Days later, Ala passed on a message from a friend, twenty-three-year-old Young Guard comrade Roza Robota, who worked in the clothing kommando, sorting the personal belongings, clothes, and underwear of murdered Jews. Roza had a lover in the work unit known as the sonderkommando, made up of Jewish men who manned the crematoria and moved the corpses. He told her that his group would soon be killed. （The sonderkommando were periodically “retired”—that is, killed off.） The revolt, he said, was coming.
They had no weapons, but it dawned on Anna: they worked in a factory with gunpowder. Anna asked Esther, one of the few women stationed in the Pulverraum （powder room）， to steal some. According to other accounts, it was the men who implored Roza to ask the women for the powder, and she agreed immediately.
Steal from the Pulverraum? The entire factory was open, transparent, constructed especially to make secrets impossible, the tables surrounded by surveillance paths. The men in charge sat in booths from where they could watch. Bathrooms, food, a pause in work—all was prohibited. Anything led to an accusation of sabotage. The Pulverraum was barely ten by six feet. “Impossible, ridiculous, forget it,” Esther said. But she thought about it.
Despite endless surveillance, maddening thirst, sickening torture, and the threat of collective punishment, Jewish women in concentration camps revolted. When Franceska Mann, a famous Jewish ballerina and dancer at Warsaw’s Melody Palace nightclub, was told to undress at Auschwitz, the young woman slung her shoe at an ogling Nazi, grabbed his gun, and shot two guards, killing one of them. A group of five hundred women who’d been given sticks and ordered to beat two girls who had stolen potato peels refused to move, despite being beaten themselves and forced to stand in the freezing cold all night without food. At Budy, a farm-based subcamp, a whole group of women attempted an organized escape. At Sobibor, women stole arms from the SS men for whom they worked and gave them to the underground.
At Auschwitz, a Belgian woman named Mala Zimetbaum, who spoke six languages, was chosen to serve as an interpreter for the SS—a job that granted her freedom of movement. She used her privileged status to help Jews: bringing medicine, connecting family members, fudging lists of incoming Jews, finding lighter work for the weak, warning hospital patients of upcoming selections, and dissuading the SS from carrying out collective punishments and even asking them to let prisoners wear socks. Mala dressed up as a male prisoner and escaped the camp on a feigned “work duty”—the first woman to flee—but was caught trying to leave Poland. As her sentence was being read, she slashed her wrists with a razor blade she’d hidden in her hair. When an SS man grabbed her, Mala slapped him across the face with her bloody hand and snarled, “I shall die a heroine, but you shall die like a dog!”
Bela Hazan was at Mala’s execution. Bela continued to maintain her Polish disguise and went back to work as a nurse. After Lonka’s death, she was devastated, but then one day the marching band played a song that reminded her of a comrade from B?dzin. Bela began to cry. One of the musicians noticed. The two talked, and it turned out the musician, Hinda, had been part of a youth movement. Bela took the risk and came out to her as a Jew. To be known was to be. The two cried together, desperate to hug, and spoke of resistance. Hinda’s group of Jewish girls who arrived on transports wanted to rebel, she told Bela. One obtained a tool to cut barbed wire. In the evenings, the guards were usually drunk. On a moonless night, they went to work, digging a tunnel to smuggle Jewish girls to safety. Two girls dug while four stood guard. Bela helped dig. The tunnel stretched under the barbed wire, starting where the trains arrived. Bela recalled that they once snuck in two fifteen-year-old girls from Germany. The girls were shocked when told to shut up and roll into a tunnel, but Bela was full of joy when they made it to the work camp. She tutored them on how to behave as illegals and dressed them in the clothes of dead patients. One Jewish girl who worked in the bathroom hid them there during roll calls. Bela stole potatoes and carrots to feed them. The young girls couldn’t understand why a Pole would help them.
Bela continually used her position as a nurse to help sick Jews, serving them soup that contained just a little bit more cabbage, gently caressing their foreheads while giving them sips of water, and volunteering to work in the Jewish scabies section. （Everyone assumed she took on this last task for her “Communist reasons,” or as she claimed, to prevent scabies from reaching the Poles and the Germans.） She warned patients before Dr. Mengele arrived for selections, and hid the sickest.