A few days later, however, the Nazis came back for Ala, Esther, Roza, and B?dziner Regina, the Pulverraum supervisor.
The girls were sentenced to hanging. Anna went mad; Marta admitted her to the revier to stop her from suiciding. She tried to make contact with her sister, tried to see her, but never managed to.
A male underground member from Roza’s hometown used vodka to convince the guard of the torture bunker to let him see Roza. “I entered Roza’s cell,” Noah Zabludowicz recalled. “On the cold cement lay a figure like a heap of rags. At the sound of the door opening, she turned her face to me. . . . Then she spoke her last words. She told me that she had not betrayed [anyone]. She wished to tell her comrades that they had nothing to fear. We must carry on.” She was not regretful, not sorry, but wanted to die knowing that the movement’s actions would continue. She handed him a note for the remaining comrades. It was signed with the exhortation “Chazak V’Amatz.” Be strong and courageous.
Esther wrote a last letter to Anna and one to Marta, asking her to “take care of my sister so that I may die easier.”
“Camp sisters” were family.
On the day of the execution, the four women were hanged, rare public ceremonies intended to terrorize the female prisoners and dissuade them from further sabotage and rebellion. Two were executed during the day shift, two during the night shift. All Jewish women prisoners were forced to watch; they were beaten if their eyes strayed for a second. Anna’s friends hid her and held her down so she wouldn’t have to see. But she heard. “A thud of drums,” she later described the scene, “a groan from thousands of throats, and the rest was mist.” Bela Hazan was there too, as the Polish nurse assigned to carry out the corpses.
In her last breath, before the noose tightened, Roza cried out in Polish: “Sisters, revenge!”
Chapter 27
The Light of Days
Renia
OCTOBER 1943
Now, outside the cell at Mys?owice, a gendarme was waiting for Renia.
“You,” he said.
She had lingered for so long, grasping on to the last shed of hope. She was ready. Ready to die.
“Any day now,” he said slowly, deliberately. “Any day, someone is going to take you out for a new task. You’ll be working in the police kitchen.”
What?
Renia said nothing but shook in relief. Miraculously, not Auschwitz after all. Not even an interrogation, but a promotion.
One month into her incarceration, Renia left Mys?owice for the first time. On the street, the normal street, headed to the police station, she searched madly for someone she might know. Anyone familiar, anyone she could tell about her imprisonment. But they were all strangers.
Renia’s shift ran from four in the morning until four in the afternoon. She left her cell in a darkness that lightened into dawn, then bled into daylight. The cook, she recalled, was a gluttonous German woman, but she gave Renia good food, and Renia regained her strength. Due to daily inspections, she couldn’t bring food back to her cell, but satiated from work, she gave her prison dinners to women hungrier than she was, mostly Jewish women. Others eyed her angrily.
One of the gendarmes who accompanied Renia to work treated her graciously, giving her cigarettes, apples, and buttered bread. He told her that he had lived in Poland for many years but was originally from Berlin. He became folksdeutsch. He was forced to divorce his Polish wife; she took their baby and fled to her parents.
“I can’t tell why I believed him and trusted him,” Renia later wrote. “I genuinely felt that he was honest and that his friendship could benefit me.”
One evening, when the prisoners were asleep, Renia wrote a letter. She had to take a chance. She asked the friendly gendarme to mail it to Warsaw for her, “to my parents.” She explained that since she’d been arrested, no one knew her whereabouts. He promised he’d attach a stamp and send it. Then he waved a finger at Renia, warning her not to mention this to anyone.