Jewish Resistence in the Holocaust

More than a million of the Jews of Europe as well as tens of thousands of Gypsies and other inmates were murdered at the Auschwitz Birkenau extermination camp. The murder was conducted by placing the people in gas chambers and then burning the bodies in one of the four crematoria. The Nazis gave horrendous task of maintaining the facilities for murder, transferring the bodies from the gas chambers and burning them to the SonderKommando (special units).  The members of these units, which from an early stage, were made up solely of Jews, lived in better shacks, separate from the other inmates, and they received more suitable food than the rest of the inmates in the camp received. After three or four months of this work, the Nazis would kill all of the members of the unit, because they had seen and heard too much and would replace them with new people.

Since the members of the SonderKommando knew about this policy of the S.S. to kill them, they were subject to emotional stress beyond that created by their daily work. During the period in which the unit operated, there were a number of instances of attempted escape and uprising, which were exposed, and which lead to interrogation using torture, and the killing of the participants in these attempts, as well as of additional Jews, in order to deter similar attempts.

At the end of the summer of 1944, when the members of the SonderKommando units operating at that time understood that their days were numbered, and that they would soon all be killed, they decided to rebel. The rebel Jewish group including members who worked at the Union factory (for making artillery shells) aided the uprising by smuggling gunpowder out of the factory on the bodies of the women who worked making it. Despite the close watch of the Nazis, one of the members of the group, Rosa Rovota, succeeded in smuggling small amounts of gunpowder every time she returned from work. Robel, a Polish Jew who was a member of the SonderKommando received the explosive material from her, and Borodin, a Russian technician, was able to produce a hand grenade using the material. Forbesky, the electrician, whose work granted him access to the SonderKommando, served as the liaison between the people involved. On October 6^th or 7^th, 1944, when the members of the S.S. came to take the 300 members of the SonderKommando to slaughter them in the gas chambers, this was the signal to the crematoria workers to launch the uprising. Without waiting for the coordinated actions that had been planned between all of the crematoria workers for an ongoing operation, the workers at Crematoria 4 began to scream loudly at their guards and then they fell upon them with axes and hammers.

There are no precise details of this heroic uprising, which was the largest in the annals ofAuschwitz. What is known is that the rebels succeeded in killing the S.S. company commander and in burning the crematoria, although their attempt to blow up the entire structure was only partially successful. At the same time, the rebels at Crematoria 2 threw the German overseer into the crematoria, killed three S.S. guards and wounded another 12. They also cut the telephone line, and panicked the guards, and 600 inmates were able to escape. A company of S.S. members was called up and every last one of the escapees was either caught or shot after being recaptured.

Crematoria 4 never returned to service.
  

On October 10th, 1944, four young Jewish women were caught: Rosa Rovota, Ella Gartner, Esteher Vichkablum and Regina Saperstein, and were accused of smuggling explosive material to the members of the SonderKommando. The youngest of them was 12 years old and the oldest (Rovota) was 16. On January 6th, 1945, following horrible torture, during which they did not break down, the four were hanged in front of all of the other female inmates. Less than two weeks later, on January 18th,  the approaching Soviet soldiers forced the S.S. to start to evacuate the camp. Just as she was being hanged, Rosa Rovota shouted to the rest of the female inmates, “Be Strong and Brave.” Theirs were the last executions carried out at Auschwitz.