Shul member Elizabeth Senigaglia submitted this story to The Shofar. “The story is especially dear to me,” she said. “When we first started sharing stories, Anna and I realized we had the same birth date — but with a huge difference. When I was born, she was 15 years old, and had been in the camp for more than a year.

“The uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto is one of the most well documented acts of Jewish resistance in modern Jewish history. Conversely, an equally significant act of rebellion and, in some ways more heroic, was the revolt of the Sonderkommando (units of Jewish slave laborers forced to burn corpses of gas chamber victims) in Crematorium IV in Birkenau. On Oct. 7, 1944, under a blue and cloudless sky, the most remarkable uprising within a Nazi extermination camp took place when the Sonderkommando succeeded in sabotaging a crematorium and igniting a rebellion.

“I first heard the story in 1980, told to me by my beloved friend and colleague, Anna Rosenthal, an eyewitness to the uprising. Anna was a 14-year-old Jewish girl, born in Preshov, Slovakia, when she was deported to Auschwitz on March 25, 1942. She was part of the first transport of 997 young Jewish girls to be entered into the slave labor force at the recently completed complex of Auschwitz ll, known as Birkenau.        “The following narrative represents the way Anna related the events to me. The awareness that it could have been any of us is never far from my thoughts.”