. "We put it in little rags, torn from an undershirt or whatever we had, and put in our bosom or pockets. When there were body searches, of course we would have been shot right away. We made holes in our pockets, and if we saw from afar that there was going to be a body search, we let the gunpowder dribble out of our pockets.

"We decided, those of us who participated, that if we're going to die, at least let us die for something; that's why we undertook the smuggling of the gunpowder."

The black powder was passed to Robota, a 23-year-old woman born in Poland, who delivered it to the Sonderkommando. It is unknown how many hands the smuggled material passed through or how she got it to the men, because most of the participants in the plot were killed.

On Oct. 7, 1944, as Jozef Garlinsky writes in his book "Fighting Auschwitz," the men in the Sonderkommando got word they were about to be killed. They convened, intending to start the uprising by night.

"They were surprised during their deliberations by the Kapo," Garlinsky writes. They killed him on the spot so as not to be turned in to the SS command. They were forced to begin fighting by day, disarming SS men, cutting the barbed, electrified wire, throwing an SS man into the burning furnace alive, beating another to death, blowing up a crematorium and fleeing to the forest.

How many participated in the revolt is not known. Within hours, the Nazis killed 450 men, mowing them down with machine guns. In the next few days, five women and 14 men were interrogated and tortured for information about the underground.

On Jan. 5, 1945, the four women were hanged at a public ceremony the other women factory workers were required to witness, four women whose statue is enshrined as part of a permanent exhibit at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in Israel.

Thirteen days after they died, Auschwitz was closed down by the SS, as they fled from the advance of Russian liberators.