Replies

Killing Center Revolts: Even in the death camps, in the shadow of the gas chambers and crematoria, Jews resisted against their oppressors. Three bold and daring uprisings occurred in the killing centers at Treblinka, Sobibor, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. As was the case with ghetto rebellions, those organized killing center revolts arose out of a sense of desperation and hopelessness, when it became clear that all Jews in these extermination camps were to be killed.

Almost all Jews -- children, the elderly, and physically fit teenagers and adults -- deported to the Treblinka and Sobibor extermination camps were gassed upon arrival. Few barracks existed for resident inmates. Camp guards temporarily spared small numbers of prisoners for use in special units called the Sonderkommando, which operated the crematoria and other camp facilities. But those Sonderkommando members realized that it was only a matter of time before they, too, would be gassed.

Treblinka: At Treblinka, an underground organization plotted an armed rebellion and mass escape. Learning about the Warsaw ghetto revolt from the last transports of Jews brought to Treblinka from Warsaw, the organizers decided the moment for revolt had arrived. On August 2, 1943, the underground fighters put their plan into action: to steal arms from the warehouse; eliminate the German and Ukrainian guards on duty; set the camp on fire; destroy the extermination area; and, then help the remaining prisoners escape to the forest. Many were killed during the rebellion, including all the resistance leaders, as the flames and reports of the revolt brought German reinforcements from all directions. But as many as 200 prisoners escaped to the neighboring forest, and perhaps twenty of those men survived German efforts to recapture them.

A few months after the revolt, Germans closed the camp, leveled it, and planted pine trees to hide all traces of the mass murders. At least 750,000 Jews perished at the camp between July 1942 and November 1943.

Sobibor: At Sobibor, Leon Feldhendler, the son of a rabbi from the nearby town of Zolkiewka, formed an underground organization in July 1943. By then transports to the death camp were slowing down and veteran Jewish prisoners sensed the end was quickly approaching. In September 1943, a new deportation of Soviet Jewish prisoners from Minsk brought a trained Soviet army officer, Lieutenant Alexandr "Sasha" Aronovich Pechersky to Sobibor. The Jewish underground recruited Pechersky and placed him in command.

Feldhendler devised a daring plan. Resisters would lure SS officers into storehouses on the pretext that they were to receive new coats and boots. Once inside, prisoners would attack them with axes and knives. The prisoners would then seize Nazi weapons and ammunition and set the camp ablaze during roll call. The insurgents would then break open the gate, and all prisoners would have a chance to run across the German mine fields toward the forest.

The revolt occurred in the late afternoon of October 14, 1943. Insurgents killed eleven of the Nazis in the camp, including the camp commander, and several Ukrainian guards. By dusk, about 300 prisoners had escaped. Nearly 200 of them managed to avoid recapture. Only a small number, however, survived to the war's end. Rumors that the escapees carried gold and silver made them easy prey for the local population, and few hiding in the forest survived the harsh Polish winter. Pechersky joined a partisan unit in the forest and survived the war; he later wrote a memoir about the revolt.

After the uprising, the Germans destroyed all traces of Sobibor. By the end of 1943, workers had plowed the death camp under and planted crops to cover the place where, between March 1942 and October 1943, the Nazis had murdered more than 250,000 Jews.

Auschwitz-Birkenau: At Auschwitz-Birkenau, an elaborate underground network of Jewish and non-Jewish prisoners planned a revolt. By summer 1944, Soviet forces were advancing swiftly from the east, and the Allies from the west. Transports had slowed to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the Nazis had murdered more than one million Jews and tens of thousands of others.

Most of the non-Jewish underground backed out of the planned revolt after the failure of the Warsaw uprising by the Polish resistance in August 1944 and after the Polish underground outside of Auschwitz became aware that the Germans had learned about the plan. Underground leaders issued orders to give up the revolt.

But members of the Jewish Sonderkommando, sensing that the end was near and their usefulness to the Germans over, went ahead with the plan with help from some Soviet prisoners of war. On October 7, 1944, in a daring act of desperation, a group of prisoners blew up one of Birkenau's four crematoria using dynamite the underground had smuggled from a nearby munitions factory to the Sonderkommando. Six hundred prisoners escaped after the explosion, but all were either captured or killed as they fled.

On January 6, 1945, less than three weeks before the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, four young women accused of supplying the dynamite -- Roza Robota, Ella Gaertner, Esther Wajcblum, and Regina Safirsztain -- were hanged in the presence of the remaining inmates. As the trap door opened, Robota shouted defiantly, "Be strong; have courage!" Before her execution, guards had tortured her brutally, but she had refused to divulge the names of any members of the resistance.

Spontaneous Resistance by Gypsies at Auschwitz-Birkenau: In Auschwitz-Birkenau, camp officials set aside specific barracks in early 1943 to house Sinti and Roma family groups deported from Germany and other countries occupied by Germany. By the end of 1943, the Nazis had interned 18,736 Sinti and Roma in the Gypsy camp, and thousands of those men, women and children died in the gas chambers. Others, more fit adult men and women chosen for forced labor, were deported from Auschwitz to other camps.

On May 15, 1944, prisoners in the Birkenau Gypsy family camp learned that the camp administration intended to gas the 6,000 remaining Gypsy prisoners the next day. When SS guards armed with machine guns surrounded the camp and attempted to begin the transport to the gas chambers, they met armed resistance. After stealing scraps of sheet metal, prisoners had sharpened the metal into crudely fashioned knives. With those improvised weapons, and with iron pipes, clubs, and stones, the Gypsies defended themselves. Guards shot some resisters. The final liquidation of the camp occurred in early August when guards moved 2,897 men, women, and children to the gas chambers in the dead of night.