She slapped an SS guard across the face with her own blood. Standing at the foot of the gallows, wrists slashed, surrounded by soldiers who had murdered over a million people, a 26-year-old Jewish woman looked her executioners in the eye and refused to break. She didn’t beg. She didn’t cry.
She turned to the thousands of terrified prisoners watching and shouted, “The end of the war is near. Be strong.” This is not a story the Nazis wanted you to know, but we’re going to tell it anyway. Before we go any further, if you’re new here, welcome to Untold War Stories, the channel that digs into the history they didn’t teach you in school.
Hit that subscribe button right now and turn on notifications because the stories we cover don’t appear on your algorithm by accident. Every view on this channel is a vote against forgetting. Now, let’s get into it. February 2nd, 1943, Stalingrad, Soviet Union. After 5 months of brutal street-by-street combat that turned an entire city into a graveyard, Germany’s elite Sixth Army, once considered the most unstoppable military force on Earth, raised the white flag.
It was the first time one of Hitler’s full field armies had ever surrendered. The psychological impact was seismic. The myth of Nazi invincibility cracked and it never fully healed. Two years later, on January 27th, 1945, Soviet soldiers pushed open the gates of Auschwitz. What they found inside would haunt the world forever.
Between 1940 and 1945, at least 1.3 million people were deported to Auschwitz. Of those, at least 1.1 million were murdered, gassed, starved, shot, or worked to death. The Nazis kept meticulous records. They were proud of their efficiency. Officially, only 928 prisoners ever successfully escaped. Many were recaptured.
Many were killed on the run. One of them was Mala Zimetbaum, and her story is unlike any other that survived the war. Malka Zimetbaum, known to everyone as Mala, was born on January 26th, 1918 in Brzesko, a small town in what is today southern Poland. She was the youngest of five children in a Jewish family that spoke German at home, a detail that would one day become both her greatest weapon and her greatest burden.
When Mala was 10, the family moved to Antwerp, Belgium. And here is where her story becomes remarkable even before the war begins. Despite growing up in poverty, her father was blind and the family struggled financially. Mala was brilliant. She excelled in mathematics and had a near supernatural gift for languages.
By the time she was a young adult, she spoke six languages fluently, Flemish, French, German, English, Yiddish and Polish. She dropped out of school to work as a dressmaker, contributing to the family income, but never stopped learning. She was passionate, politically aware and deeply compassionate, qualities that would define every choice she made for the rest of her life.
She joined the Zionist youth organization Hanoar Hatzioni, believing in a future where Jewish people could live without fear. That future was about to be violently interrupted. On May 10th, 1940, Nazi Germany invaded Belgium. Within six weeks, the country collapsed. King Leopold III surrendered and was placed under house arrest.
The government fled to London. For Belgium’s Jewish community, which had swelled to between 70,000 and 75,000 people by 1940, many of them refugees who had already fled Nazi persecution in Eastern Europe, the occupation was a death sentence written in slow ink. Anti-Jewish laws came swiftly. Businesses were seized, movement was restricted.
The yellow star of David became mandatory. Jews were forced into labor gangs constructing military fortifications in northern France and factory lines across Belgium. Then came the deportations. Between 1942 and 1944, German authorities deported nearly 25,000 Jews from Belgium to Auschwitz. Most were murdered. Fewer than 2,000 ever came home.
Mala had worked as a language assistant for an American-run company in Antwerp. When the Nazis shut it down, she was offered a chance to emigrate to the United States. She refused. She wouldn’t leave her parents behind. That decision would cost her everything and it would make her immortal.
On July 22nd, 1942, Mala was arrested during a raid at Antwerp Central Station. She had just returned from Brussels, where she had been trying to find a hiding place for her family. She was first taken to Fort Breendonk, a grim transit camp, and then to the SS collection center in Mechelen. Even there, imprisoned, she resisted.
She was assigned to register incoming Jewish prisoners and used her position to smuggle messages and jewelry to the outside world, passing them to the families of inmates. She removed children’s names from deportation lists, saving them from the death trains. On September 15th, 1942, Mala Zimetbaum was deported to Auschwitz.
Advertisements
When the train arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the process was clinical and monstrous. Prisoners were divided into columns, men and older boys in one line, women and children in another. SS doctors, including the notorious Josef Mengele, walked the lines performing selections. A wave of the hand to the left meant the gas chambers.
A wave to the right meant forced labor. The entire process took seconds per person. Of the 1,048 Jews who arrived on Mala’s transport, only 230 men and 101 women survived the selection. Those condemned to death were told they were going for a shower and disinfection. They were even promised soup, tea, and coffee afterward. They were told to hang their clothes on numbered hooks and remember the numbers.
SS guards were polite, calm, clinical. Then the doors sealed shut and Zyklon B pellets dropped through vents in the ceiling. The victims were dead within 20 minutes. SS Dr. Johann Kremer, who oversaw gassings, testified at the Nuremberg trials that you could hear the screaming through the walls, that they fought for their lives until the very end.
Afterward, the Sonderkommando, Jewish prisoners forced under threat of death to process the bodies, remove the corpses, sorted them by size and body mass for the crematoria and extracted gold teeth. Those who refused were thrown alive into the furnaces. Those caught stealing were doused in gasoline and set on fire in front of the others.
This was the machine that Mala entered on that September morning. Mala’s language has saved her life for a time. The camp administration assigned her as a Läuferin, a runner, and official translator. This came with extraordinary privileges. She didn’t have to shave her head. She wore civilian clothes instead of a striped uniform.
She lived in a block with doctors and other privileged inmates. She could move freely across the camp. She used every single one of those privileges to help others. Auschwitz survivors testified about her in nearly identical terms: generous, fearless, radiant, tireless. She supplied food, medicine, and clothing to prisoners on the edge of starvation.
She warned the sick before selections so they could appear healthy and avoid the gas chambers. She placed the names of the already dead onto selection lists to keep the living off them. She arranged for separated family members to find each other across different camp blocks. She even sent coded postcards to her sister in Antwerp mentioning that everyone is with Etush, their sister-in-law who had died in 1940.
Her sister Janka understood immediately. The family was gone. In late 1943, in the most unlikely corner of the most horrific place on earth, Mala met a young Polish Catholic prisoner named Edward “Edek” Galinski. Edek had been arrested at 17 and deported on the very first transport of Polish prisoners to Auschwitz on June 14th, 1940.
He had survived 4 years in the camp. He worked in a locksmith’s workshop under an SS officer named Edward Lubusch who, unusually, treated prisoners with basic human decency. Mala and Edek fell in love quietly, secretly. In stolen moments between camp blocks under the watch of SS guards, they found something the Nazis could not take from them, each other.
But love in Auschwitz was a revolution, and revolutions have consequences. By early 1944, Edek had a plan. He and fellow prisoner Wieslaw Kielar had been plotting an escape disguised as SS guards. Lubusch, their sympathetic supervisor, secretly supplied them with uniforms and a pistol.
Edek refused to leave without Mala. Mala had her own reasons for escaping. She carried stolen deportation lists and intended to bring them to the allies as proof of what was happening. Inside Auschwitz, she would not run to survive. She would run to save others. Her fellow runners, Cella Herda Lea and her cousin Giza, helped her acquire civilian clothes, a detailed map, and a blank SS exit pass stolen from the guard room. The plan was audacious.
Edek would pose as an SS guard escorting a prisoner out of the camp. Mala would wear a male prisoner’s uniform over civilian clothes, carry a porcelain washbasin on her shoulders to hide her face, and walk past the guards as the prisoner being transferred. On June 24th, 1944, they walked out of Auschwitz.
For 2 weeks, they moved through the mountains towards Slovakia, where Mala hoped her uncle could shelter them. She didn’t yet know his entire family had been deported in 1942. Then on July 6th, 1944, it ended. Mala entered a small village store to buy bread with gold she and Edek had carried from the camp. Someone grew suspicious.
The police were called. She was arrested. Edek watched from the hills. He could have run. He turned himself in instead. He had promised they would not be separated. They were returned to Auschwitz-Birkenau and thrown into Block 11, the bunker, the camp’s punishment barracks. The Gestapo tortured Edek for weeks demanding names.
Who gave him the uniform, the pass? Edek revealed nothing. Every evening after roll call, he sang an Italian song from his cell. It was a signal to Mala, “I am still alive.” On September 15th, 1944, exactly 2 years after Mala had first arrived at Auschwitz, both she and Edek were brought out for public execution. Thousands of prisoners were forced to watch.
Edek was led to the gallows in the men’s camp. Before the verdict was even read, he jumped forward into the noose himself, refusing to let the Nazis control even the moment of his death. The guards pulled him back to the platform. He stood up straight and shouted, “Long live Poland.” One prisoner called for all inmates to remove their caps in respect.
They did in unison and silence. In the women’s camp, Mala had hidden a razor blade. As she was brought forward, she drew the blade and slashed the artery in her wrist. An SS guard lunged to grab the blade. Mala slapped him across the face hard with her bleeding hand. She turned to the assembled guards and screamed, “You will all dearly pay for your deeds.
” Then she turned to the prisoners, thousands of them, watching, terrified, heartbroken. And with blood pouring from her wrist, she called out, “I was outside. The end of the war is near. Be strong.” Guards knocked her to the ground. They taped her mouth shut. Maria Mandel, the SS Oberaufseherin known as the Beast of Auschwitz, ordered Mala burned alive in the crematorium.
What happened next is uncertain. Eyewitness accounts differ. Some say Mala died on the cart being wheeled to the crematorium. Some say a guard took pity and shot her at the entrance. Some say she had hidden poison and took it before the flames could reach her. Some say she was thrown into the furnace alive. The Sonderkommando prisoners knew she was coming.
They had been told in advance. They made special preparations. They prayed. They wept. And then they burned her remains with as much dignity as they could offer. Mala Zimetbaum never got a grave, but she was never forgotten. After the war, 39 Belgian women from the Auschwitz women’s camp formally testified that Mala had saved their lives.
Dozens more added their voices over the decades. A Holocaust survivor named Sarah Gottfried named her daughter, born in 1946, Mala after her. That woman, Mala Mayer, lives today in Tel Aviv. A Holocaust research grant was established in Mala’s name at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem. In 2017, she was awarded the JRJ title, Jew Rescuing Jew During the Holocaust by the B’nai B’rith World Center.
On the Antwerp building where she once lived, a memorial plaque bears her likeness. In September 2023, a monument was finally erected in her honor at the Jewish cemetery in Brzesko, her birthplace, because she had no grave to mark. She was 26 years old when she died. She had already lived more bravely than most people dare to dream.
Mala Zimetbaum did not survive the Holocaust, but because of her, others did. And because of them, this story exists. This is why we created Untold War Story, because history is not just dates and battles, it is people. Real people who loved each other, fought for each other, and refused to let darkness have the final word.
If this story moved you, if you believe these voices deserve to be heard, then subscribe to this channel right now. Hit the like button. Share this video with one person who needs to hear it. Turn on notifications so you never miss another story like this one. We remember them, and we always will.
