October 7

by Justine Hemmestad

2-22-24

T h e R e v o l t o f t h e Sonderkommando in 1944 is a pivotal day in WWII history that isn’t known as well as it should be. The Sonderkommando were prisoners who were forced to process the bodies of their murdered Jewish brothers and sisters (this reminded me of an article I wrote a few weeks back about Avigail Gimpel and Zaka, processing the bodies of those murdered on October 7, 2023). Ester Wajcblum, who was 19 when she was taken to Auschwitz the year before, her 14 year old sister Hana, joined young women Ala Gertner, and Regina Safirsztai n i n smuggling gunpowder in small amounts out of Weichsel-Union-Metallwerke (a munitions factory within the complex) to the men. Captives like Roza Ro- b ot a , a you ng Jewish woman who worked with clot h i ng i n Bi r ke n au , helped to smuggle these small amounts of contra- band and covertly pass it on to her co-conspirators, who planned to blow up the gas chambers and crematoria. Ever y few months the Sonderkommando were murdered by the Nazis and another Sonderkommando would take their place. It was the newly formed Sonderkommando’s duty to process the bodies of the murdered Sonderkom- mando before them. On October 7, 1944, upon learning that the SS planned to imminently destroy them, the Sonderkommando crystallized their plans and rose in re- volt. The gunpowder had been used to make the demolition charges as well as small grenades, and small weapons had been hidden in the crematorium. The Nazis brought in the heavy machine guns and crushed the efforts of the prisoners; nearly 250 prisoners died in the revolt and 200 more were shot immediately thereafter. Ala Gertner, Regina Safirsztain, Ester Wajcblum, Rózà Robota and possibly Fejga Segal were all identified by the Nazis as having been involved in the revolt. They were brutally raped and tortured as the Nazis tried to force them into giving up names of co-conspirators. The Nazis were not successful. As the trap door fell out when Rosa Robota was hung, she shouted, “Be strong and be brave.” “Never again” was the mantra of the world after the Holocaust, and yet October 7 happened again, same tactics used, in a different year.