FIVE WOMEN ,STOLE GUNPOWDER FROM AUSCHWITZ ,BLAST 1944 OCTOBER 7

FIVE WOMEN ,STOLE GUNPOWDER FROM AUSCHWITZ ,BLAST 1944 OCTOBER 7

vநாம் சாவது உறுதி ஆகிவிட்டது .என்றாலும் நாம் மனித வதை கூடத்தை வெடி வைத்து தகர்ப்போம்
ஐந்து பெண்களின் துணிச்சல்
.தகர்த்த நாள் 1944 OCTOBER 7,

On October 7, 1944, prisoners assigned to Crematorium IV at the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center rebel after learning that they were going to be killed.

For months, young Jewish women, like Ester Wajcblum, Ella Gärtner, and Regina Safirsztain, had been smuggling small amounts of gunpowder from the Weichsel-Union-Metallwerke, a munitions factory within the Auschwitz complex, to men and women in the camp’s resistance movement, like Róza Robota, a young Jewish woman who worked in the clothing detail at Birkenau. Under constant guard, the women in the factory took small amounts of the gunpowder, wrapped it in bits of cloth or paper, hid it on their bodies, and then passed it along the smuggling chain. Once she received the gunpowder, Róza Robota then passed it to her co-conspirators in the Sonderkommando, the special squad of prisoners forced to work in the camp’s crematoria. Using this gunpowder, the leaders of the Sonderkommando planned to destroy the gas chambers and crematoria, and launch the uprising.

On October 7, 1944, having learned that the SS was going to liquidate much of the squad, the members of the Sonderkommando at Crematorium IV rose in revolt. The Germans crushed the revolt. Nearly 250 prisoners died during the fighting and guards shot another 200 after the mutiny was suppressed. Several days later, the SS identified five women, four of them Jewish, who had been involved in supplying explosives to blow up a crematorium used to burn the bodies of Nazi murder victims. All five women were killed.

Roza was transported to Auschwitz concentration camp in a Holocaust train during the liquidation of the Ciechanów Ghetto in 1942.[2] She survived the "selection" and was assigned to Auschwitz-II Birkenau labor commando for women, where she got involved in the underground dissemination of news among the prisoners. No one else from her family in Europe is known to have survived. She worked in the clothing depot at the Birkenau Effektenlager adjacent to Crematorium III of Birkenau, where the bodies of gas chamber victims were burned. She had been recruited by men of the underground whom she knew from her hometown, to smuggle "Schwarzpulver" (gunpowder; or dynamite according to other sources)[4] collected by women in the Krupp "Weichsel" munitions factory, and then transferring it to a Sonderkommando man named Wróbel,[5] who was also active in the resistance. This schwartzpulver was used to manufacture primitive grenades to help blow up the crematorium during the Sonderkommando revolt. In her work, she was assisted by Hadassa Zlotnicka and Asir-Godel Zilber, both also from Ciechanów, whom Robota apparently enlisted in the resistance. Together with a few other women who worked in the Nazi "pulverraum" factory, they were able to obtain, hide, and turn over to the men of the underground no more than one to three teaspoons of the schwartzpulver compound per day, and not every day. The Sonderkommando blew up Crematorium III on 6 October 1944.[6]

Robota and three other women – Ala Gertner, Estusia Wajcblum, and Regina Safirsztajn – were arrested by the Gestapo and tortured in the infamous Bloc 23 but they refused to reveal the names of others who participated in the smuggling operation. They were hung on 6 January 1945 – two women at the morning roll-call assembly, two others in the evening. Robota was 23 years old. According to some eyewitness accounts, she and her comrades shouted "Nekamah" ("Vengeance!"), or "Be Strong" to the assembled inmates before they died. Some say they shouted, "Chazak V'amatz" – "Be strong and have courage", the Biblical phrase that God uses to encourage Joshua after the death of Moses. This is also the motto of Hashomer Hatzair, the youth organization she belonged to.

The Sonderkommando Revolt caused some 70 fatalities among the SS and kapos, and blew the roof off one crematorium, yet the Nazis knew the advancing Russian Army was very close to liberating the camp. It was clear to the Nazis that all evidence of the war-time atrocities had to be concealed, so the Germans attempted to destroy the other four crematoria themselves.

Róza was born and raised in Ciechanów, Poland. In November of 1942, her family was deported to Auschwitz and Róza was the only one who was not gassed on arrival. She was selected to work in the Bekleidungskommando in the Birkenau area of the camp, which had the job of sorting the confiscated belongings of the prisoners and the murdered. Róza put together a resistance group that distributed news that members of the camp's underground had obtained by listening to radio broadcasts in secret. Eventually Róza found out about a revolt that the men in the Sonderkommando were planning, and recruited a number of other women to help out. She contacted Ala Gertner,

Hanka and Ester (Estusia) Wajcblum, Hadassah Zlotnicka, Ruzia Grunapfel, 

Marta Bindiger, 




Inge Frank, 

Regina Safirsztajn, 

Genia Fischer,

and a number of other women who were working in the Union Munitions factory, which made rocket parts for V2s. The particular room of the factory these women worked in was the only place in Auschwitz where inmates had access to gunpowder. The women would set aside a small amount of gunpowder each day, at great personal risk to themselves, and smuggle it back to Róza, who in turn passed it along to Asir-Godel Zilber, who was from her hometown. The smuggling chain continued until it made its way to a group of Sonderkommandos who assembled it into bombs and grenades. It took over a year for them to smuggle enough gunpowder to make the revolt and attempted escape a reality. On 7 October 1944, Crematorium IV was blown up, although the uprisings in the other crematoria were put down before they were able to get that far. In retribution for what had happened, every third Sonderkommando was shot. An investigation into how this could have happened went on for weeks, and the gunpowder was finally traced back to the Union Munitions factory. All of the women who worked there were tortured and interrogated for weeks, and eventually Róza was betrayed, along with Regina, Ala, and Estusia. Although these four women were tortured and interrogated even further over the next few months, they refused to give up any information and only named names of Sonderkommandos who had already been killed. During this time, Noah Zabladowicz, one of the underground leaders in the camp, managed to steal a visit to Róza, who urged him and the other members of the underground to keep on with their resistance work. Her final message, which was smuggled out of her cell, was a note saying "Hazak v'amatz," Hebrew for "Be strong and brave." Róza and the other three women were publicly hanged in the women's camp on 5 January 1945, two weeks before the camp was evacuated. Their last words, according to survivors, were said to be either "Be strong!" or "Revenge!" In 1991 a memorial at Yad Vashem was dedicated to Róza, Regina, Estusia, and Ala, recognising their act of heroism.

KAZIMIERZ PIECHOWSKI , WITH OTHERS ESCAPED FROM AUSCHWITZ DEATH CAMP

KAZIMIERZ PIECHOWSKI ,
WITH OTHERS ESCAPED FROM AUSCHWITZ 
DEATH CAMP

I escaped from Auschwitz

Kazimierz Piechowski is one of just 144 prisoners to have broken out of the notorious Nazi camp and survive. Today aged 91, he tells his extraordinary story

 Kazimierz Piechowski, 2011

 Kazimierz Piechowski in 2011. 'We just planned that I would play the role of an SS officer so well that the guards would believe me.' Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi for the Guardian
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On 20 June 1942, the SS guard stationed at the exit to Auschwitz was frightened. In front of him was the car of Rudolph Höss, the commandant of the infamous concentration camp. Inside were four armed SS men, one of whom – an Untersturmführer, or second lieutenant, was shouting and swearing at him.

"Wake up, you buggers!" the officer screamed in German. "Open up or I'll open you up!" Terrified, the guard scrambled to raise the barrier, allowing the powerful motor to pass through and drive away.

Yet had he looked closer, the guard would have noticed something strange: the men were sweating and ashen-faced with fear. For far from being Nazis, the men were Polish prisoners in stolen uniforms and a misappropriated car, who had just made one of the most audacious escapes in the history of Auschwitz. And the architect of the plot, the second lieutenant, was a boy scout, to whom the association's motto "Be prepared" had become a lifeline.

Almost 70 years later, prisoner 918 is holding forth in the home of the scouting association, Baden Powell House in London. At 91, he is impeccably dressed, with a face as wrinkle-free as his well-ironed shirt. As he accepts the ceremonial neckerchief from a shy girl scout from Lancashire, he is as straight-backed as any of the teenagers on parade. In the UK as the guest of a British singer, Katy Carr, who has written a song about his experiences, he is thrilled when the scouts and guides join her to sing for him. Yet in between the traditional trappings of a jamboree, Kazimierz Piechowski, or Kazik as he likes to be called, will tell them a story few in the UK have heard –

 how, during Nazi occupation, scouts their age were murdered in the streets, while others like him were sent to concentration camps to witness the horror of Hitler's Final Solution.

Piechowski had a happy childhood in the town of Tczew, swimming with friends in the nearby river Vistula or playing with bows and arrows in the park with his two brothers. His family were middle class and his father worked on the railways. When he was 10, Piechowski decided to join the scouts – an act that would alter his life for ever. The youth association was flourishing in Poland, a newly independent state set up after the first world war, with a strong focus on patriotism, "toughness" and brotherhood. "I joined because I was patriotic," he remembers. "And when I arrived home, my mother was crying a little bit and said to me: 'I am so happy you are on the right way.'"

When the Nazis invaded the country nine years later, in 1939, the scouting movement was seen by the invaders as a symbol of nationalism – and a potential source of resistance. "I was 19 when the war broke out," Piechowski says. "Four days after Germany declared war, they arrived in Tczew. 

They started shooting the scouts." Among those rounded up and killed were Piechowski's childhood friends, and the teenager was terrified. "I knew that, sooner or later, I would also be killed," he says, "so I decided to run away."

He tried to flee across the Hungarian border, a route used by other scouts making their way to France to fight in the Free Polish forces there, only to be caught at the crossing. After eight months in various prisons he was sent to Auschwitz.

"We were only the second transportation to the camp," Piechowski says, "and we had to help build it." The old collection of buildings that made up the original concentration camp was not big enough to house all those caught in mass arrests, so inmates were forced to work 12- to 15-hour days to construct a new camp next door that would become notorious as the Nazis' biggest death camp.

"For the first three months, we were all in complete shock," says Piechowski. And it just got worse. From June 1940 and all through the first six months of 1941, the SS were keen to kill inmates – beating them to death with batons – as the simplest way to cope with the camp's overcrowding. 

Today, the starvation, unimaginable brutality and physical labour that made the concentration camp a living hell are well documented. But the details of Piechowski's memories still have the power to shock. Inmates were each given a spoon and a tin bowl – not just to eat and drink from, but also to urinate in at night. "If you lost your spoon, you ate from the bowl like a dog," he says quietly. "If you lost your bowl, that was it; you did not get any soup."

Sometimes the guards would murder just to get a holiday, he says. "When an SS man was bored, they would take off a prisoner's cap and throw it away. They would then order the prisoner to fetch it. As the prisoner was running, the officer would shoot them. Then they would claim the prisoner was trying to escape and get three days off for foiling it."

How did people cope? "Some prayed, but some who had prayed before they arrived would say: 'There cannot be a God if Auschwitz exists.'"

For six weeks, Piechowski was set to work carrying corpses after executions. "The death wall was between blocks 10 and 11. They would line prisoners up and shoot them in the back of the head." At the end there would be a pile of naked corpses and Piechowski would take the ankles, while another man held the arms, and throw them on to carts, to transport them to the crematorium. "Sometimes it was 20 a day, sometimes it was a hundred, sometimes it was more. Men, women and children." He looks at me fiercely. "And children," he repeats.

Yet he did not think of trying to escape until a friend's name appeared on a death list. Like many of the boy scouts in Auschwitz, Piechowski joined the resistance movement in the camp. As many of the scouts spoke German, they found useful positions – some were even among the prison police and were able to access the prisoners' files. One day, a Ukrainian friend, Eugeniusz Bendera, a gifted mechanic who worked in the camp's garage, came to him. "He had been told by those who had access to his documents that he was going to be murdered. I was devastated," Piechowski says. The germ of an escape plan formed.



"He said he could organise a car, but that was not enough." The men were being held in the main camp, Auschwitz I, where the fences were covered in electrified barbed wire and there were guards every few metres. The escapees would have to make it through the infamous Arbeit macht frei gate (the legend meant "Work sets you free"), and also break out of the outer perimeter of the complex.

Yet Piechowski could not dismiss his friend's plea. "When I thought that they would put Gienek [Bendera] against the wall of death and shoot him, I had to start thinking." It helped that Piechowski was now working in the store block, where the guards' uniforms and ammunition were kept. Slowly an idea took shape. But holding him back were the consequences for other prisoners. "In the speech the deputy commandant gave when a new transport came in, he would say: 'If anyone thinks of doing something stupid like escaping, let them know this: we will kill 10 people for each person who escapes from a work group or [housing] block.' It was like a cup of cold water hurled over my head."

So that the Nazis would not hold their real working group responsible, Piechowski and Bendera formed a fake group of four, recruiting another boy scout, Stanislaw Gustaw Jaster, and priest Józef Lempart for their "spectacular escape".

On 20 June 1942 – two years to the day after Bendera entered Auschwitz – the conspirators met in the attic of a half-built block to run through the escape plan for the last time. It was a Saturday, when work stopped at midday and the store rooms and motor pool would be unmanned. Before they left they said a prayer for their families, and agreed that if the attempt failed they would shoot themselves. "What was really encouraging us and pushing us on was that if we did not do this Gienek would be killed. "Until the last moment we weren't sure. But we said: 'We have to do this, we have to believe.'"

Picking up a rubbish cart containing kitchen waste, the four started walking towards the Arbeit macht frei gate. Here Piechowski told the guard he was part of a squad taking the rubbish away, praying the guard would not check to see if they were registered. Their luck held and they were able to walk freely out of the main camp and towards the store block. How did it feel? "I did not think about anything," Piechowski says. "I was just trying to pass this final examination. From that moment we did not only need courage, but intelligence."

At the stores, three of them made their way to trap doors covering chutes to the coal cellars. That morning while at work, Piechowski had unscrewed a bolt keeping the doors locked so they could climb in. They made their way to the second-floor store room, broke down the door and dressed themselves in officers' uniforms. Meanwhile, Bendera got into the garage with a copied key and brought round the car.

The mechanic had picked the Steyr 220 – the fastest car in Auschwitz, there for the sole use of the commandant. "It had to be fast, because he had to be able to get to Berlin in a few hours. We took it because if we were chased we had to be able to get away."

They drove to the main gate – passing SS men who saluted them and shouted Heil Hitler. But for Piechowski, the biggest test was still to come. "There was still one problem: we did not know whether, when we came to the final barrier, we would need a pass. We just planned that I would play the role of an SS officer so well that the guards would believe me."

Yet as they approached the barrier, the guard did not move. As he describes what happens next, Piechowski looks away as though he can see the last obstacle before him. "We are driving towards the final barrier, but it is closed . . . We have 80m to go, it is still closed . . . We have 60m to go and it is still closed. I look at my friend Gienek – he has sweat on his brow and his face is white and nervous. We have 20m to go and it is still closed . . ." Bendera stopped the car and as Piechowski stared blankly ahead, not knowing what to do, he felt a blow on his shoulder. It was Lempart. "He whispered: 'Kazik, do something.'

"This was the most dramatic moment. I started shouting." The SS guards obeyed and the car drove to freedom – allowing the men to become four of only 144 prisoners to successfully escape Auschwitz.

The Nazis were incensed, says Piechowski. "When the commandant heard in Berlin that four prisoners had escaped he asked: 'How the bloody hell could they escape in my own car, in our own uniforms, and with our ammunition?' They could not believe that people they did not think had any intelligence took them [for a ride]."

Keeping away from the main roads to evade capture, they drove on forest roads for two hours, heading for the town of Wadowice. There they abandoned the Steyr and continued on foot, sleeping in the forest and taking turns to keep watch. Lempart became ill and was left with a parish priest, while Jaster returned to Warsaw. Piechowski and Bendera spent time in Ukraine before Piechowski returned to Poland, joining the partisan Polish Home Army and spending the rest of the war fighting the Nazis.

In revenge, Jaster's parents were arrested and died in Auschwitz, and there were serious consequences for the remaining prisoners. "A month after we escaped, an order went out that every person must be tattooed [with their prison number]. The Nazis knew that an escapee's hair would grow back, and that the partisans would make new documents for them. But when people saw the number, they would know that they were from Auschwitz. No other camp used numbering – it was our escape that led to it."

Although they were never recaptured, Piechowski relived his time in the camp in flashbacks and nightmares. And his problems were not over. When Poland became a communist state in 1947, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison for joining the Home Army, serving seven. "When I finally came out of prison I was 33 years old. I thought, 'They have taken away my whole youth – all my young years.'"

Later, he became an engineer and when the communist regime fell in 1989, he took to travelling the world with his wife, Iga. He has written two books about his experiences, and tries to ensure no one will forget what happened in Auschwitz. Does he mind reliving his terrifying past? "I am a scout so I have to do my duty – and be cheerful and merry. And I will be a scout to the end of my life," he says simply.

Additional reporting Christina Zaba

For details of Katy Carr's 'Escapologist Tour', which will include screenings of the short documentary Kazik and the Kommander's Car, visit katycarr.com