On September 27, 2023, Ariela Heilman presented a program via Zoom about her mother, Holocaust survivor Anna Heilman, for the Nancy & David Wolf Holocaust & Humanity Center in Cincinnati, OH. You can watch this excellent and moving presentation here. In her 2001 book, Never Far Away: The Auschwitz Chronicles, Anna Heilman recounted how her sister Ester (Eustusia) Wajcblum, along with Regina Safirsztain, Ala Gertner and Roza Robota, was hanged in January 1944 in Auschwitz, after smuggling gunpowder that aided members of the 12th Sonderkommando’s crematorium revolt. Ariela explained that her mother was born into the comfort of an assimilated Jewish family in prewar Warsaw, suffered from the conditions and the ultimate loss of her sister in Auschwitz, and built her life afterward and worked to memorialize her sister and the other women who were part of the gunpowder plot. Ariela described how her
mother’s happy youth quickly turned into a life of tragic loss, infinite resilience, and enduring love.
Remember the Women Institute presented a program about the four hanged women at the Center for Jewish History, New York, in 2014, and members of our executive board were with Ariela Heilman and others when she organized a memorial at the sculpture honoring the four women at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel, in January 2020.