Palestine and the Forgotten Jewish October 7 Revolt
Eight decades before the Palestinian uprising, Jewish resistance carried out a kindred rebellion.
For more than a year, the Jewish prisoners of Birkenau, the largest extermination camp in the Auschwitz industrial murder complex, meticulously prepared for an uprising against their Nazi oppressors.
Their revolt, the only to ever take place at Auschwitz, would become a footnote in the vast history of World War 2 and the Nazi genocide in Europe, but today it holds an uncanny historical parallel.
They gathered materials, improvised weapons, and smuggled and stored explosives. Against all odds, they planned to cut the death camp’s power supply, cutting communications among the SS officers and disabling the electric fence, and then to break through it and lead an escape.
The attack would be initiated by 200 men of the Sonderkommando “special work unit", Jewish slaves who were forced by Nazis to escort other Jews arriving on trains, undress them, walk them to the gas chambers, and after their murders, shave hair from their corpses, remove gold teeth and crematoria, burn their bodies in crematoria, grind their bones to dust, and then scatter the ashes to cover up the crime. The Sonderkommando were forced to partake in the extermination of their own people, strangers and loved ones alike.
“I have wanted to live through it to take a revenge for the death of my father, my mother, my beloved sister Nella,” a Greek Jew working at Birkenau’s Crematorium II wrote in a letter discovered decades later.
Four women had smuggled small amounts of gunpowder from the explosives factory they worked in and delivered it to the Sonderkommando, which they planned to use to destroy the crematoria.
The revolt had been delayed by months, but as the gassing at Birkenau came to an end, the Sonderkommando understood that they were slated to be murdered.
On October 7, 1944, the moment arrived.
The camp’s SS ordered the senior Sonderkommando men at Crematorium IV to prepare lists for “evacuation” to another camp, which they suspected meant they would be killed.
One hour before the planned 2 p.m. attack, the SS Staff Sergeant began to announce roll call for the prisoners who would be “transported.” As the Sonderkommando ignored his orders and threats, a Jew named Chaim Neuhof stepped forward. As the SS man reached for his gun, Neuhof shouted the word “Hurrah” and struck the Nazi’s head with a hammer, collapsing him to the ground. The other prisoners began to attack SS troopers with stones, knives, iron poles, axes, picks and crowbars, wounding several more.
Amid the uprising, several Sonderkommando men rushed into Crematorium IV’s barracks and set the mattresses on fire. The smuggled explosives they had stashed in the walls ignited, burning the building down.
Some prisoners cut through the death camp’s fence and escaped into the surrounding forest after having killed three SS men and wounding several more.
The prisoners of Crematorium II saw the dark smoke from the flames of Crematorium IV billowing into the sky and launched their own attack. They threw Nazis into the ovens and killed two SS men, then they cut through the fence to the women’s camp. They all escaped, making their way to the Polish village of Rajsko, where they hid in a granary.
It didn’t take long for the SS to locate the escaped prisoners. The Nazis set fire to the granary, killing everyone inside. Those who escaped from Crematorium IV into the nearby forest fought until they were overcome. Some 250 Jews, including the Sonderkommando resistance leadership, were killed in the uprising.
An SS investigation discovered the names of the four women who had smuggled the explosives: Regina Safirsztajn, Estera Wajcblum, Ala Gertner, and Róża Robota. The women were tortured for weeks and hanged in front of Birkenau’s prisoners. As the Nazis placed a noose around Robota’s neck, she erupted with a final cry of defiance: “Sisters, revenge!”
Exactly 79 years later, the Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip, often referred to as an open-air concentration camp, carried out their own uprising against their oppressors.
Like Birkenau’s Jewish prisoners, the Palestinian resistance carefully planned the uprising, though over a period of at least 10 years. They too used basic weaponry, which they had developed through their own ingenuity.
Like their 1944 Jewish homologues, the Palestinians also tore through the enclosures of their concentration camp. Even the Israeli occupation’s layered system of hi-tech fences, sensors, and barriers could not contain the Palestinian resistance. With basic Ak-47s and rocket-propelled grenades, they attacked and laid siege to military bases and settlements with the goal of bringing as many captives back into Gaza as possible, to be used to win the release of their imprisoned comrades (and civilians) and extract concessions from Israel.
Israel, shocked by the Palestinians’ bold and well-planned assault, enacted the Hannibal Directive, launching a frenzy of machine gun, helicopter, and tank attacks on its own settlements and vehicles heading to Gaza, killing untold hundreds of both Israeli captives and Palestinian militants.
At the same time, it began a military campaign of mass destruction and genocide against the Gaza Strip and its inhabitants – whom defense minister Yoav Gallant called “human animals.”
Unlike the Nazi Holocaust, the Zionist genocide of Gaza has been documented and witnessed in real time by all of humanity via social media and smartphones. There remains no doubt across the world about the scale of the mass-murder and destruction that Israel has carried out.
With full backing from the Biden administration and consensus across the Israeli political spectrum, the Netanyahu government has expanded its war into Lebanon, where it has applied its strategy of complete annihilation and the targeting of civilians to both Beirut and the country’s south.
Yet unlike the Jewish uprising of October 7, 1944, which ultimately failed, the Palestinian attack of October 7, 2023 appears to have triggered an existential crisis in Israel, from which it cannot escape. The collapse of the State of Israel and its Zionist national ideology no longer appears to be a question of “if”, but a matter of “when.”
While some may shudder at the bloody images of the Hamas attack, there can be no doubt that, after 75 years of colonization, 56 years of occupation, 16 years of siege, and no diplomatic or political track to advance their cause, the Palestinians of Gaza were left with no choice but armed struggle. They, like the Jews of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, chose to fight for their lives and liberty, rather than to accept the fate that their oppressors had planned for them.
In due time, October 7, 2023 will come to be understood as the beginning of the Palestinian revolution and will be widely celebrated alongside the Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Algerian, Cuban, and Haitian Revolutions, among others, as a morally justified liberation struggle against an oppressor.
The only question is how many more will die in that process.
Thank you Dan for encapsulating it all so succinctly. Bless you.
Brave and moving piece Dan. Respect.