Renia’s fellow prisoners included petty offenders: women arrested for selling goods on the black market, or turning on the light during a blackout, and other such “nonsense,” as she called it. Those prisoners’ lives were a bit easier. They were allowed to receive food and clothing packages. The Germans riffled through them and kept the good items for themselves.
Why, Renia kept wondering, was she still at Mys?owice? Why hadn’t she been taken away? Why was she still alive? So many women died, so many brought in to replace them.
Then, one afternoon, her turn. A male supervisor entered the cell. He looked at Renia and asked what she was in for. She told him that she was arrested while crossing the border.
“Let’s go.”
What would it be? A bullet? Hanging? Medieval torture? Or Auschwitz?
She didn’t know the method. But she did know the result: This was her end. This.
*
Auschwitz, the crowning example of bestial brutality, was only a bus ride away from Mys?owice. But despite the notorious conditions, resistance brewed beneath the camp’s seams. The underground at Auschwitz comprised （often disagreeing） groups from several countries and philosophies, including young Jews who were not immediately sent to be gassed but selected for slave labor. （For this reason, many Jewish women tried to make themselves look younger at camps—they used red dye from shoe tassels as blush and lipstick, and margarine to slick back their hair and hide grays.） The transport from B?dzin, with comrades from the movements, had contributed several members to the underground and renewed its energy.
Anna Heilman first heard about the resistance from one of her block mates, a Jewish girl who’d been taken for a Pole and had contacts with the Home Army. Anna, just fourteen years old, had arrived at Auschwitz a year earlier with her older sister Esther. The two girls, from a highly assimilated and upper-middle-class Warsaw family, had grown up with nannies and visits to gourmet ice cream parlors. Now they lived in the women’s camp in Birkenau, “working” at the Union Factory. The self-proclaimed “bicycle factory” was in reality a munitions plant in a large, single-storey, glass-roofed structure that fabricated detonators for artillery shells for the German army. Auschwitz had about fifty subcamps, and like the labor camps, many were leased to private industry.
Anna was thrilled by the news of rebellion. She’d joined The Young Guard in the Warsaw ghetto; it had been her spiritual savior. （Because of her lack of Hebrew or even Yiddish, the movement gave her the name Hagar—she was from another tribe.） Every evening, her group of Jewish friends and her sister sang songs, told stories, and thought about resistance. She’d seen the ghetto uprising; she craved more activity. Now she heard that the Home Army was organizing a revolt in Warsaw and had made contact with the Auschwitz underground. They were planning to attack the camp from the outside; when the inmates heard a password, they would attack from the inside. Men and women began to prepare. Anna and her group collected materials—matches, gasoline, heavy objects—that they placed in agreed-upon spots. They obtained keys to the farm toolshed, from which they would nab rakes and hoes. About five women in each block participated, coordinated by one leader. Only the leaders maintained contact in this secret and organized operation.
On Anna’s way to work each day, she’d pass a man who worked as a locksmith and was always smiling at her. One morning, she gutsily asked him for a pair of insulated wire-cutting shears （to break through the electrified barbed wires）。 He looked at her, stunned, and said nothing. For days, she worried she’d been careless and would be caught. Then one afternoon he put a box on her worktable. The factory girls cooed, “He’s your lover!”—the term for male protector. Anna put the container under her table and peeked. A whole loaf of bread! She was excited, but also disappointed. Thankfully, there was no inspection that day, so she smuggled the bread back to camp, hidden in a little purse, under her clothes.
Lovers often brought girls gifts. All possessions were forbidden, so, if caught, a girl would say, “I found it.” Huddled on her bed, Anna showed Esther the loaf. They noticed that the bread had been hollowed out. Inside: shears, beautiful shears, with red insulated handles. The sisters hid this treasure in their mattress and—in case they were out when the password was called—told their friends, including Ala Gertner, their elegant bunkmate from B?dzin whose prewar portrait shows her posed coquettishly in a fashionable woman’s fedora and collared top.