Canadian War Museum
November 7th, 7:00 pm
Register: Sabotage, Women’s Underground Resistance at Auschwitz
By Marion Silver
In observance of 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz , CHES will welcome the Ottawa community to an evening dedicated to women’s resistance in Auschwitz. The program will feature the screening of the film, Sabotage, the outstanding documentary created by Noa Aharoni, an award-winning Israeli filmmaker. She will attend the screening and will participate in a special presentation about the untold story of a women’s underground operation in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Photo by: Wayne Cuddington - Ottawa Citizen
Sabotage, a unique, outstanding, and sensitive Holocaust film, utilizes animation, archival footage, and live testimony to dramatize a heroic story of women’s courage and sisterhood. The film documents how 30 Jewish women, slave labourers in the ‘Union’ munitions factory, risked their lives in a dangerous smuggling operation.
They stole small portions of gunpowder from the factory and passed it from one to another so that the gunpowder could reach the Sonderkommando men, Jewish prisoners who were forced to perform various duties in the gas chambers and crematoria. The plan was to blow up the gas chambers. The men used that gunpowder to destroy Crematorium IV, during the Auschwitz uprising on October 7th, 1944, mere weeks before liberation.
Sabotage, an unforgettable account of the triumph of the human spirit, has an Ottawa connection, Anna Wajcblum Heilman, whose sister Estucia was one of the thirty women, survived the uprising and emigrated to Ottawa in 1960 with her husband and two daughters. She became a well-respected social worker and supervisor at the Ottawa Children’s Aid Society until her death in 2011. Anna was an advocate for Holocaust Education and participated in the March of the Living in 1994. In her later years, she campaigned tirelessly to have the women involved in the revolt recognized as resistance fighters.
Anna kept a diary while in Auschwitz that included details of that historic and heroic uprising. The diary, which formed the basis of Sabotage, is now housed at Library and Archives Canada, and will be on view at the launch event. Anna’s memoir was published in a book entitled, Never Far Away, and won a City of Ottawa Book Award in 2002. Her daughter, Ariela Heilman, will be participating in a panel discussion following the screening of the documentary.
“Anna’s narration as she recounts her love for her sister and the courage of the young women and the stunning animation by Avi A. Katz are profoundly moving,” said Janet Kaiman, Anna’s neighbour and friend and a member of the CHES Event Committee. “I remember sitting around Anna’s kitchen table as a young girl listening to her stories about growing up in Warsaw. She told them as an adventure story, about going into the Warsaw sewers, smuggling food and other items and about hiding from soldiers. As we grew older, she spoke more about the camp and the horror of what happened there.”
Photo credit: The Ottawa Citizen
“I let the women in this film talk for themselves, I put them in front of the stage,” said producer Noa Aharoni. “When I ask myself what attracted me to making Sabotage, my answer is unequivocal: The female perspective on the Holocaust, or if you will, the heroism of women in the Holocaust.”
CHES is proud to support the Israeli film industry during this difficult time. In 1994, Aharoni graduated from Sapir College’s Television and Cinema program. She won the Best Documentary Film Award (Forum of Documentary Creators, Israel) and was nominated for the Ophir Award for Best Documentary. She is a director of both feature films and documentaries. In her opinion, the combination of multimedia in Sabotage is the secret that will bring the viewer to the emotional place she looks for in her films.
Marion Silver is the CHES secretary.