Bela knew that her kindness seemed not only strange to the Jewish prisoners but also suspicious. She, of course, understood their Yiddish mutterings about her possibly being a spy. Nevertheless, they were pleased when she granted the Jewish women who worked in the hospital permission to throw a Chanukah party. Privately, Bela was devastated that she could not attend but had to act more “Polish than the Pope.” Instead, she decorated a Christmas tree with Santa Claus figurines.
One of Bela’s supervisors, Arna Cook, was short, angry, and cruel. She insisted that Bela clean her room, deliver coffee, and shine her boots. One morning, Bela came in to perform her duties, and Arna did not hear her enter. Bela saw Arna lying on her bed with her legs splayed wide, having sex with her German shepherd. Bela shut the door and fled, fearing that if she’d been caught, she would have been killed.
Later, Arna beat Bela for not coming to work on time. She marched her back to Birkenau for slave labor and forced her to join a unit digging trenches—a horribly demanding task. No rest allowed, constant beatings; girls were shot if they collapsed. The others had to carry their bodies, to the tunes of the marching band.
Once, during work, SS men dragged one of the girls to the forest nearby. Bela heard her screaming. She never returned. It turned out, they’d forced her to have sex with a dog. She begged to be killed. The SS laughed. “This dog found a good subject for pleasure,” Bela heard them say. This was not the only time this happened. Another Auschwitz survivor related that the Nazis forced her to undress her young daughter and watch as she was raped by dogs.
Bela and her fellow inmates became terrified of going out to work. They decided that if it happened again, the entire kommando would rise up. After the third incident of dog rape, when they began to drag out yet another girl, the entire unit of twenty girls screamed. The SS put them in confinement in a basement, where they were forced to stand for days and nights on end, fed only once in ninety-six hours. They left solitary physically broken but comforted by the knowledge that they’d resisted. The women banded together and protected one another.
Women in many labor camps, including Auschwitz, rebelled by sabotaging the products they were being forced to make, marring productivity or quality. They weakened hemp threads in a spinning factory, mismeasured bomb parts, dropped a wire among ball bearings, and left windows open overnight so that pipes froze. Sabotaged munitions caused German weapons to backfire and explode. Fania Fainer, a Bia?ystok native from a Bundist family, sometimes put sand instead of gunpowder in her product at Union.
When Fania was about to turn twenty, her friend Zlatka Pitluk decided that such a landmark needed to be celebrated. Zlatka, who loved crafts, risked her life to gather materials she found in the camp and used a mix of water and bread to glue them together and create a three-dimensional birthday card in the shape of a heart—similar to an autograph book, a popular item of the day. A small object with a purple fabric cover （ripped off Zlatka’s secret underblouse）， the card had an F on the cover, embroidered in orange thread. Zlatka then passed the booklet to eighteen other women prisoners, including Anna, who wrote their birthday messages. On eight carefully constructed origami-like pages, opening into a clover, are the prisoners’ wishes, written in their diverse mother tongues: Polish, Hebrew, German, French.
“Freedom, Freedom, Freedom, Wishing on the day of your birthday,” wrote a woman named Mania, at the risk of being murdered.
“Not dying will be our victory,” wrote another.
One woman quoted a Polish poem: “Laugh among people. . . . Be light when you dance. . . . When you’re old, put on glasses, and remember what we once went through.”
Camaraderie, a defiance that was intimate and even illegal, gave women hope and helped them persevere.
*
In the end, Esther agreed to steal the gunpowder.
Anna’s sister worked twelve-hour shifts in front a machine that pressed the powder—slate gray, the consistency of coarse salt—into a checker-like piece. This part ignited the bomb.