The Shoah (1939–1945)
Sonderkommando uprising
7 oct. 1944·Auschwitz-Birkenau
The toll is reproduced exactly as the source states it — never rounded, never added to another. Tolls overlap from one event to the next.
Prisoners assigned to the crematoria revolt with gunpowder smuggled by workers from the Union factory; Crematorium IV is destroyed.
On 7 October 1944, the prisoners of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz-Birkenau, forcibly assigned to the service of the gas chambers and crematoria, rise up. Knowing they would be liquidated like their predecessors, they blow up crematorium IV with powder smuggled in clandestinely by Jewish women workers from the Union factory, break through the barbed wire, and attempt to reach the woods.
The revolt is crushed within the day and the insurgents killed. Four of the women workers, including Roza Robota, were hanged before the assembled female prisoners after having endured torture without denouncing anyone. It is in the days of this uprising that members of the Sonderkommando buried near the crematoria the manuscripts in which they had recorded what they witnessed, recovered after the war.
- Period :
- The Shoah (1939–1945)
- Type :
- Shoah
- Region :
- Central and Eastern Europe
- Country :
- Pologne
Manuscrits enfouis du Sonderkommando ; archives du musée d'État d'Auschwitz-Birkenau et dépositions des survivants.