On Oct. 7, 1944, the Sonderkommando assigned to Crematorium lV, having learned they were to be killed, revolted against the SS. The uprising was not a spontaneous outburst of anger against the SS, but was a carefully thought-out plan that overcame incredible logistical odds.

The key players were a group of young Jewish women, among them, Ester Wajcblum, Ala Gärtner, and Regina Safirsztain, who for months had been smuggling small amounts of gunpowder from an ammunitions factory within the Auschwitz complex to men and women in the camp’s resistance movement. The girls wrapped the gunpowder in bits of cloth or paper, hid the small packages on their bodies, and passed them along the chain to Róza Robota, a leader of the movement. Sonderkommando used the gunpowder to create makeshift bombs and grenades. Preparations came to a head on Oct. 7, when one of the prisoners walked calmly up to a Nazi officer and struck him with a hammer.

Chaos followed. The SS were attacked by prisoners with knives, hammers and explosives.  Some prisoners cut the barbed wire, hoping to flee into the woods. Three SS men were killed, another dozen injured. Inevitably, the Nazis crushed the revolt: The escaped men were        captured and executed; nearly 250 prisoners died in the fighting, and guards killed an additional 200 once the uprising was suppressed.

Shortly after the event and its aftermath, the SS identified the four women instrumental in supplying the explosives: Ester, Ala, Regina and Róza. Tortured for several weeks, the girls were hanged on Jan. 6, 1945: Two were hanged at the morning roll call, two at evening roll call, in the women’s camp, an example for all to witness. As they were dying, the women shouted “Revenge.” Three weeks later, Auschwitz Birkenau was liberated by the advancing Red Army.

“The revolt at Birkenau was born of years of enslavement, degradation, frustration and hopelessness.  There was nothing at all to lose. What must be remembered today is the courage of the girls and the dignity of their deaths. They have been memorialized in a monument at Yad Vashem. It is for us, the living, to pass on their story as I had promised Anna I would — so that this, too, will become part of our more than 3,000 years of collective Jewish history.”

—Elizabeth Senigaglia