Dreadful tortures followed for both of them upon capture. The pair was taken to Block Eleven in Auschwitz where they were detained in separate cells for more than a month. This was extraordinary long time for anyone to remain inside The Bunker. Few people survived inside for a week. As Kraus and Kulka put it, “The SS styled it the ‘educational block’ and it represented the culmination of all their bestiality, known as ‘intensified discipline’.” The penal block was first in Camp BIb before it was in the men’s camp BIId.

Block 11, The Death Block 

Inside Block 11, even though they were detained in separate cells, the besotted pair remained connected. The story goes that they could whistle to each other down a hallway and a friendly guard passed notes between them. When the ever-gallant Galiński was allowed outside briefly for exercise he would stand beside what he thought was Zimetbaum’s cell window and sing an Italian aria. How such details were known and recorded is a mystery. They could be fanciful. Nonetheless, there can be no argument as to whether or not the couple’s teamwork in the face of overwhelming odds was inspiring. While their romance had blossomed inside the camp, other fellow prisoners did whatever they could to foster and protect it.

As well, there remains some concrete proof that their love story is real. Inside the house of horrors, Galiński scratched their names and prison numbers on a wall in Cell 20 inside Block 11 and the etching was discovered after the war. An image of Galiński’s painstaking etchings is provided here:

“531 Galiński Edward + 6.VII.1944r. 19880 Mally Zimetbaum +” The inscription includes the prisoner numbers and the names of the escapees, as well as seemingly the date they were captured: July 6, 1944

After the pair steadfastly refused to kowtow to their captors, Galiński and Mala were taken to Birkenau to be hanged on the same day, September 15, 1944, in front of their respective male and female camps.

In The Death Factory: Document on Auschwitz (1966), Auschwitz locksmiths Ota Kraus and Erich Kulka, both Czechs, allege that Malka (or Mala or Mally) was “secretly sentenced to be burnt alive.” If it was a secret, who knew? There are various storylines to consider as to the nature of Mala’s murder, as well as how Galiński was killed. Given that the details are grim, it stands to reason that a somewhat sanitized, storybook version might rise to the fore. Regardless of whether or not Malka knew her destiny, there is ample evidence to claim she remained defiant.

It has been assumed that the SS decided both Mala and Galiński must be publicly humiliated on raised platforms in their respective female and male camps–and this was probably true in Mala’s case. There are various eyewitness reports. Her fellow females prisoners were instructed to march past her. Ever defiant, Mala allegedly struck her SS guard named Ruitters (or named Rutter, according to Auschwitz survivor-turned-historian Erich Kulka, who could not have witnessed Mala’s heroics) in the face while he was looking away. She then slashed the veins of one wrist with a concealed razor blade, intending to bleed to death. The story goes that before she was accorded medical treatment, whether she wanted it or not, Zimetbaum slapped a guard’s face with her bloodied hand and allegedly shouted, “I shall die a heroine, but you shall die like a dog!”

Mala and Edek’s escape route. 

Such quotes might be deemed apocryphal but there were some reliable witnesses for her heroism. The Auschwitz survivor Raya Kagan referred to Zimetbaum’s valour within her Session 70 testimony for the trial of Adolf Eichmann, delivered on June 8, 1961 and her recollections have been corroborated by Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi in his 1986 book The Drowned and the Saved, (I sommersi e i salvati). Levi recalls Zimetbaum as a Birkenau interpreter and messenger who “enjoyed a certain amount of freedom of movement.” She was therefore akin to Vrba and Wetzler in that her multi-lingual abilities had made her valuable for the smooth running of the complex.

The French Auschwitz survivor Fania Fenelon recalls “Mala” (no last name was given) as “the chief-translator at Auschwitz-Birkenau.”  Sent to Auschwitz from Belgium in 1942, she was given a relatively desirable job as a courier and translator due to her fluency in German, Polish, English, French, and Flemish. Fenelon also purports to record a final conversation between Mala and an SS officer during which Mala supposedly asked to be gassed like her parents and so many others. This seems hard to believe. More credible is Fenelon’s record of Mala’s last words. As she was being dragged away in front of her fellow female inmates, Mala allegedly screamed, “Revolt! Rise Up! There are thousands of you. Attack them — they’re cowards, and even if you’re killed, anything’s better than this, at least you’ll die free! Revolt!”

Galiński, at right, Auschwitz metalworking shop 

There are reports that a Nazi guard tried to silence her by grabbing her arm and breaking it, after which she was knocked to the ground and held down while her mouth was taped shut. After she had tried to cut the artery on one of her wrists, she was supposedly taken to the camp hospital, but nobody can verify the truth now, for certain. Others claim a guard took pity on her at the crematorium and shot her before she was incinerated. Kulka and his co-author Ota Kraus could not have witnessed the events on the platform. Nonetheless, they confidently conclude “they loaded her on a handcart and took her to the crematorium to carry out the sentence.” The dramatic inference is that Malka was burned alive. But one can never know for certain. The head supervisor of the women’s camp supposedly yelled that “this beast should burn alive in the chimney.” This, too, sounds apocryphal.

Here is another eye-witness testimony: “An execution by hanging was also planned for Mala. However, a young Slovak woman fellow prisoner described to Wieslaw Kieler what really happened:  “(…) When she (Mala) was already on the platform, while the sentence was being read, she cut her veins with a razor she had prepared beforehand, but as with Edek she was not allowed to die that way. Rapportfuehrer Taube ran over to her, and she slapped his face with her bloody hands. At the same time the SS-men practically trampled her to death before the eyes of the whole women`s camp. She died on the way to the crematorium.” — A-BSM, Collection of Testimonies, v. 9, p.123-126.”

Raya Kagan, in Hell’s Office Women, provides another version: “Mala got hold of a razor blade and quietly slit open her veins. … One of the blockführers grabbed her by the hair. Mala slapped him across the face with her bleeding hand. The SS man crushed her hand. Legend has it that she told him: ‘I shall die a heroine, but you shall die like a dog!”

In the Collection of the State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau there is also an extraordinary memento from the former concentration camp with the statement of Wiesław Kielar from 29th of January, 1968 attached to it: “I donate two locks of human hair to the Museum. They are wrapped in paper printed in German. On the edge of the paper is a pencil inscription: Mally Zimetbaum 19880, Edward Galinski 531. It is an inscription made by Galiński, and his hair and that of Mala Zimetbaum. The camp Lagerkapo, Jupp Windeck, who hanged Edek, gave me the hair and the note an hour after his death in the presence of Rapportschreiber Kazimierz Gosek, stating that it was the last request of the condemned that I should take it and give it to his father. That tragic memento went with me through all the camps, and I kept it to this day.” Statement of Wiesław Kielar dated 29th January 1968.

Different shades of hair that belonged to Zimetbaum and Galiński 

The story is less fanciful than Romeo & Juliet, and all the more credible. These were heroic spirits. A memorial message for Galiński succinctly states: “Those who knew him said he was very handsome, brave, and manly, a person who was willing to take risks. Despite his youth, he served in the Polish Army after the Nazi invasion of his homeland. He was arrested as a political prisoner and taken to the Tarnów prison sometime after Poland fell to the Nazis. On 14 June 1940, he was one of 728 male Polish political prisoners who made up the first deportation to Auschwitz, which at the time was “only” being used as a camp for criminals and political prisoners, not Jews and Gypsies as well. Edek was assigned work as a mechanic, a line of work which brought him into contact with several civilians who were working on the camp’s construction. His work as a mechanic also enabled him to have access to some of the sub-camps, among them the women’s camp at Birkenau, where in late 1943 or early 1944 he met and shortly fell in love with Mala Zimetbaum, who worked as a messenger, a very privileged position that enabled her to save many, many lives. Galiński reportedly tried to jump into the hangman’s noose before sentencing could be read on September 15, 1944. His last words were shouted in defiance, ‘Long Live Poland!'”

There is another version of how Galiński died that is most likely credible because it was provided by a member of the Auschwitz orchestra, 26-year-old Fania Fénelon, who had been deported from Paris to Birkenau in January of 1944 and wrote an autobiography, Sursis pour l’orchestre (1976). She was portrayed by Vanessa Redgrave in the movie Playing for Time.

“On the other side, in the men’s camp, a gallows had been put up. Like us, the men prisoners were there, motionless, silent. Edek Galinski appeared, hands tied behind his back, unrecognizable. He who had been so handsome seemed no longer to have any face at all; it was a swollen, bloody mess.

“We saw him climb onto a bench. A snatch of the verdict in German, then in Polish, reached us; but before it was concluded I saw Edek move. He himself put his head in the noose and pushed back the bench. Jup, a camp kapo, intervened, took his head out, made him get  back on the bench. The speech was resumed, but Edek didn’t wait for it to end to shout: ‘Poland isn’t yet…’

“We would never know the end. With a kick, Jup, his friend, tipped over the bench. An order rang out in Polish and thousands of hands were lifted to raise their caps. In final homage, the inmates of the men’s camp bared their heads before Edek, who had been their hope.”

*

The subject of torture must not be overlooked. At the very end of their book, The Death Factory, Kulka and Kraus provide an addendum that outlines the notorious cruelties of Wilhelm Boger. This grimmer viewpoint emanates from a Russian-born Frenchwoman named Dunja Wasserstrom who was deported from France to Auschwitz in June of 1942. Initially, after being separated from her husband on the platform, Wasserstrom was relegated to hard labour draining swamps, working the gravel pit and carrying bricks. Other times she was required to help carry dead bodies of other workers to the mortuary where she would have met Alfred Wetzler, the registrar. The story goes that she once talked an emaciated Greek girl out of committing suicide, then nursed her back to health. One day when the guards were asking if anyone could work as a Russian-Polish-German interpreter and typist, Dunja Wasserstrom volunteered to work within the Political Department of the Gestapo. Initially, she worked for an SS man named Draper in the Welfare (Fürsorge) Office. There she was obliged to provide false answers to letters forward by the Red Cross from people all over the world who were seeking news about their missing relatives, some of whom were in Auschwitz. The standard reply was, “Not in the camp.”

Wassertrom was then re-assigned to work for the sadist Wilhelm Friedrich Boger, nicknamed Tiger of Auschwitz. With the rank SS Hauptsturmführer (“head storm leader”), he was the head of interrogations from December 23, 1943 until the evacuation of the camp. His contribution to mankind was his invention of the so-called Boger Swing, an implement of torture that was described by his secretary Frau Braun. The hands of a victim were fastened behind their back, then fastened to the victim’s feet, as the victim was suspended to swing in the air from an iron bar that hung from the ceiling. Stripped naked, the victim swung from this bar, with their wrists manacled to their ankles, while Boger asked questions and a guard smashed the suspended victim on the buttocks with a crowbar. As one of Boger’s secretaries named Frau Braun reported: “As the swinging went on and on, and the wailing victim fainted was revived only to faint howling again, the blows continued—until only a mass of bleeding pulp hung before their eyes. Most perished from the ordeal–some sooner, some later. In the end a sack of bones and flayed flesh and fat was swept along the shambles of that concrete floor to be dragged away.”

On April 23, 1964, in Frankfurt, according to The Death Factory by Kraus and Kulka, Wasserstrom testified she witnessed Boger beat at least twenty prisoners to death. Then she confided: “I remember one autumn day. It was in November, 1944, after the gassing had been stopped. A lorry with children arrived in Auschwitz, and stopped just outside the Political Department. As I stood by the window, I saw a small boy, about four years old, jump down from the lorry, holding an apple in his hand. Boger and Draser stood by the door, watching. Suddenly, Boger went to the boy, took him by his legs, and threw him with all his strength against the wall, smashing the child’s head. Then he picked up the apple dropped by the boy… About an hour later, Boger called me in to interpret at an interrogation. He was eating the dead child’s apple.

It was Wasserstrom’s office job to take dictation and type, but she also was obliged to teach her boss Russian and French. She recalled that Boger was learning Russian because he hoped to command a small army of Russian prisoners from Auschwitz. Boger hated Poles more than he hated Jews. When Boger wanted to impress his new secretary Dunja Wasserstrom with his new invention, he called it “my talking machine.” He was particularly fond of interrogating Polish intellectuals on this swing. Consequently, when Mala and Galiński were recaptured after their escape attempt, Boger was keen to interrogate Galiński while Mala was forced to watch. Boger often like to beat men’s testicles until they died.

In The Death Factory, on page 278, we are told, “He died without saying anything. Then Boger questioned Mala…” This evidence was given by Dunja Wasserstrom in 1964 after she was flown from Mexico, at the court’s invitation, for the Frankfurt trial of Auschwitz criminals, during which author Erich Kulka also testified. After numerous eye witness testimonies, Chief Judge Hans Hofmeyer sentenced Boger to life imprisonment with hard labour for murder in at least 114 cases and as an accessory to murder in at least 1000 cases. The inventor of the Boger Swing died on April 3, 1977 in a German prison at the age of 70.

Auschwitz prisoner Zofia Stępień-Bator’s drew this portrait of Mala, now stored in the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.

*

While it’s tempting to accept the fanciful notion that Edek and Mala were the ‘Romeo & Juliet of Birkenau’—Shakespeare himself might have chosen to pitch their romance in that vein—the truth of their tragic tale is far too grim to be re-positioned as entertainment. Nonetheless, there is now a book hyped as “an absolutely heart-breaking World War 2 page-turner” by Ellie Midwood entitled The Girl Who Escaped from Auschwitz despite the fact that, after two years in Auschwitz (two years almost to the day of her escape), Malka Zimetbaum, at 26, can hardly be described as a girl. And her escape failed. The Auschwitz Museum has dubbed such tawdry fare as ‘airport fiction.’ Conversely, as purveyors of non-fiction, Kulka and Kraus also skewed their accounts to serve their own agenda (Kulka grew jealous of his friend Vrba’s notoriety in the West, and likely envied his charm).

The most reliable account of all might well be one of the least known. First published in 1947, Olga Lengyel’s riveting Birkenau memoir Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor’s True Story of Auschwitz is arguably incomparable in Holocaust literature as the ‘best’ (ie. most undeniably true and detailed) account of daily life and death from a female perspective. Before describing what happened to Mala Zimetbaum in particular, the Auschwitz veteran survivor — Lengyel arrived in May of 1943 and was marched out of Auschwitz with 6,000 other women in January of 1945 — offers these comments regarding escape attempts in general.

“All the internees of Auschwitz-Birkenau had one dream, to escape… During my whole stay, I heard of no more than four or five escapes that had gone well. Even in these cases, the results were not completely sure.

“The German system was frighteningly effective. The guards were rewarded for shooting escaped prisoners. First, there was the barbed wire with its high-tension current. Then there were the ‘Miradors,’ the dogs outside who had been specially trained to run down fugitives. Besides, the moment someone was missing, a strict set of measures was put into effect. A siren wailed. When we heard this fearful sound piercing the air, we knew what it meant: someone had tried to save herself. We trembled and prayed for her success. Our sentiments were mixed with selfishness, for we hoped that whoever escaped from the inferno would tell the world what was happening at Birkenau, that someone might come to our aid at last. If the Allies could blow up the crematory oven! The pace of the extermination would at least be slowed.

” But the chase began without a minute lost. At night, powerful searchlights probed the surrounding areas, and patrols accompanied by police dogs prowled the region. Unfortunately, the fugitive could not even count on the aid of the natives. Three or four days’ hunger and thirst generally conquered those who had, by some miracle, succeeded in escaping the pursuers. It was, of course, impractical for them to enter any city to seek food until they had changed their rags for less noticeable garb.

“There was virtually no chance to escape to escape without the cooperation of the guards. Several deportees who had been there for a long time and had procured gold or precious stones from ‘Kanada’ did succeed in bribing a guard. A few got hold of SS uniforms. But even such preparations did not assure success.”

As the wife of a distinguished doctor who had owned and operated a modern, 70-bed sanatorium in Cluj (Transylvania), Olga Lengyel was able to sleep in a separate compartment with a handful of other nurses during much of her imprisonment, during which she became well-acquainted with both Dr. Mengele (she reviled him as a coward) and the bisexual, predatory, ‘blonde angel’ Irma Griese who propositioned her (she “inspired me to the most violent hatred I ever experienced”). She most certainly would have been aware of the escape attempt made by Vrba and Wetzler in early April of 1944, but, in 1946, when she was writing her memoir — so soon after the camps were liberated — she would have had no way of knowing whether or not the pair had succeeded. As well, the fact the duo’s names were not initially included in the so-called Auschwitz Protocols, and that both successful escapees had been obliged to accept new names for their own protection, made it even more unlikely that she would have known whether Vrba and Wetzler had been apprehended or not. Lengyel, however, did learn about the failed escape attempts.

Five Chimneys is remarkably restrained as a narrative, void of embellishments and speculations, so that by the time one has proceeded halfway through the detailed account, there can be no doubt that Lengyel was anything but truthful. Vrba’s account is similar in this regard; they both knew and had experienced so much, the truth was stranger than fiction, as it were. Here, then, is her validation of Mala Zimetbaum’s drama on page 137 of 229-page narrative.

“In the summer of 1944, an Aryan Polish worker [ie. Edek Galinski] who laboured in section B-3 succeeded in getting two S.S. outfits, one for himself and the other for a Jewish girl from Poland, with whom he was in love. Both had been in camp for a long time. They escaped from Birkenau through Auschwitz and reached the village of Auschwitz. There they spent two happy weeks, a real honeymoon after so many years of captivity. They felt so secure in their SS uniforms that they relaxed their vigil and began to stroll through the streets of the village. An SS officer noticed an irregularity in the woman’s appearance, and at once demanded to see their papers. Naturally, they were both arrested.

“The rules provided that fugitives returned to camp must suffer an exemplary punishment in the presence of all the inmates. First, they were compelled to make the rounds of the camp carrying a placard listing the crime for which they were sentenced. Then they were hanged in the middle of the camp or sent to the gas chamber.

“The Polish worker and his companion showed great courage. In front of the assembled crowd of internees [for their separate executions], the girl emphatically refused to carry the placard!

“The Germans behaved as though thunderstruck. An SS guard beat her brutally. Then something unbelievable happened. Gathering all her strength, the girl struck her torturer in the face with her fist.

“A mumour of astonishment ran through the assembly. Someone had struck back! Fuming with rage, the Germans threw themselves on the girl. A shower of blows and kicks felled her. Her face was covered with blood and her limbs were broken.

“Triumphantly, the SS chief slung over her body the sign which she had refused to carry. A truck appeared to fetch her. She was thrown into it as if she were a sack of flour. Still the girl, half dead, with a pierced and a gory face, raised herself and cried out: ‘Courage, friends! They will pay! Liberation is near!’

“Two Germans climbed into the vehicle and stomped her into silence, but they were still kicking her when the truck moved away.”

In this version of the story, there is no mention of a razor blade or what might have occurred inside a crematorium.