women to escape. Alas, they could not achieve much. They managed to flee to a distance of several kilometres from the camp. But they were surrounded by other [guards] which were called in by telephone from the neighboring camps [i.e., the SS garrisons at the Auschwitz subcamps]. Alas, all were shot while escaping....

Who is able to gauge the courage and sacrifice of our three comrades who remained... in order to blast the crematorium and at the same time to lay down their lives consciously... [so that the women should escape?] and finally they laid down their own lives. . . . Laid down in full consciousness, with complete self-denial. Why, nobody forced them to do so at that moment. They could have tried to escape together with all the others and yet they renounced it for the good of the cause. And therefore who is able to gauge the courage of our comrades and the heroism of their deed? Yes, yes, there the best, truly the best and the most worthy men perished who were capable of living and dying with dignity....

And this will be forever with us and with all those who will be able to evaluate our situation. They will remain [in our thoughts?] and will be remembered with gratitude. . . .

And if anybody knows anything about what was happening here, he knows it thanks to our exertions and our sacrifices [...] thanks to the fact that we had risked our lives... [W]e did it simply because we felt [it] our duty. [W]e did... [everything] that we possibly could [. . .] [in return] we demanded nothing.... [W]e shall continue our work, we shall try to preserve all this for the world. We shall simply hide our [journals] in the soil.... because we must... show all this to the world in the order in which it was developing, with a chronicler's system. [This diary] is dedicated to my closest ones, in honour of their memory [Editor's note: here Lewental lists his comrades in the Sonderkommando along with their places of birth: Jesel Warszawski, born in Warsaw, arrived from Paris[:] Salmen Gradowski (Suwalki); Lajb (Herszko) Panusz (Lomza)[;] Ajzyk Kalniak ([Lomza])[;] Josef Deresinski (Luna near Grodno); Lajb Langfus (from Makow Mazowiecki]), born in Warsaw, today still [working] in crem[atorium] [;] Jankiel Handelsman RadomParis[,] today in [the bunker] [i.e., for punishment or gassing][.] The author of these words Salmen Lewental (Ciechanow), [working] today in crem[atorium III.]

The Story of Roza Robota

Born in 1921 in Ciechanow, Poland, Roza Robota was active in the resistance in her hometown after the German occupation in 1939. She earned a reputation as reliable and fearless. Thus, following her deportation to AuschwitzBirkenau in 1942, where she became one of the first women to be incarcerated in the newly constructed barracks of the women's camp at Birkenau, the camp underground established contact with her in 1943. During 1944 Robota helped

to smuggle small amounts of explosives out of the WeichselUnion ammunition factory to the Jewish Sonderkommando men who mutinied in the first week of October 1944. Subsequently arrested and tortured, she steadfastly refused to divulge any information about the resistance groups. Roza Robota was hanged on 6 January 1945, a few days before the Red Army arrived to liberate Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The following selection recounts the courageous activities of Roza Robota as told in Ingrid Strobl, Saq nie, du gehst den letzten Weq: Frauen im bewaffneten Widerstand gegen Faschismus und deutsche Besatzuna (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1991), 297–300. Translation by Patricia Heberer

The trains with the Jews from Ciechanow drove directly to the ramp at Birkenau. Roza Robota, twenty-one years old, knew what was in store for her fellow sufferers. She was a member of the leftist Zionist pioneer group, Haschomer Hazair, and helped with the Jewish resistance movement before the ghetto was liquidated. Three days after invading Poland, the Germans had occupied Ciechanow, and now they were transporting the Jewish inhabitants to the gas chambers.

While Roza's parents were driven to the "showers" along with the masses of deported persons, the SS-men picked out Roza and a few other men and women. Before they died, they were to serve as work-slaves. Roza was assigned to the clothing storehouse. Most of the other women were ordered to work in the Weichsel-Union factory, a subsidiary of the Krupp Works. In Weichsel-Union about a thousand prisoners produced detonators for grenades. The women worked in the so-called powder pavilion, the unhealthiest and most heavily guarded section.

Roza Robota had not been in Birkenau very long when the camp underground made contact with her. She was known to be reliable and brave; therefore, she was given one of the most dangerous assignments. She was to organize the explosives for the bombs that would be used in the planned uprising. On behalf of Israel Gutman and Joshua Lejfer, two Jewish members of the underground leadership, Noah Zabludowicz, who knew Roza from Ciechanow, explained to her what this would require and asked if she would be willing to take on the assignment. Roza Robota immediately accepted. One evening after work, Roza secretly met with the other women from Ciechanow, told them about the planned uprising, and asked for their help. They were to steal explosives during work, and during the night shift, which was not very strictly supervised, they would smuggle them out of the factory and give them to Roza. The women were easily convinced. They were happy to be able to do something. "We can do it, and it depends entirely upon us," one of them, Esther Wajsblum, said. "Thousands will die, but perhaps someone will be saved. We cannot allow millions to be murdered, secret from the

rest of the world. It is our duty to do what we can to make it easier for a mass escape. . . . We cannot go like cattle to the slaughterhouse. We must offer resistance."

Night after night, twenty Jewish women, forced laborers working in the powder pavilion of the Weichsel-Union factory, smuggled out explosives in tiny containers. They hid them in their mess-tins or in the knots of their head scarves, and they made it safely through security every time. Roza collected the nightly "rations' and handed them over to a male comrade from Ciechanow. Afterwards the explosives passed through many hands before they made it to Filatov, a Russian prisoner of war and explosives expert who manufactured the bombs. However, the uprising never took place. Again and again something went wrong, something prevented it. The Sonderkommando, the prisoners who were assigned to work in the crematoria, became impatient. Their situation was the most desperate. Every day they shoved piles of corpses into the ovens, and for a long time now they had been unable to bear their work. Several of them had taken their own lives. Their last hope was that the uprising would at least save the 400,000 Hungarian Jews who made up one of the last mass transports to Birkenau. When that hope also proved to be in vain, they decided to take matters into their own hands and act independently of the continually failed plans of the underground leadership. On October 7, 1944, they rose up, killed several SS-men, and managed to blow up one of the four crematoria, thus rendering it forever useless. They themselves tried to flee, but all were killed in a storm of bullets.

The political section of the camp SS immediately began their investigation. The explosives were unquestionably traced back to the Weichsel-Union factory. Three weeks later, after they had arrested and released several women, they arrested three women from the powder pavilion: Esther Wajsblum, Ella Gertner, and Regina Saphirstein, and, for reasons unknown, Roza Robota, who was still working in the clothing storehouse. All four were cruelly tortured; however, the SS treated Roza Robota with the greatest brutality, as they suspected her, and correctly so, of having direct connections with the underground. Every day she was brought to the cellar of the infamous Block 11,

Auschwitz's torture chamber. When she, now only a bloody clump of flesh, could no longer walk, they brought in two women-attendants to continue the torture. The members of the camp underground, with whom Roza Robota had direct contact, prepared themselves for the worst. They knew that no one could withstand such tortures. However, Roza withstood them. Noah Zabludowicz, her old comrade from Ciechanow, convinced Jacob, the Kapo from Block 11, to let him into Roza's cell. Jacob got the guards drunk and brought Noah to the cellar. Noah Zabludowicz, who survived Auschwitz, later gave an account of this meeting.

"I had the privilege of being the last one to see Roza. This was a few days before she was executed. At night . . . I went into the bunker of Block 11 and saw the cells and the dark hallways. I heard the moaning of the condemned and was horribly affected by it. Jacob lead me to Roza's cell. ... When my eyes had become used to the darkness, I saw a figure, wrapped in shredded clothes, lying on the cement floor. She turned her head toward me. I could barely recognize her. After a few moments of silence, she began to speak. She described the sadistic methods used by the Germans during the interrogation. No human being can withstand it. She told me that she had taken all the blame and that no one else was in danger. She had betrayed no one. I tried to console her, but she did not listen to me. 'I know what I have done, and I also know what awaits me,' she said. She asked that the others continue their work. 'It is easier to die,' she said, 'when you know that the others will go on.'

999

On January 6, 1945, six days before the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army, the four women were hanged on the camp grounds where roll call wss held. Esther Wajsblum's sister, Hana, one of the forced laborers in the powder pavilion, later gave an account of the execution.

66

"... Suddenly, my eyes saw the field between Blocks 4 and 5. What kind of roll call is this? . . . I lifted my head; right in front of me I saw the gallows. I realized what was about to happen.... Silence fell over the grounds. I heard the quick breathing, the restrained sobs and tears. They walked to the gallows. Their heads held high, their eyes looking forward, far away to freedom. Lost freedom. The banging of the chairs that were pulled out from under them. They died."

Danish Resistance

During 1944 active resistance against the German occupying forces in Denmark increased. One tactic was the calling of general strikes. In direct response the Germans disarmed all Danish policemen and threatened the occupation of all

government buildings. On 19 September the Danish police exchanged gunfire with the Germans outside Amalienborg Palace, the royal residence in Copenhagen, and several German sailors were killed. The newspaper PM printed the following story about the resistance on 20 September 1944.

Danish Police

Battle Nazis in Copenhagen

Emergency State Declared as Resistance Rises in Denmark

By United Press

STOCKHOLM, Sept. 20.-Danish guards killed seven German sailors and wounded others yesterday in battle before Amalienborg Palace, Copenhagen residence of King Christian X, Danish sources report. The second general strike within five days is said to be sweeping the Danish capital. The Germans have disarmed all policemen but their own und imposed a state of "police emergency."

Street barricades are reported springing up in Copenhagen, and there was shooting in several parts of the city yesterday, the Danish Press Service says.

At 11 a.m., the Danish police reinforced the palace guard after hearing that the Germans intended. to occupy all government buildings and dismiss the police, the press service reports. Streets around Amalienborg were blocked with barbed wire, which was pushed aside at one time to allow Quoen Alexandra to pass through when she returned from a shopping tour. The German sailors moved toward the palace guards, and were repelled. repelled. They promptly called for fresh troops and heavier weapons and surrounded the entire

Nazis Plead 'Mistake'

At 3:25 p.m., after the German sailors had been killed and two wounded, and a Danish palace official hurt seriously, the Germans withdrew from Amalienborg, Swedish dispatches from Copenhagen say. The Germans are said to have declared the entire action was a "mistake" since the King "naturally is entitled to keep his Palace Guard."

Swedish dispatches add that King Christian was in the palace and was forced to take refuge in the cellars during the height of the fighting in the streets. (A Stockholm dispatch of the London Daily Mail says that at one time the King, the Queen and the royal family stood on a palace balcony while Danes and Germans exchanged shots.)

Take Over Police

Danes last weekend called a 48hour strike to protest the deportation of some patriots to Germany and the Swedish TT Agency, quoting reliable sources, said that a new general strike began in Copenhagen at noon yesterday, a few hours after the Germans began disarming Danish police.

Only utilities and railroads were excepted from the strike order.

German occupation authorities accused the Danish police of giving both direct and indirect support to Danish patriots, whom the Germans call "saboteurs, murderers and Communists," the German controlled Danish home radio said.

The Danish radio said that Danish police, as excepted from Gernian occupation police and SS troops, "ceased to function" throughout Denmark at noon yesterday, and that Germans took over their duties.

Resistance in France

George Millar

After his capture in North Africa in 1942, British prisoner of war George Millar was interned in Italian and German prison camps. In late 1943 Millar escaped and circuitously made his way to England via France and Spain. In England he became a member of the British intelligence organization known as the Special Operations Executive, or S.O.E. Created by Winston Churchill in July 1940, the S.O.E. worked covertly to assist resistance groups and wreak havoc behind enemy lines throughout Europe in anticipation of the Allied invasion of the continent. Shortly before D-Day, George Millar parachuted into France in order to work with the French resistance groups (Maquis) actively combating the Germans in eastern France. In the following excerpt, Millar explains the cooperation of the S.O.E. with French saboteurs during the final months of German occupation.

Reprinted from George Millar, Waiting in the Night: A Story of the Maquis, Told by One of Its Leaders (New York: Doubleday, 1946), 80-84, 273-74.

That night we went out to try to work a little. The objective was Mouchard railway station, we were told. It was Mathieu's team who were attacking the station, but they had agreed to let Albert and myself go along as observers. Fat Face, wearing a raincoat and a slung Sten gun, called for us at 11 P.M. Albert and I, both in our leather jackets, looked like the film conception of a couple of Soviet agents going out to work. Each of us carried a big .45 automatic with three magazines. I wore soft shoes. At night I detest making a noise even if I am with a lot of other people who do. And I was coward enough always when I went out on night jobs to envisage the possibility of having to run away. I had already had experience against the German at night, and knew that the nicest thing about him was his refusal ever to discard his own heavy, noisy boots.

Taking field paths, after one hour's walk in the moonlight we reached Mathieu's house, one of a row on the outskirts of Mouchard. It was already after midnight, and there was nobody about in the streets. But there was quite a crowd in Mathieu's cellar, where they were making up the charges.

If instructors from the training schools in England could have seen these Frenchmen making up charges, the cellar would have looked to them like Dante's Inferno. Every conceivable school "don't" was being done. And we were unable to say a word. The atmosphere was so strained that if either of us had merely uttered a "Don't you think that perhaps it might be better to ..." we should have been forbidden the trip. I personally was consumed with a passionate curiosity.

Curiosity to see whether these odd, sausage-shaped lumps of explosive would really blow things up.

In a choking voice Albert, who took those things much more seriously, asked Mathieu if we could have a meeting to discuss the operation the following day, and if he and I could then make suggestions about anything that we might find to criticize on the night's operation. Mathieu agreed to this brusquely, but, to my mind, with little intention of arranging any such thing.

When the young man who had been making up the charges, a long thin village Don Juan, had flung them roughly into a dirty sack, we left on the job without any orders whatsoever. I choked with laughter as we moved down the road in a clattering huddle. We were all armed with pistols, Stens, or rifles. But there was no scout ahead. And since it was a built-up area, they made the most appalling noise with their nailed boots.

Every hundred yards I picked out a line of retreat or some cover on both flanks. I knew that if anything happened like meeting a German patrol (a not unlikely eventuality) the whole lot would break, and run, since nobody had been told to do anything else. It was better to be prepared.

However, we came without incident to the railway station, which is some distance away from Mouchard. We left the station on our left, crossed the rails a little farther on, and came to the signal box. It worried me that this should be the objective for all those vast, sausage-shaped blobs of explosive. However, I followed Mathieu, like the rest. We trooped into the signal box, where the man at the desk in the corner said the French equivalent of: "What ho, Mat."

box."

"We've come along to blow up your "I say, hold on a minute. The one-fifteen passenger isn't through yet."

"Imbecile. What d'you think we are, murderers? We'll send it up when the one-fifteen has passed." "Agreed. You going to tie me up?" "Just as you like."

"Yes, best to tie me up good and proper and put me in the stationmaster's office. No immediate hurry, of course." "Mind if we place the charges?"

"Make yourselves at home, boys."

At this the tall Don Juan shook his explosive out of the sack. With that amount I could have made a start on the Forth Bridge. There was certainly twenty times too much for the signal box. Don Juan stood looking at the line of levers. Mathieu had gone out of the little building to place sentry posts on the railway to either side of our secret and dangerous work. So Don Juan, a perfectly normal and confused young man, with fewer "no-meddlers” principles than Mathieu, said to me:

"Eh, Emile. How do we do this?"

Having already thought out this simple problem, I was able to place three of his charges in a minute or so and link them up with detonating fuse in the best manner (except that we were taught in the British schools to double everything, and in the field there was a shortage of material, so we always used it single). Impressed by the showy way that I did these things-they had to drag me to the schools, but I had not been there for nothing the tall young man invited me to help him place the other charges. It was raining when we went out. We had some difficulty in keeping the detonators dry. Don Juan hitched some strange charges round the telephone posts. They were like gargantuan pearl necklaces with blobs of explosive strung on fuse. I then placed the remainder of the charges in the hearts of the points. We put them there because these steel castings were extremely difficult to replace, since hundreds of thousands of them had been destroyed by Allied bombardments of marshalling yards and stations.

While I had been doing all this, and getting wet, dirty, and bad-tempered in the process, Albert and Mathieu had been down looking at the station. There they had found fifteen German soldiers who were waiting for the one-fifteen. The one-fifteen was late and everyone was angry. I went along to have a look at them. Five of them were labour-corps youths in dirty uniforms, slouching about, anyway, with down-at-heel boots and rusty rifles. The other ten were SSmen in thick greatcoats. They paid less attention to their compatriots than to two French women who were sitting at the back of the platform, waiting also for the one-fifteen. The SS-men enormous in the half black-out with their padded shoulders and high hats—strutted back and forth in front of the French women, who looked stonily into the darkness.

They paid no attention to us. No more attention than British troops would have paid in their place. Albert wanted to kill them. He had a blood lust.

"It is much more important to block the station," I said. "But so much less amusing, Georges."

"Does it really amuse you to kill them?"

“Of course. Think what they are doing to my mother." "Killing these ones won't get her out of prison."

"Be damned for a sloppy Englishman. Do you never want to kill them?"

"Yes, if I see them hurting someone, or destroying something. And when I have them in the sights of a weapon, or when I am frightened of them."

"Look at that now. Does that not make you angry?"

One of the Germans had approached the women. He leaned forward to speak to them, and the light shone for an instant on his handsome, loose young features. He wore his hair long, and his face was pointed. He drew back, offended, and his raised voice reached us across the platform.

“I am not German, I am Austrian, mademoiselle," he said, and he walked off after his friends, who greeted him with a salvo of coarse laughter.

"French soldiers would do the same thing to German women, or French women," I said to Albert. "I cannot see anything wrong in that."

"Sometimes I think you went out of your mind in prison. But thank God, here comes the one-fifteen, over two hours late."

When the train had slowly drawn out of the station I went around all the charges initiating them. I had often done this in England, placing dummy charges on machines or railway engines. And I had imagined that it would be different when the detonator was attached to one and a half pounds of violent explosive instead of a lump of plasticine. All I found was that it was more difficult to make a mistake, for a mistake might mean instant disintegration. I walked round with Don Juan in the dark. Being untrained, he was a little afraid of this part of the work. He watched closely everything that I did, although he was too proud to ask questions.

way.

We walked back from the station in the same muddled

Our first charge went off. A flash in the sky, then a roaring explosion. The road trembled under our feet, for the charges had been fairly far apart and there was a good interval of time between initiating them and leaving the station.

They quickened their pace a little. The noise would draw any German patrol that might be about. It was after four o'clock, a favourite hour for the Germans. Once a car's lights came shining on the top of the houses in the street we were in, gradually lowering as the car mounted the curve towards us. They broke and ran then almost in a panic, ran for any sort of hiding place on a piece of waste ground. These men needed instruction and leadership. Guerrillas need leadership more than soldiers. Explosion after explosion shattered the silence of the dawn. With each one our spirits rose. Mathieu thanked us at the door of his house. There was

a car there, behind the house alongside the woodpile. A French Ford, a reasonable car and in good repair. . . .

I became a gangster with genuine regret.

Had I been born ten years later, this might not have been so. During the formative years of my childhood, the leading inhabitants of my imaginative world were, in the following order: sailors (Drake especially), Romans, Napoleon, cowboys and trappers, Christ, Robin Hood and all outlaws, King Harold (because he lost the Battle of Hastings, I think), and Tallulah Bankhead. The only two of this list who have not slipped away are Napoleon and Christ.

I do not think I ever seriously considered the merits of gangsters, because I do not think that I heard of them before it was too late. I have always felt a strong, and I believe thoroughly healthy, antipathy for anything in the shape of a policeman. This antipathy is possibly what prevents me from reading any book about crime or detection.