Mala Zimetbaum was born on January 26, 1918, in Pszczyna, today part of Poland and then part of Austria-Hungary. She was the youngest of five children of Pinhas and Chaya Zimetbaum, both Jewish.
Her family had lived in Germany for several years before her birth, which is why German was the main language spoken in her parents' home. In 1928, when Mala was 10 years old, she moved with her family to Antwerp, Belgium.
She achieved excellent results in school, especially in mathematics and foreign languages. She spoke Flemish, French, German, English, Yiddish and Polish.
Because her father was blind, the family lived under difficult financial circumstances. To contribute to the family income, Mala dropped out of school and initially worked as a dressmaker in a large Antwerp fashion house.
She became interested in Zionism, a political and nationalist movement advocating for the establishment of a Jewish state in the historical land of Israel, and joined the Jewish youth organization Hashomer Hatzair.
Mala Zimetbaum was 15 years old when, on January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany by President Paul von Hindenburg. In 1933, approximately 9.5 million Jews lived in Europe, comprising 1.7 percent of the total European population and more than 60 percent of the world's Jewish population at that time, estimated at 15.3 million.
The Jewish population of Belgium was comparatively small. Out of a population of around 8 million, there were only 10,000 Jews in the country before World War I. The interwar period, however, saw substantial Jewish immigration to Belgium. By 1930 the population rose to 50,000, and by 1940 it was estimated at between 70,000 and 75,000.
Most of the new Jewish immigrants came from Eastern Europe and Nazi Germany, escaping anti-Semitism and poverty in their native countries. Few of the Jewish immigrants claimed Belgian citizenship, and many did not speak French or Flemish. Jewish communities developed in Charleroi, Brussels and above all Antwerp, where more than half of the Jews in Belgium lived.
The Second World War started on September 1, 1939, with the German invasion of Poland. The German invasion of France, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Belgium began on May 10, 1940, and these countries were conquered within six weeks.
Little more than two weeks after the German invasion of Belgium, King Leopold III ordered the surrender of the Belgian Army. The Belgian government fled to Great Britain and formed a government in exile in London, while King Leopold III remained in Belgium under house arrest.
Immediately after the occupation of Belgium, the Germans instituted anti-Jewish laws and ordinances. They restricted the civil rights of Jews, confiscated their property and businesses, banned them from certain professions and in 1942 required Jews to wear a yellow Star of David.
Belgian Jews were also rounded up for forced labor. They worked primarily in the construction of military fortifications in northern France, in road construction projects, in clothing and armament factories and in stone quarries in Belgium.
During the German occupation, a German military administration coexisted with a Belgian civil service. German authorities carried out deportations between 1942 and 1944 and deported nearly 25,000 Jews from Belgium to Auschwitz. Most were murdered there.
The Breendonk and Mechelen camps served as collection centers for the deportations. Fewer than 2,000 deportees survived the Holocaust.
Mala Zimetbaum's knowledge of foreign languages enabled her to get a job as a language assistant in the administration of an American-run company. When the company was forced to close down at the request of the Nazis, she was offered the opportunity to immigrate to the United States. She refused because of her parents.
In October 1940, the German occupation forces in Belgium issued a decree mandating the registration of all Jews residing in Belgium. Jewish individuals were required to register themselves and provide detailed personal information to the authorities, including their names, addresses, family members and other identifying information. The information collected through these registers was later used to facilitate the deportation and extermination of Jews during the Holocaust.
On April 14, 1941, a Jewish pogrom occurred in Antwerp when 200 followers of the Flemish National Union, a Nazi collaborationist movement, burned two synagogues in the city, smashed the windows of Jewish-owned shops, damaged religious symbols and harassed the Jewish population.
In early 1942, Mala's brother was conscripted into forced labor, but because he was mistrustful of official appeals he fled and, together with one of their sisters, went into hiding. Since Antwerp was no longer a safe place, Mala convinced her parents she would find a hiding place in Brussels and together they would wait out the war there.
On July 22, 1942, however, she was arrested during a raid at Antwerp Central Station as she was on her way back from Brussels, where she had attempted to find a hideout for her family. She was first taken to Fort Breendonk, a Nazi detention and transit camp, and five days later to the SS collection camp in Mechelen.
There she was assigned a job registering incoming Jews, which she used for her secret resistance. She smuggled messages and jewelry to the outside world and sent them to the families of the prisoners. She also managed to remove children from the deportation lists, thus saving them from being sent to a concentration camp.
On September 15, 1942, Mala Zimetbaum was deported to Auschwitz. When a train stopped at the platform of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the arrivals were lined up into two columns. The men and older boys were in one column, and the women and children of both sexes in the other.
SS physicians such as Josef Mengele performed a selection. The only criterion was the appearance of the prisoners, whose fate for labor or for death was determined at will.
The veteran prisoners gathered the belongings of the new arrivals in an area known as Canada, which consisted of several barracks used to store the stolen belongings of the prisoners. Trucks carried those too infirm to walk, and the rest marched.
Before entering the gas chambers, people were ordered to disrobe in Crematorium 1. They undressed either in the yard surrounded by a wall or in the antechamber. Wooden barracks were erected for this purpose at Bunkers 1 and 2. At Crematoria 2 to 5 there were special undressing rooms.
The SS kept the people fed to die unaware of what awaited them and made the new arrivals believe that they were being sent to a camp where workers were waiting for them, but first they had to undergo disinfection and bathe. Jews were told politely to hang their clothing on hooks, take a shower, and were even promised that they would be provided with soup and tea or coffee.
They were taken into the gas chambers, and after the doors were shut, SS men dropped Zyklon B pellets through vents in the roof or holes in the side of the chamber. The victims were dead within 20 minutes.
Johann Kremer, an SS doctor who oversaw the gassings, testified that the shouting and screaming of the victims could be heard through the opening and it was clear that they fought for their lives.
After the victims had been murdered, the Sonderkommando unit, made up of camp prisoners, was tasked with the removal of the bodies and grouping them by size and fatty tissue to facilitate their disposal in the crematoria. Those who refused to do the terrible work of the Sonderkommando were often thrown alive into burning furnaces.
When jewelry or other valuables were found in the possession of one of the members of the Jewish Sonderkommando, the SS would pour gasoline over them and set them on fire. When the prisoners from the Sonderkommando were not working properly, they would be immediately executed.
Of the 1,048 Jews who arrived with Mala Zimetbaum at Auschwitz, only 230 men and 101 women survived the selection. Mala was sent to the Birkenau women's camp, and thanks to her extensive language skills she was given a job as a runner and translator.
This came with certain privileges. She did not have to wear a striped uniform or shave her head, and in the camp hierarchy she was positioned above the kapos. Instead of living in the barracks with the other inmates, she lived in the section of the camp where doctors and other privileged inmates lived.
She could move relatively freely between different camp blocks, which gave her not only detailed knowledge of the extermination system but also of the hierarchy within the camp. Although Mala had a relatively privileged position, camp life did not corrupt her character.
Unlike some other privileged prisoners, Mala did all in her power to help other prisoners and saved many of their lives. Many Auschwitz survivors testified that she was generous, risking her life for other inmates and standing proudly against the Germans.
She supplied food, clothing and medicine for those in need, encouraged desperate people to be resilient, disseminated information about world affairs and organized encounters between family members who were separated and imprisoned in different blocks of the camp.
One of her tasks was to assign prisoners who had been released from the infirmary to labor commandos. She would arrange easier work for weak people so that they would not die from hard labor.
Her insight into the infirmary also enabled her to find out about upcoming selections so she could warn sick prisoners in advance to report as healthy. She also placed the dead inmates on selection lists to save the living ones.
She sneaked photographs that inmates' relatives had sent out of the files and to the inmates, as they were not allowed to have them in the camp. The Nazi leadership tried to stop rumors about the extermination process in the concentration camp by allowing prisoners to write to their relatives.
Mala used this opportunity to warn their families in encoded form about the murder of people who were deported. Mala herself sent some postcards to her sister Yokha in Antwerp. She wrote in them that she was fine and all the family members were with Atush. Atush was Mala's sister-in-law, who had died in 1940. Yokha understood the message.
In late 1943, Mala met Edward Galinski, a Polish Catholic five years her junior. In the spring of 1940, Edward and his high school friends were arrested as part of the German AB Action directed against the Polish intelligentsia.
As a 17-year-old, he was sent to Auschwitz in the first transport of Polish prisoners on June 14, 1940, from Tarnow in Poland. They were given serial numbers 31 to 758. He worked in a locksmith shop, the head of which was SS man Edward Lubusch, who behaved favorably toward prisoners and treated them with respect.
Mala and Edward quickly developed a thread of sympathy and soon great affection, strictly forbidden in the camp. Taking advantage of the freedom to move around the complex, they tried to spend as much time as possible with each other.
In early 1944, Edward started seriously thinking about escaping from Auschwitz. Initially, Edward was supposed to escape from the camp with Wieslaw Kielar, with whom he started planning. They decided that the best way was to leave the camp disguised as SS men.
Consequently, they started looking for uniforms. Edward Lubusch, an SS officer for whom Edward worked, came to the rescue, supplying uniforms and a pistol. When the plans became more and more specific, Edward began to insist that Mala also run away with them.
Mala wanted to escape with proper documents so that she could inform the Allies of what was going on at Auschwitz and thus save lives. Mala's cousin Giza Weisblum and the three runners Cyla, Herta and Leah, with whom she shared a room, were informed of the escape plan.
They helped her obtain a map, civilian clothes and a blank SS exit pass taken from the SS guard room. Mala also stole deportation lists to inform the world of what was happening at Auschwitz.
After long discussions, it was agreed that the lovers would run away first and Wieslaw Kielar would join them later. They decided that Edward would pretend to be an SS man leading a prisoner out of the camp, which was a common sight and would not raise any suspicions, and Mala would take on Kielar's role as a prisoner.
Mala Zimetbaum and Edward Galinski managed to escape on June 24, 1944. To avoid being recognized as a woman, Mala wore a male prisoner's uniform over the stolen civilian clothes and carried a porcelain wash basin on her shoulders, under which she hid her face.
Proceeding past the guards, they left the camp, changed their clothes and moved in the direction of Slovakia. Apparently Mala hoped to find refuge with her uncle Hanania Harman in Bardejov, Slovakia. However, she did not know that the entire family had been deported in 1942.
The escape was noticed during the evening roll call, and a telegram to track down the couple was sent the next morning by the camp's commandant, Josef Kramer. Two weeks later, on July 6, 1944, they were caught in the Beskids mountains at the Slovakian border.
Edward had hidden nearby as Mala went into a store to try to buy some brandy with the gold that they had stolen from the camp. Someone in the store, however, became suspicious and called the authorities, who arrived and arrested Mala. Edward, watching from a distance as Mala was arrested, turned himself in to the German patrol since they had promised not to separate.
Soon they were identified as Auschwitz prisoners and deported to the camp. They were immediately sent to Block 11, a punishment barracks known as the bunker. The camp kapo subjected Edward to torture to reveal who gave him the uniform and the gun. He did not, however, reveal the secret.
Wieslaw Kielar, who was imprisoned in the same cell as Edward, recalled that every evening after the roll call Edward sang an Italian song, giving Mala a sign that he was still alive.
On September 15, 1944, the 26-year-old Mala and 20-year-old Edward were transferred to Birkenau. They were taken out to be hanged in a public execution, at the same time in the men's and women's camps respectively.
Edward jumped into the noose before the verdict was read, but the guards put him back on the platform. Edward then shouted something to the effect of "Long live Poland." One person told all the other prisoners to take their hats off out of respect to Edward, and they all did.
Meanwhile, Auschwitz survivors Primo Levi, as well as Raya Kagan and others, reported after the war that Mala had got hold of a razor blade and, at the foot of the gallows, cut the artery on one of her wrists. An SS man tried to snatch the razor blade from her, but Mala slapped the guard's face with her bloody hand and shouted at the guard that they would all dearly pay for their deeds.
Then she turned to the assembled prisoners, trying to encourage them, saying that she was outside, the end of the war was nearing, and they should be strong and firm. Other guards immediately jumped on her, knocked her to the ground and taped her mouth shut.
Following orders from Berlin, Maria Mandl, nicknamed the Beast of Auschwitz, ordered Mala to be burned alive in the crematorium. Mala was then put on a wheelbarrow and taken to the camp infirmary to stop the bleeding.
The exact circumstances of her death have never been fully clarified, as the surviving eyewitness accounts differ significantly. Some witnesses said that she died while on the handcart, while others reported that a guard took pity on her and shot her at the crematorium entrance.
There is also a report that she had poison on her and took it before she could be burned alive, while another report says that she was thrown alive into the Auschwitz crematoria oven. The prisoners forced to cremate the corpses had been informed that Mala was arriving, and they made special preparations. They prayed and cried as they burned her remains.
Mala's legacy remains alive even today, 79 years after her death. This good and brave woman, who did everything in her power to help others and save dozens of fellow prisoners from certain death, is not forgotten.
Many survivors, including 39 Belgian inmates from the women's camp, claimed after the war that Mala had saved their lives. One of them, Sara Goodfriend, named her daughter, born in 1946, Mala. Mala Mayor lives today in Tel Aviv.
The survivors devoted to Holocaust research granted her name at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem. In 2017, Mala Zimetbaum was awarded the Jewish Rescuers' Citation title "Jew rescuing Jew during the Holocaust period." This award is given by the B'nai B'rith World Center Jerusalem and the Committee to Recognize Jews who Rescued their Fellow Jews during the Holocaust period.
Her nomination to the judging committee was submitted by Dr. Abraham Huli, then vice president of B'nai B'rith International representing Israel. Until their last day, those who knew Mala spoke about her with great respect and recognition, affirming that they owed their lives to her. Some of their descendants are still named after Mala.
On the Antwerp building where Mala lived, a memory placard with her relief is placed. Having no grave, a monument was erected for her in September 2023 in the Jewish cemetery at Pszczyna, her native town in Poland.
Mala was a hero who dedicated her life to those who needed it most, and in the end she died fighting for them until her very last breath.