Roza Robota

At Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, a monument was built to honor Robota and the three other executed women. It stands in a prime location in the garden. In the United States, the Rosa Robota Foundation, Inc., a not-for-profit educational organization in New York State has been active in the dissemination of information and has offered audio-visual presentations to student and civic groups since 1994. The Foundation also arranged a fiftieth-anniversary commemoration of the Sonderkommando Revolt at the site of a destroyed crematorium in the Auschwitz Museum. Another commemorative event is planned to take place in Auschwitz in October, 2023.

Roza Robota (1921 – 6 January 1945) or Róża Robota in Polish, referred to in other sources as Rojza, Rózia or Rosa, was the leader of a group of four women Holocaust resistors hanged in the Auschwitz concentration camp for their role in the Sonderkommando prisoner revolt of 7 October 1944.

Robota and three other women – Ala Gertner, Ester Wajcblum, and Regina Safirsztajn – were arrested by the Gestapo and tortured in the infamous Bloc 23 but they refused to reveal the names of others who participated in the smuggling operation. They were hanged on 6 January 1945 – two women at the morning roll-call assembly, two others in the evening. Robota was 23 years old. According to some eyewitness accounts, she and her comrades shouted "Nekamah" ("Vengeance!"), or "Be Strong" to the assembled inmates before they died. Some say they shouted, "Chazak V'amatz" – "Be strong and have courage", the Biblical phrase that God uses to encourage Joshua after the death of Moses. This is also the motto of Hashomer Hatzair, the youth organization to which she belonged.

Roza was transported to Auschwitz concentration camp in a Holocaust train during the liquidation of the Ciechanów Ghetto in 1942. She survived the "selection" and was assigned to Auschwitz-II Birkenau labor commando for women, where she got involved in the underground dissemination of news among the prisoners. No one else from her family in Europe is known to have survived. She worked in the clothing depot at the Birkenau Effektenlager adjacent to Crematorium III of Birkenau, where the bodies of gas chamber victims were burned. She had been recruited by men of the underground whom she knew from her hometown, to smuggle "Schwarzpulver" (gunpowder; or dynamite according to other sources) collected by women in the Krupp "Weichsel" munitions factory, and then transferring it to a Sonderkommando man named Wróbel, who was also active in the resistance. This schwartzpulver was used to manufacture primitive grenades to help blow up the crematorium during the Sonderkommando revolt. In her work, she was assisted by Hadassa Zlotnicka and Asir-Godel Zilber, both also from Ciechanów, whom Robota apparently enlisted in the resistance. Together with a few other women who worked in the Nazi "pulverraum" factory, they were able to obtain, hide, and turn over to the men of the underground no more than one to three teaspoons of the schwartzpulver compound per day, and not every day. The Sonderkommando blew up Crematorium III on 6 October 1944.

Born in Ciechanów, Poland, to a middle-class family, Róża had one brother and one sister. She was a member of Hashomer Hatzair Zionist-socialist youth movement, and joined that movement's underground, upon the 1939 Nazi German invasion of Poland. Róża often used her Hebrew name, Shoshanah. In the home of Izajasz (Isaiah) Robota at Żydowska 4 Street in Ciechanów was the Perec Library, the most active Jewish cultural society in the city, organizing discussions about the Polish, Jewish and world literature, as well as theatre performances, lectures, and dances.