Rosa Robota
Rosa Robota and the Holocaust Resistance
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On Holocaust Day We Forget . .
By Allan E. Mallenbaum
May 5th,
2005 is a day for remembrance. The Knesset
(Israels
Parliament) established 27 Nissan as
Yom Hashoah VeHagevurah
(Devastation and Heroism
Day). Nations throughout the world follow
this
designation, much as they follow the complex calculation
instituted by the Catholic Church to determine the date of
Easter.
Recently
weve shortened the name, dropping the words
and
heroism, recalling only the
devastation. We recall that six million
of our
brothers and sisters were slaughtered, burned, shot,
hanged,
starved, gassed, and tortured to death by the
German civilization which
found them guilty of the crime of
born Jewish.
But weve forgotten the
second part of the earlier designation,
and
heroism.
Weve forgotten that there were proud Jews
throughout Europe, men
and women, boys and girls, who
fought back against their German
killers. They
fought against the mightiest military force ever before
seen,
an armed war machine which over-ran countries like
Poland and
France in mere weeks, which conquered
nations without firing a single
shot. These Jews
fought although they knew that under the German rule
of
collective responsibility, innocent
civilians would be punished
for their resistance.
They fought alone, against hostile local
populations who
would not feed, shelter or give weapons to Jewish
partisans. But they fought, actively and bravely, with every
weapon at
their disposal, in every circumstance
imaginable. In order to
understand the little-known
activities of these Jewish heroes and
heroines, we're going
to examine in some detail just one such event
within our
rich, enormous, but little-known, History of Jewish
Resistance.
Just as the
term "Holocaust" is used as the paradigm of genocide at
its worst, so the terrible word "Auschwitz" is used to
represent the
worst of the Shoah. But just what
was this place called Auschwitz?
Only those who
lived through it can really know.
Within this killing factory were
massive structures, built with the
help of many German
firms and local sub-contractors, all of whom had to
know
their intended purpose. When they were
completed, these furnaces
began to devour the bodies of
the Jews who had been robbed of their
breath by German
cyanide inside the factory walls. Millions of Jewish
bodies were efficiently reduced to ashes by German
factories of death.
There
was a detachment of prisoners assigned to remove the
dead
from the gas chambers and feed them into the ovens
or open pits. This
unit was called
"Sonderkommando," "Special Command" or "Special
Task
Force." Each day shift and each night shift at
each of the four
crematoria in Birkenau - Auschwitz II -
had about 84 prisoners, always
men, almost always
(97%) Jews, assigned to each Sonderkommando.
After
incinerating the bodies of their fellow Jews, the bones
and ashes from
the crematoria and burning pits were
ground to a fine powder and
scattered into ponds, a larger
pond near crematorium IV, and a smaller
pond near
crematorium II. Ive seen both ponds still
there today.
This is the
background. This the situation into which the
Jews
were forced. How could they resist? How
could anyone fight back in
such circumstances?
Resistance took many
forms. Isaac Kowalski, himself a hero of the
Vilna
Underground, has devoted years of his life in Brooklyn,
NY, to
the compilation of a 4-volume anthology detailing
Armed Jewish
Resistance from 1939 to 1945. He
has devoted almost 2,500 pages to
groups of Jews who
fought back, preserving the heroic histories of tens
of
thousands of Jews who took up arms against the
Germans. Do you know
any of their names?
For some of our brothers and
sisters, it was an act of resistance
to throw oneself on the
camps electrified barbed wire. This was
a
supreme act of resistance, an act that deprived the SS
of the pleasure
of controlling the death of another
Jew. Do you know any of their
names?
For some, resistance
was refusing to work in the Sonderkommando, as
did an
entire group of Greek Jews. These proud Jews
from Greece
declined to do the German's dirty work of
murdering and burning their
fellow Jews. For this
they were all killed immediately. Do you know
any
of their names?
For
some, resistance meant pleading for
Vengeance – nekomo
– in
their own blood as death approached.
Resistance meant stealing food or
clothing for other
prisoners, or sabotaging the production equipment in
the
slave-labor plants, or carrying messages for the camp
underground.
Resistance might even mean risking the
death penalty by fasting on Yom
Kippur. Do you
know any of their names?
For some, for those fortunate enough to have escaped
the
deportations, resistance was direct, and costly to the
German enemy.
In virtually every country, proud
Jewish men and women studied the art
of war, learned to
kill their people's killers, succeeded in fighting
back with
pride and with distinction. Do you know any of
their names?
Its
been estimated that 30,000 Jews fought in partisan
groups in
the forests of Eastern Europe. There
were 30 all-Jewish partisan
units, all-Jewish because many
partisans hated the Jews more than they
hated the
Germans and sometimes even hunted down the Jewish
fighters
and killed them. But Jews did fight
side-by-side with other anti-Nazis
in 21 combined units in
Europe; many of these units were Italian
partisans who
didnt have the same anti-Jewish feelings that
were so
common in Eastern Europe. Of these tens
of thousands of armed Jewish
partisans, do you know any
of their names?
Jews
were rounded up and forced into more than 400 sealed
ghettoes
throughout Europe, ranging in size from
Warsaws half million people,
to smaller ones
holding a few hundred. In every ghetto, there
was
Jewish resistance, sometimes only spiritual, often
armed revolts.
Youve surely heard of the
Warsaw ghetto revolt, maybe even of the
Vilna ghetto
uprising, but do you know the names of any of the
leaders
of the revolts in Kovno, in Minsk, Bialystok,
Lachva, and at least 60
others larger ghettoes?
Jewish leaders formed active
resistance movements - often Labor or
Revisionist (Betar)
youth members - in almost every extermination camp,
work
camp, transit camp, forced-labor camp, prisoner of war
camp, and
internment camp Do you know any of
their names?
Let's turn
the calendar back almost 61 years, to October 7th,
1944. That year it was a Saturday. The
newspapers of the world
reported that Allied invasion forces
were pouring into Albania and
Greece. U.S. Armed
Forces were pushing towards the German industrial
city,
Cologne. Russian troops had invaded Hitler's
satellite,
Hungary. In a single day, more than
2,200 American aircraft struck war
production centers in
Berlin and elsewhere in the Nazi heartland. It
was
the start of the finish for The
Führer's Thousand Year
Reich.
There,
on that day, in that vast Jewish cemetery called
Auschwitz,
at the killing factory called crematorium
IV, something unusual
happened . . . .
Although some of the details have been lost in the ashes,
and other
details are subject to disagreement by historians,
we know that the
Jews of Sonderkommando Squad 59 B
revolted against their
slave-masters. They attacked
Germans. They blew up crematoria. They
fled to
the forests. Zalman Leventhal, who had been in
the
Sonderkommando since 1942, coordinated the plans
for the uprising. He
recorded various events in
small notebooks, which he then buried in
different places in
the soil near crematorium III.
Eighteen years later, on Oct.
17th, 1962, the jar containing one of
the notebooks was
discovered. From it we learned many unfortunate
details: that the help agreed upon by the Polish Camp
Military Command,
led by Poland's future prime minister,
Josef Cyrankiewicz, somehow
never appeared. The
Jews had to fight alone. A Kapo walked in
unexpectedly and the element of surprise was lost.
The timing was
unfortunate. And those who escaped were
all eventually recaptured.
So what did their heroic revolt accomplish? In the
final analysis,
a gas chamber-crematorium complex -
Crematorium IV - was actually
destroyed. The
Jewish Revolt in the heart of Auschwitz achieved
something
that all of the combined Allied Armed Forces were
unable -
or perhaps just unwilling - to accomplish:
They demolished a German
factory of death, and stopped the gassing
and burning of
Jews there forever.
Other
crematoria were set ablaze as well, and several SS men
and a
German Kapo were killed by the prisoners who were
armed with little
more than home-made hand
grenades. These weapons had been
manufactured
from empty sardine-cans and from stolen
schwartzpulver, "black powder,"
by Walenty Filatow, who
managed to supply alarm clocks for parts, and
by Godel
Zylber, a mechanic, also from Ciechanow, who now lives
in
Canada. These members of the Jewish
Underground were instructed by a
Russian prisoner named
Borodin who had some knowledge of ordnance.
Every active participant who
escaped in the only successful
uprising in the history of
Auschwitz was recaptured and methodically
murdered by
the Germans. The Master Race
was badly shaken. They
were made fearfully aware
that their end was fast approaching.
The full story of the history-making
Revolt of the Sonderkommando
really began eight months
earlier, when Noah Zabludowicz, from the town
of
Ciechanów, a male member of the camp
underground, made contact with
a trusted young woman he
knew from home. Zabludowicz worked in the
camp
as an electrician. This allowed him to move about
to different
sections of the camp Both he and the
young woman had been members of
one of the Zionist
youth groups in their home-town, a rural community
north
of Warsaw.
Rosa Robota was then 21 years old. She came
from a modest family,
with one sister and an ailing
brother. Her father had been a
struggling
shop-keeper in the Jewish section of town.
She had been
sent to the camp in 1941, probably on
November 7th.
Unlike the
other members of her family, all of whom were
murdered,
Rosa was selected as fit for
slave labor and was assigned to sleep in
the women's
section of Birkenau, or Auschwitz II, in section
B Ib,
in block 6, a wooden
barrack, not far from the Effektenslager, the
Personal
Effects Depot to which she was assigned. Rosa was a
natural
leader and had many friends in the camp.
Among them were some of the
young women and girls
who worked in Weichsel Union
Metallwerke, a
munitions factory.
Rosa was eager to fight back,
eager to avenge the slaughter of her
family and of her
people. What she did must have seemed only
natural
in that environment - not very "heroic" at
all. At heart, she was a
small town girl who signed
the backs of pictures with sentimental
wishes, wishes that
the Nazis would soon make impossible to keep.
So,
over a period of time, young Rosa cautiously
approached a few of these
youthful slave laborers, those
who worked in the carefully guarded
"Pulverraum," the
powder room.
Some of
them categorically rejected her plan to steal minute
quantities of schwartzpulver, that explosive black powder
they
carefully measured and inserted into each artillery
fuse. Others
hesitated, afraid that they wouldn't be strong
enough to remain silent
if they were caught and
tortured. But a few of these brave young
women,
certainly fewer than a dozen, accepted this chance to
avenge the
injustices which they and the Jewish nation had
experienced every day
for years.
These gutsy Jewish saboteurs -
usually fewer than five or six on
each work shift - passed
the pilfered material indirectly, through an
elaborate
network, to Rosa, who often arranged for unwitting
accomplices to store the precious schwartzpulver until she
could
transfer it, in small lots, to the men of the
underground. This is
how
the men of the
Sonderkommando were armed
for the revolt.
Two days after the revolt, Rosa
Robota and three other women were
imprisoned by the S.
S., beaten, tortured, interrogated, and then
mysteriously
released. Two days later, the Underground's worst
fears
were realized. Rosa was imprisoned again,
and tortured continuously in
the infamous Blok 11 of
Auschwitz-I. Rosa was the only one who could
actually identify all of the men in the camps
Jewish Underground.
Would she succumb to the
Nazi torture and expose the entire Underground
network?
No! Throughout
her ordeal, throughout weeks of torture worse than
anything we can conceive of, Rosa
revealed nothing.
After Rosa had been in the torture Blok for about 2
months, Rosa's
friend from Ciechanów, Noah, was
smuggled into her basement cell to
speak to her - with the
help of Jacob, the Jewish Kapo of the feared
Blok
11. She had been beaten so badly that Noah
couldn't recognize
her. Rosa wasn't concerned
about her own brutal treatment and about
her own
impending fate. In that final conversation before
her death,
Rosa felt compelled to assure Noah that
she had revealed no one's
name, and she begged him to
continue the struggle against the German
enemy.
On the 6th of January 1945
– 21 Tevet 5705 – Rosa and three of
her
suspected collaborators were hanged. Two of
them were hanged in front
of the assembled day shift, two
of them before the assembled night
shift, in the last
hanging to take place before the Germans
evacuated
the camps only eleven days later.
If she had weakened under the
German's torment, Rosa could have
implicated dozens of
men and women; the other three could have
implicated all
of their fellow workers. But they all remained
silent.
Today, more than
sixty years later, there are hundreds of children,
and
grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, living in Israel, in
The
United States, in Canada, France, Australia, and
elsewhere, who would
never have been born if Rosa and
her three martyred fellow-prisoners
had not summoned the
courage to withstand those months of Nazi
brutality without
revealing the identities of their comrades.
On May 5th, 2005 we cannot
recall solely the devastation without
also proudly
acknowledging the forgotten heroism. We Jews recall the
Egyptian midwives who defied Pharaoh and refused to kill
the newborn
Israelites. We Jews recall the assimilated
Persian Jewess, Esther, who
risked death by approaching
the king to save her people. We Jews
recall the
battles of Joshua, David, Bar Kochba. So how
can we as Jews
forget the sacrifices that these four young
women made in the spirit of
all of the other Jewish women
and men of the Bible, thousands of years
in the past?
The world
must never forget that from the bowels of German terror,
Jewish men and women, Jewish boys and girls, rose up
and fought their
enemies! The heroes and heroines of our
history made Jewish Survival
possible over the generations,
over the centuries, over the millennia,
even until this day,
and we have not forgotten them.
So too, Rosa,
Estusia, Regina and Alina, you have made us proud of
the
Jewish heroes of our own century, Jews who
disregarded the odds and
fought the Nazi beasts
throughout Europe. Rosa Robota, Estusia
Wajcblum, Regina Safirsztain, Alina Gartner, the nations
of the world
must remember you, and our nation can never
forget you! That is the
reason for Yom Hashoah
VeHagevurah.
The Rosa Robota Foundation is seeking contact with
any person
who has any first-hand knowledge of the events
described above, no
matter how minimal. Please
contact the Foundation at RRF@USA.Com,
or
at 1-516 349-0425, or at P.O. Box 24, Plainview, NY
11803-0024, USA.
© Copyright
2005 Allan E. Mallenbaum. All Rights
Reserved.
Reproduction without this notice is
prohibited.
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