From Brzesko to Antwerp
Malka Zimetbaum, known to everyone as Mala, was born on 26 January 1918 in Brzesko, a small town in southern Poland, the youngest of five children of Pinhas and Chaya Zimetbaum. In 1928, when she was ten, the family left Poland for Belgium and settled in Antwerp, home to a large and lively Jewish community and to the diamond trade that employed many of its members.
Mala was a brilliant pupil, especially strong in mathematics, and she had a gift for languages. Growing up between Polish, Yiddish, Flemish and French, she went on to master German and more besides. Her schooling ended early: when her father lost his sight, the family needed her wages, and she left school to work in a diamond factory.
Occupation and deportation
German forces invaded Belgium in May 1940. Over the following two years Jews in Belgium were registered, marked, stripped of their livelihoods and, from the summer of 1942, rounded up for deportation. Mala was arrested in Antwerp in 1942, most probably on 22 July, though some accounts place her arrest in the September raids of that year.
She was taken to the Dossin barracks in Mechelen, the assembly camp from which the Jews of Belgium were deported. On 15 September 1942 she was put aboard Transport X to Auschwitz, which arrived two days later. Of the 1,048 Jews on that transport, only a few hundred were admitted to the camp as prisoners; the rest were murdered on arrival. Mala, aged twenty-four, was sent to the women’s camp at Birkenau and given the number 19880. The Mechelen barracks now house Kazerne Dossin, a memorial, museum and documentation centre on the Holocaust in Belgium, whose archive preserves records of the deportations.
The runner who saved lives
Because she spoke so many languages, the SS made Mala an interpreter and Läuferin, a runner or messenger, in the women’s camp. The post gave her rare privileges: a measure of freedom to move around Birkenau, and access to the camp offices. Many prisoners in such positions used them to protect themselves. Mala used hers to protect others.
Survivors’ testimonies are remarkably consistent about what she did. One of her tasks was to assign women released from the camp hospital to work details, and she quietly sent the weakest to the lightest work. She warned patients when selections were coming, urging them to leave the hospital while they could. She smuggled food and medicine to the sick, passed on letters, and slipped photographs that relatives had sent, which prisoners were forbidden to keep, out of the files and into the hands of the women they belonged to. Some survivors said she saved them by removing their numbers from lists of the condemned. Tzipora Silberstein, who gave testimony to Yad Vashem decades later, remembered Mala standing beside the Germans as transports from Greece arrived, apparently writing down names but often only pretending to, and so saving lives. She said Mala had done hundreds and thousands of good things for the women around her, and that she wanted Mala’s story to be heard.
Primo Levi, himself a survivor of Auschwitz, wrote in The Drowned and the Saved that she was generous and courageous, had helped many of her companions and was loved by all of them. Several witnesses also described her as part of the camp’s underground.
Mala and Edek
In Birkenau Mala met Edward Galiński, known as Edek, a young Polish political prisoner born in 1923. He had arrived at Auschwitz on 14 June 1940 with the very first transport of Polish prisoners from Tarnów, and bore the low number 531. Working as a mechanic, he could sometimes enter the women’s camp. The two fell in love. Their love, in a place built to destroy every human bond, became part of the camp’s collective memory.
Edek had first planned to escape with his friend Wiesław Kielar, who survived Auschwitz and later described these events in his memoir Anus Mundi. That plan fell through when Kielar lost a pair of SS uniform trousers they needed for their disguise. Edek decided instead to flee with Mala, promising his friend that he would find a way to send a uniform back so that Kielar could follow. For Mala, escape was not only about freedom. According to Levi and other witnesses, she hoped to reach the outside world and tell the Allies what was happening at Birkenau, in the hope of saving lives.
The first woman to escape
On Saturday, 24 June 1944, chosen because the weekend guard was lighter, the couple walked out of Birkenau. Edek wore an SS uniform obtained with the help of Edward Lubusch, an SS man known for aiding prisoners, and Mala, carrying a blank pass she had obtained, posed as a prisoner being escorted to work. The disguise held. Mala Zimetbaum became the first woman known to have escaped from Auschwitz-Birkenau.
For almost two weeks they made their way south toward the Slovak border. On 6 July 1944, in the Żywiec Beskid mountains, Mala went into a shop to buy bread and was stopped by a German border patrol. Edek, watching from hiding, gave himself up so that they would not be separated, as they had promised each other.
Unbroken in captivity
The pair were brought back to Auschwitz and held in separate cells in Block 11, the camp’s punishment bunker. They were interrogated and tortured, but witnesses agree that neither betrayed anyone. Even there they kept faith with each other. Edek scratched their names and numbers into the wall of his cell; they whistled to each other down the corridor, and a sympathetic guard passed notes between them. When Edek was taken out for exercise, he would stand beneath what he believed was her window and sing an Italian aria. According to the Jewish Women’s Archive, their death sentences were probably confirmed by Heinrich Himmler himself.
A final act of defiance
On 15 September 1944 the SS staged simultaneous public executions, Edek’s in the men’s camp and Mala’s in the women’s camp, in front of assembled prisoners, as a warning. Edek is remembered for crying out “Long live Poland” before he died. Witnesses in the men’s camp recalled that when he was led to the gallows, prisoners bared their heads in respect.
As her sentence was read, Mala cut her wrist with a razor blade she had hidden, and when an SS man seized her she struck him across the face. Witnesses including Raya Kagan and those whose accounts Levi recorded described this moment as an act of open defiance by a Jewish woman before the whole camp. Some recalled her calling on the prisoners to resist, or telling them that the day of reckoning was near. She was overpowered and taken away, and died that day. Accounts of the exact circumstances of her death differ. Women prisoners who witnessed the scene carried the story back to the barracks, and it spread through the camp.
Remembered by those she saved
Mala’s story first entered the record through the survivors themselves. In August 1946, in a displaced persons’ shelter in Paris, the American psychologist David Boder recorded interviews with two survivors, Edith Serras and Henja Frydman, who each independently spoke of Mala from Belgium; Frydman said Mala had saved her life by removing her number from an execution list, and Serras remembered her saving many other women in the same way and arranging extra food for them. On 8 June 1961 Raya Kagan told Mala’s story in her testimony at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, and Primo Levi wrote about her in his last book.
Three of Mala’s siblings, Gitla, Marjem and Salomon, survived the war. Gitla later emigrated to Guayaquil in Ecuador, and her descendants still honour Mala’s memory. Whatever details differ between accounts, every survivor who spoke of her agreed on the essential: that camp life did not corrupt her, and that she used the little power she had to help others.
Legacy
Mala Zimetbaum has become one of the best-known symbols of Jewish resistance and compassion at Auschwitz. The Polish director Wanda Jakubowska, herself a survivor of the camp, based the heroine of her 1948 film The Last Stage, one of the first feature films about Auschwitz, on Mala’s story. In 2002 a musical about her life, Mala, The Music of the Wind, opened in Athens. Seventy years later the film was screened in Tel Aviv and reviewed in Haaretz. Biographies have appeared in several languages, among them Lorenz Sichelschmidt’s German study of 1995, Gérard Huber’s French biography of 2006 with a preface by Simone Veil, Francesca Paci’s Un amore ad Auschwitz of 2016 and Barbara Beuys’s Die Heldin von Auschwitz, The Heroine of Auschwitz, of 2023, and her story is taught in schools and told at commemorations across Europe and Israel.
For later generations, Mala stands for two kinds of courage. One was the quiet daily courage of a young woman who, given a scrap of privilege in a place built for death, chose to spend it on others. The other was the open courage of her escape and of her last moments, when she refused to let her captors decide the meaning of her death. Survivors remembered her as unbowed, and that is how she is remembered still.
Sources & further reading
Mala Zimetbaum, Wikipedia · Mala Zimetbaum, Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women, Jewish Women’s Archive · Mala Zimetbaum, University of Liverpool, Department of History blog · Mala Zimetbaum, Jewish Virtual Library · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.