Zimetbaum, Mala (1920–1944)

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Zimetbaum, Mala (1920–1944)

Jewish escapee from Auschwitz-Birkenau. Born in Brzesko, Poland, in 1920; grew up in Belgium; committed defiant suicide at Auschwitz on August 22, 1944.

Mala Zimetbaum "was one of the most extraordinary prisoners to pass through Auschwitz," writes Jerry Adler in Newsweek. Though she was born in Poland, her family became fearful of the growing anti-Semitism and moved to Belgium when she was eight, settling in Antwerp. After the Germans invaded France and the Low Countries in May 1940, Zimetbaum managed to elude the Nazis for two years. In 1942, she was swept up with 2,000 other Belgians and taken to a collecting center at Malines; from there, she was put on a train for Auschwitz-Birkenau, arriving in September 1942.

Fluent in several languages, Zimetbaum was chosen by the Germans to be a messenger and interpreter, which allowed her to move about more freely than other prisoners. Despite the risk, she carried out assignments for camp resistance, smuggled in food and medicine, and managed to switch identity cards of those women selected for the gas chambers with those who had already died. One of her duties was to oversee a roster at the camp hospital. Privy to the timing of German "selection" visits, she would arrive ahead and help all but the more hopeless cases leave the building. Along the way, she fell in love with Polish political prisoner Edward Galinski (known as Edek or Adek).

In May 1944, when 12,000 Jews began to arrive from Hungary daily and all but a few were sent directly to the gas chambers, Zimetbaum could bear the situation no longer. She and Galinski decided to attempt an escape. Zimetbaum was not only after her own freedom; she also planned on documenting the daily slaughter at Birkenau. On Saturday, June 24, 1944, while dressed in an SS uniform purchased with a bribe, Galinski marched out the front gates of Auschwitz with his prisoner, Zimetbaum, in tow. Caught two weeks later by customs agents at the Slovak border, they were returned to the camp and interrogated by Wilhelm Boger, known as the "devil of Auschwitz," but they refused to tell him who helped them in their escape.

On August 22, Galinski was hanged in the men's camp; by one account, he kicked over his own stool rather than listen to the obligatory reading of his sentence. While Mala was waiting her turn in the women's camp, a cellmate asked her how she was doing. "Things are always fine with me," she replied. That same day, Zimetbaum was brought before the assembled women prisoners in the Camp B compound. As preparations progressed for her hanging and the SS and Maria Mandel , commander of the women's camp, lectured inmates on the consequences of escape, Mala Zimetbaum "pulled out a razor blade and slit her wrists," writes Adler, "spraying her executioners with her blood." When one of the SS tried to snatch the blade from her, she slapped his face with her bloody hand. Other guards came running and trampled her to death.

But the escape and recapture of Galinski and Zimetbaum was considered a success by fellow prisoners, notes Adler, "because even in failing it gave courage to the thousands of inmates who knew about it and witnessed its legendary end." "A prisoner, a Jewess, a woman, had dared defy them," writes Primo Levi in The Drowned and the Saved. "Mala had resolved to die her own death." There is a plaque on a house in Antwerp, where Zimetbaum once lived, which reads: "To Mala Zimetbaum, Symbol of Solidarity, Murdered by the Nazis in Auschwitz, 22 August 1944."