24. Smuggling in the Means of Resistance
The quartet of Ella Gartner, Regina Safirsztajn, and sisters Ester and Hana Wajcblum, engaged in a nerve-wracking conspiracy in 1944. The went through with it over a period of months, with the ever-present knowledge that if they were discovered, they would be executed. They painstakingly hid small amounts of explosives from the munitions factory in which they toiled. With the help of Roza Robota, who worked in the clothes depot, they smuggled them out with ingenious methods such as false the bottoms of food trays, or secreted them in the nooks of corpses sent for cremation. The explosives made it to the men of the Sonderkommando, who fashioned them into makeshift bombs and grenades. They were stashed away, along with knives, axes, other makeshift weapons, and a few pistols smuggled in by partisans.
The goal was to embark on resistance and launch a revolt in which the death camp’s gas chambers and crematoria would be destroyed, and simultaneously facilitate a mass breakout and escape. On the morning of October 7th, 1944, the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz’s Crematorium IV were warned that orders had been issued for their liquidation. During a roll call that day, a prisoner calmly walked up to a Nazi officer, shouted “Hurrah!“, and hit his head with a hammer. The revolt was on, and in the chaos that followed, the camp’s guards were attacked on all sides by prisoners who wielded knives, hammers, clubs, and threw explosives. One particularly brutal guard was seized and thrown alive into a crematorium.