Charlotte Delbo-Dudach (1913-1985)

Charlotte Delbo was born in Vigneux-sur-Seine, Essone on 10 August 1913. In 1934 she married George Dudach and later went to work for actor and threatical producer Louis Jouvet. She was with his company in Buenos Aires when the Germans occupied France in 1940.

In 1941 Philippe Petain, leader of the collaborationist Vichy regime, established special courts in 1941 to deal with members of the resistance. Among those put to death was a young architect friend. "I can't stand being safe while others are guillotined", she told Jouvet. "I won't be able to look anyone in the eye."

She returned to Paris where her husband was already active in the Resistance as the assigned courier for the internationally famous poet Louis Aragon. The couple spent much of that winter printing and distributing pamphlets and other anti-Nazi Germany reading material. They became part of the group around communist philosopher Georges Politzer, and took an active role in publishing the underground journal Lettres Françaises.

On 2 March 1942 police followed a careless courier to their apartment, and arrested them. The courier was able to escape from a back window. George was shot the morning of 23 May after being allowed to bid his wife farewell.

Charlotte was held in transit camps near Paris for the rest of the year. Then on 23 January 1943 she and 229 other Frenchwomen, imprisoned for their resistance activities, were put on a train for the Auschwitz concentration camp. She wrote about this experience later in Le convoi du 24 janvier (published in English as Convoy to Auschwitz). The convoy entered camp legend as the only one to enter the gates singing La Marseillaise. It was partly thanks to the presence of several scientists among the prisoners that a few, Delbo included, were selected to farm kok-saghyz at the Raisko satellite camp and survived. In 1945, as the war drew to a close, they were released to the custody of the Swedish chapter of the International Red Cross. After recuperating, Charlotte returned to France.

She wrote her major work, the trilogy published as Auschwitz and After (None of Us Will Return, Useless Knowledge and The Measure of Our Days) in the years immediately after the war. To give the book the test of time, and because of her fear it would not do justice to the greatest tragedy humanity had known, she held off on publishing the first part until 1965. The final volumes were published in 1970 and 1971. The play Qui Rapportera Ces Paroles? (Who Will Carry the Word?) is about her experience at Birkenau.

In later years she abandoned Communism, influenced like other resister-survivors by the exposure of concentration camps in the Soviet Union. During the 1960s she worked for the United Nations and philosopher Henri Lefebvre, who had worked with Politzer before the war. She died of lung cancer in 1985.

Adelaide Hautval (1906-1988)

Adelaide Hautval was born to a Protestant family in Hohwald (Bas Rhin), France in 1906. She studied medicine in Strasbourg, going on to work in several psychiatric wards.

In April 1942, she was told of the death of her mother who lived in occupied Paris. Wishing to attend her mother's burial, Adelaide asked German authorities for permission to cross the demarcation line separating the two zones of France and was refused. Her attempt to make a crossing without the permit failed: Adelaide was arrested by the German police and transferred to the prison in Bourges.

That June, Jewish prisoners wearing the yellow patch began to arrive at the prison. As she awaited her, she protested the harsh treatment of Jewish prisoners who were incarcerated with her. The reply was that from now on she would share their fate. Undeterred, Adelaide pinned a piece of yellow paper to her clothing that read, "Friend of the Jews."

After incarceration in several detention camps, she was sent with 200 other French women to Auschwitz in January 1943 on a train that became known as the Convoi des 31000. She was housed with 500 Jewish women who nicknamed her "the saint."

She applied her medical knowledge to treat Jewish prisoners who had contracted typhus, secluding them in a separate part of the block, in order to prevent contagion. Employed as a physician by the camp commander, she refrained from reporting the prisoners’ illness and thereby spared them immediate death. She treated Jewish patients with boundless dedication, and her gentle hands and warm words were of inestimable value to Jews in the hell of Auschwitz. “Here,” she said, in words engraved on the prisoners’ memory, “we are all under sentence of death. Let us behave like human beings as long as we are alive.”

Adelaide was assigned to Dr. Eduard Wirths who conducted sterilization experiments on Jewish women in the infamous Block 10 at Auschwitz. She quickly discovered that the experiments were performed without anesthesia. When forced to assist in the surgical sterilization of a young woman from Greece, Dr. Hautval told Dr. Wirth that she would never again attend such a procedure. When Wirth asked Dr. Hautval: “Don’t you see that these people are different from you?” she replied, “In this camp, many people are different from me. You, for example.” 

After her confrontation with Dr. Wirths, she was advised to stay out of sight. She feared retribution but was not punished. In August 1944 she was moved to Ravensbruck where she continued to practice medicine and heal prisoners as much as possible until the camp liberated in April 1945. When she returned to France, her health had been permanently impaired.

Marie-Claude Vogel Vaillant-Couturier (1912-1996)

Marie-Claude Vogel, daughter of magazine editor Lucien Vogel and fashion photographer Cosette de Brunhoff, was born in Paris on 3 November 1912.

She chose to be a photographic reporter, at the time when the trade was uniquely male, and earned herself the nickname of “the lady in Rolleiflex”.

In 1934 she joined the Communist Youth Movement of France. That year she married Paul Vaillant-Couturier, founder of the Republican Association of Ex-servicemen, a communist and chief editor of L'Humanité. She entered into it's photo service and later took responsibility for it after Paul's mysterious disappearance in 1937.

Attached to the magazine's Vu team, she went to Germany where she took part in an investigation into the rise of Nazism. It was two months after the accession of Adolf Hitler to power when she reported on the stereotypes of the concentration camps of Oranienburg and Dachau.

The Hitler-Stalin Pact in September 1939 resulted in prohibitions on L'Humanité and influenced her change of activities. She joined the Resistance and participated in the publication of leaflets such as l'Université Libre, Georges Politzer's pamphlet Sang et Or (Blood and Gold) and a clandestine edition of L'Humanité with Pierre Villon, who she married in 1949. She strengthened the connection between the Committee of National Front Intellectuals and the military resistance (OS, later the FTPF).

On 9 February 1942 Marie-Claude was arrested in a trap set by Marshal Pétain's police with many of her companions, all of whom were shot at Fort Mont-Valérien. She was interned until 15 February at the Dépôt de la Préfecture and La Santé Prison from March 20 to August, when she was transferred to Romainville, an internment camp under German authority. From there she was sent to an internment camp in Compiègne before deporting to Auschwitz-Birkenau via the Convoi des 31000 of 24 January 1943. Singular by its composition, this covoy inincluded 230 female Resistance members, communists and Gaullist wives of Resistance members. Only 49 of the 230 women would return from the camps after the war.

For 18 months, Marie-Claude was kept in Auschwitz where she witnessed the genocide of Jews and Gypsies and took part in the international clandestine resistance committee of the camp. In August 1944, she was transferred to the Ravensbrück where she was assigned to earthworks before being transferred to Revier (the camp infirmary) because of her knowledge of the German language.

Though Ravensbrück was liberated on 30 April 1945 by the Red Army, she didn't return to France until 25 June 1945. During that time, she devoted herself to the patients' repatriation. An article in Le Monde on 16 Jun 1943 read, “Each day, this magnificent Frenchwoman makes the rounds, uplifting courage, giving hope where it is often but illusion. The word 'holiness' comes to mind when one sees this grand sister of charity near these men and these women who are dying every day."

A leading member of the National Federation of Resistant Deportees and Internees and Patriots since its creation in 1945, Marie-Claude became its vice-president, then co-president in 1978. She was also one of the first presenters of l'Amicale d’Auschwitz. A witness at the Nuremberg Trials, she said later, “by telling of the sufferings of those who could not speak any more, I had the feeling that, through my voice, those who they had tortured and exterminated, accused their torturers.” However, she returned from the trials “shocked, worried,” “exasperated by the procedure,” dissatisfied, in particular denouncing the absence, on the dock, of the leaders of the firms Krupp, Siemens, IG Farben, firms which had largely taken part in the economic exploitation of the deportees. But in spite of these insufficiencies, she underlined later how much the definition crimes against humanity was “progress for the human conscience”.

In 1964 Paul Rassinier, a holocaust survivor and critic of the trial verdicts, accused her of having survived only by dispossessing her companions. Marie-Claude took action against these accusations and the lawsuit against Rassinier made justice of the charges. Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz declared to the bar of witnesses, “We entered the infirmary buildings not to hide, but because we needed courageous German speaking comrades. … When we gave back this ration of bread deducted from our own ration, this bulb, we knew that she would give it well to those who needed it most and without any political appreciation … I know few women as courageous as Marie-Claude, who always gave the feeling that her own life was nothing if she wasn't with the company of her comrades.”

The manager of the extreme-right magazine Rivarol and Rassinier were condemned. During December of the same year, she defended in front of the French National Assembly the concept of imprescriptibility of the crimes against humanity, thus opening the way with the ratification, by France in 1968, of the Convention of United Nations on the imprescriptibility of these crimes.

In 1987, she called all the civil parties to testify against Klaus Barbie. During the creation of the Foundation for the Memory of the Deportation. In 1990, she was unanimously designated President, then President d' Honneur until her death on 11 December 1996.

Ala Gertner (1912-1945)

Ala Gertner, daughter of a prosperous Jewish family, was born in Bedzin, Poland on 12 March 1912. She may have attended the gymnasium in Bedzin.

On 28 October 1940 she was ordered to report to the train station in nearby Sosnowiec, where she was taken to a Nazi labor camp in Geppersdorf (now Rzedziwojowice), a construction site where hundreds of Jewish men were forced laborers on the Reichsautobahn (now the E22 highway) and women worked in the kitchen and laundry. Ala, who was fluent in German, was assigned to the camp office where she would meet her future husband Berhard Holtz. 

Geppersdorf was part of Organisation Schmelt, a network of 177 labor camps under the administration of Albrecht Schmelt, a WWI veteran who joined the Nazis in 1930 and rose quickly to the post of SS Oberführer.

Schmelt built a highly lucrative slave trade. Over 50,000 Jews from western Poland were forced to work for German businesses, primarily in construction, munitions and textile manufacturing. The businesses paid Schmelt, who shared a fraction of the money with Moses Merin, the Jewish governor of the region. Almost none of it went to the Jewish laborers. Conditions varied, but were much better than in the large concentration camps: for example, mail and packages could be received in some of the Schmelt camps until 1943, when the Schmelt labor camps became part of Auschwitz and Gross-Rosen. (Oskar Schindler's camp was originally under Organization Schmelt.)

In 1941, Ala was allowed to return home and was employed in various local workshops and offices run by Moses Merin. She and Bernhard married in the Sosnowiec Ghetto of Srodula on 22 May 1943. They lived in the Będzin ghetto of Kamionka until sometime after 16 July 1943 (the date of Ala's last known letter) and were probably deported to Auschwitz with the remaining Jews of Sosnowiec and Będzin in early August,1943.

At Auschwitz, Ala worked in the warehouses at first, sorting the possessions of Jews who had been gassed. She became friendly with Roza Robota, who was active in the underground resistance. Ala was then assigned to the office of the munitions factory, where she and Roza became part of a conspiracy to smuggle gunpowder to the Sonderkommando, who were building bombs and planning an escape. She recruited other women to join the conspiracy, and passed the stolen gunpowder to Roza.

On 7 October 1944 the Sonderkommando blew up Crematorium 4, but the revolt was quickly quelled by the armed SS guards. A lengthy investigation led the Nazis back to Ala and Roza, and then to Estusia Wajcblum and Regina Safirsztajn, who were also implicated in the conspiracy. They were interrogated and tortured for weeks. On 5 or 6 January 1945 the four women were publicly hanged in Auschwitz. This was the last public hanging at Auschwitz: two weeks later, the camp was evacuated.

Auschwitz-Birkenau:

The Revolt at Auschwitz-Birkenau

October 7, 1944

19-year-old Ester Wajcblum and her 14-year-old sister Hana arrived at Auschwitz in spring of 1943. They were assigned to work in the munitions factory where they met Regina Safirsztain and Ala Gertner, women engaged in resistance activities. Together with Roza Robota, who worked in the clothes depot, they began to smuggle gunpowder to the men in the adjoining camp, sometimes using bodies of friends that were en route to the Sonderkommando for disposal.

The Sonderkommando were Jewish prisoners who worked the death camps in return for special treatment and privileges. Every few months, the current Sonderkommando was liquidated and the first task of their successors was to dispose of the bodies of the previous group. Since a Sonderkommando usually comprised men from incoming transports, their second task often consisted of disposing of the bodies of their own families. The Sonderkommando did not participate in the actual killing - that was carried out by the Nazis. The Sonderkommando duties included guiding the new arrivals into the gas chambers, removing the bodies afterwards, shaving hair, removing teeth, sorting through possessions (much of which they were given as reward), cremating the bodies, and disposing of the ashes. Their knowledge of the internal workings of the camp marked them for certain death. Someone selected for the Sonderkommando had a choice: die then or die in four months time.

As the time of their execution grew nearer, the members of the 12th Sonderkommando crystallized their plans of revolt and escape. Besides the gunpowder being smuggled by the women, which the men fashioned into crude grenades using sardine tins, there were some small arms that had been slipped through the fence by local partisans. In addition, knives and small axes had been made and hidden throughout the crematoria. Much of the gunpowder was used in creating demolition charges. There was talk of a general uprising that would coincide with the arrival of the approaching Soviet armies, but some Sonderkommando were certain that they would not live until that day.

On 7 October 1944, at about 3:00 p.m., the Poles in Crematorium 1 began the revolt. Hungarians in Crematoria 3 and 4 joined in while the Sonderkommando of Crematorium 2 broke through the wires of the camp. An especially sadistic Nazi guard in Crematorium 1 was disarmed and stuffed into an oven to be burned alive. Small arms fire rattled from the second floor of the crematoria until the Germans brought in heavy machine guns and riddled the wooden roof.

The guards counterattacked and penetrated the buildings, indiscriminately shooting at all prisoners they encountered. The Sonderkommando in Crematorium 4 dragged their demolition charges into the oven rooms and detonated them in a defiant suicide. The revolt was quickly suppressed and the escaped men recaptured with the help of local citizens. Approximately 200 sonderkommando were forced to lie face down outside the crematoria where they were executed with single shots to the back of the head. Some of the men were spared for interrogation, but the bodies of the 12th Sonderkommando were soon disposed of by the 13th Sonderkommando.

The men gave up names, including those of some women who were engaged in smuggling gunpowder. Despite months of beatings, rape and electric shocks to their genitals, the only names given up by the women were those of already dead Sonderkommando.

On 5 January 1945, the four women were hung in front of the assembled women’s camp. Roza Robota shouted “strong and be brave” as the trapdoor dropped.

Crematorium 4 was damaged beyond repair and never used again. On 7 November 1944, the Nazis destroyed the gas chambers to hide their crimes. Twelve days after the hanging of the four women, the camp personnel forced 56,000 prisoners on a Death March into what remained of the Third Reich; 7,500 prisoners left behind were liberated by advancing Soviet armies on January 27.

Found at www.Jewishvirtuallibrary.org.