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Holocaust Memorial Day - A Timely Reflection

Holocaust Memorial Day 2025 approaches. Like so many people, I find it a really difficult day. After the positive light of Chanukah I am aware that the date is fast approaching. As part of the editorial team here at the Star I now have to think about and consider how I might write about it too. With so many thoughts, it is hard to know where to begin. I am putting pen to paper on January 6th, just a week before we go to press. I want to take you back to the grim but heroic 80 year anniversary of January 6th 1945 but for now, permit me a digression.

HMD began in Britain in 2001. That was a difficult time for my family. My mother, Rose, had suffered throughout her life from what we would now consider to be PTSD. She would never talk about her earlier life, even to my father. Only her psychiatrist knew what she had experienced. When younger, she had made a number of unsuccessful attempts on her life and yet she had, paradoxically, become a successful, confident, influential and much respected, author, historian and local politician. She was also a wonderful mother. By 2001 however, she had begun to suffer increasingly from a form of dementia. The cruellest part was her gradual failure to recognise those around her. That eventually included myself. The mother who taught me Torah, who I argued with, respected and who understood me, no longer knew me. How does one say goodbye under such circumstances? She died almost 20 years ago of pneumonia, aged 75. She left behind some of her later diaries and a bunch of unpublished manuscripts from her early twenties; mostly rescued and hidden by my father. He told me that she had progressively burned a good deal of other writing and reminiscences.

My mother Rosa (Salz) aged 23

My mother found memories of the Shoah difficult, that at least, she would explain. I understand that like so many, she felt an incredible sense of guilt that she remained when others from her wider family were gone. After Eichman's trial in 1961 and execution in '62, she seems to have begun to confront memories and to throw herself into positive work, motherhood, writing and political activism. As a family we travelled to Germany on many occasions while she pursued research and met people. She continued to travel and research after I left home at 18, visiting the former Soviet Union, Poland (where the wider Salz family had lived), and the DDR. Her study was always full of books, both in German and English. She typed meticulous notes right up to her final illness but I am never clear that she found the answers she was looking for. Very little survives.

All this frenetic activity did however give me a mother capable of the most intelligent insights and a fund of historical information. Born in 1930, like most mothers who lived through that turbulent period, she was passionate in making sure that her daughter would never forget the events of the Shoah. Horror and terror were clearly not something she wanted to pass on to a child, but I am aware that she tried to give me the most balanced account of the events that she could as I grew in understanding. Six million horrifying deaths were counterbalanced by some positivity lest I assume that Jews were simply passive victims. She was always careful to explain that there was a will to fight back that could not be ignored by hateful Nazi forces. For one thing I am eternally grateful: I grew up knowing that there was also a Jewish Resistance, the ghetto uprisings and selfless acts of bravery from so many. I retell one such story below. The story, though heroic, contains disturbing details. I struggle to deal with these now and I know that my mother struggled more. The heroism of the Jewish resistance was the heroism of those who knew they would not escape alive. That they fought back at all was truly remarkable and hard for me to comprehend. My generation owes so much to these courageous men and women.

Rosa Robota (1921-1945) – Heroine of the Jewish Resistance in Auschwitz-Birkenau (photo Courtesy of the Wiener Holocaust Library)

Exactly 80 years ago as I write, on January 6th 1945, four young Jewish women resistors were hanged by the SS in Auschwitz. Their leader was Roza Robota, pictured above. Her fellow resistors were Ala Gertner, Ester Wajcblum and Regina Safirszstajn. These four courageous women, had successfully enabled a Sonderkommando revolt in October 1944. It was a daring plan involving the co-ordinated work of many people, but without Rosa’s work, it would never have happened. How it was arranged was a story of painstaking planning, secrecy and personal sacrifice. Various accounts survive. Yad Vashem has a brief one page entry with the bare facts.

Born in 1921 in Ciechanow, Poland (Zichenau in German), Rosa, as well as being my mother's namesake, also shared her Hebrew name: Shoshanah. Like my mother, she had grown up a political activist and was a member of the Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa’ir Zionist underground movement. In 1942, the Nazi forces cleared the Zichenau Ghetto where she had been forced to live. Rosa was transported to Auschwitz with the rest of her family, none of whom survived the selection process apart from herself. She was imprisoned in Auschwitz II. She was later transferred to Birkenau and made to work in the women’s

clothing kommando. These girls had the trauma of sorting and processing clothes taken from the dead. Rosa however was able to organise a resistance group within her unit and make contact with one of the sonderkommando units attached to crematorium 4.

The Sonderkommando were mainly Jewish men, forced to dispose of corpses from the gas chambers. They had traumatic work, sometimes having to deal with the murdered relatives or friends they had known. They were forced to work or suffer death themselves. They played no part in the killings and were kept apart from other camp inmates to maintain secrecy.

Between 1942 and ‘44, Rosa secretly recruited the help of girls forced to work in the Weichsel-Union-Metallwerke factory which produced detonators for artillery shells. At great risk to themselves, these girls, (including Ala Gertner, Ester Wajcblum and Regina Safirszstajn) smuggled tiny, concealed quantities of schwarzpulver (gunpowder) which Rosa then passed on to the men of the Sonderkommando. By October 1944, there was however a considerable amount of explosive hidden in the crematorium. Reputedly some was used to make crude, makeshift grenades and the rest to fabricate explosive charges to destroy the crematorium. Added to this, the Sonderkommando also possessed some small arms smuggled in to the camp by partisans as well as crudely fashioned knife blades.

On October 7th 1944, on a given signal, the revolt broke out. Initially the SS were taken by surprise. Some prisoners managed to escape but were soon rounded up. There was hand to hand fighting. Crematorium 4 was successfully put out of action and destroyed. Three SS men were killed and several more injured before the revolt was brutally suppressed. Most of the Sonderkommando were summarily executed but a few retained for interrogation. When they revealed the names of the women involved these were then arrested and brutally tortured in the notorious Bloc II. Rosa was the only one with any genuinely useful information but in spite of her Nazi captor’s horrific treatment, she never revealed the names of her fellow resistors.

Rosa was only 23 when she was hanged by the Nazis on January 6th 1945. I find it hard to imagine what strength, bravery and resilience it must have taken for her to remain silent after being so brutally and repeatedly tortured. Her work and her steadfast resistance, remind us that even in those incredibly dark times, Jews like her, never gave up and resisted to the last. I for one am thankful.

3 weeks later, on 27th January 1945, the Red Army liberated Auschwitz. The date is now recognised as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.