June 24th, 1944. The red alarm system of Avitz Burkanau shrieks, tearing through an atmosphere wreaking of burning fat and death. 3,000 SS guards plunge into absolute chaos when confronted with an unbelievable reality. A prisoner has broken the tightest security system on the planet, vanishing without a trace right before a dense wall of executioner guns.
The one who has just dealt a fatal blow to the sacred pride of Nazi Germany is Mala Zimitbal, a 26-year-old Jewish girl bearing serial number 19,880. Without weapons, without comrades, the only things she carries are a razor sharp mind, fluent in six languages and classified documents containing the lists of deported victims.
The solitary escape of a seamstress has instantly ignited both raw fury and sheer panic inside the Supreme Command, forcing the Gestapo to activate a red manhunt across all borders. Mara’s freedom is more dangerous than any military force because she is a living witness holding the key to exposing the entire industrial murder chain that the German fascists have painstakingly tried to hide.
This suffocating confrontation between a fragile life and a colossal machine of violence forces us to face the most harrowing questions of the era. What was so extraordinary about this young woman that caused her enemies to panic so deeply? And how could a solitary individual challenge the most sophisticated destruction system in history? It is this unimaginable clash that forces us to look deep into the mechanism of evil.
What turned ordinary civilized people into cold-blooded cogs? And how did that evil operate? And when that ultimate violence sought to annihilate her flesh, what would achieve final victory to force the brutal regime to pay the price? Mala has no stone grave. Her body has turned to ash and dust, merging into the skies of Burkanau from the smoldering incinerate events.
But before the crime could erase her footprints, history captured a magnificent legend, an immortal legacy that today we will begin to unfold from the most pristine and raw archival files of Mala Zimit Bal’s journey. The Golden Star Under the Empire. January 26th, 1918. Amidst the final remnants of the first world war in the Polish town of Brazesco under the control of the Austrohungarian Empire, Mala Zimitbal, also known as Mala, was born.
She was the youngest child in a poor Jewish family with a permanently blind father. Their previous years of struggling to make a living in Germany inadvertently left them with a special survival weapon. Every family member spoke German as fluently as their mother tongue. The major turning point occurred in 1928. Her family immigrated to Antwerp, Belgium, a bustling port city where a multitude of international cultures intersected.
In this vibrant commercial space, Mara early on revealed an outstanding intellect by mastering six languages: Dutch, French, German, English, Polish, and Yiddish. To join her older siblings in bearing the burden of supporting the family, the young girl chose the seamstress trade, a job requiring utmost meticulousness and patience.
The dark historical milestone officially detonated in 1933 when Mara turned 15. In neighboring Germany, Adolf Hitler stepped up to the position of chancellor, paving the way for the rise of an extremist ideological system. At that time, statistical data recorded approximately 9.5 million Jewish people scattered across the European continent, accounting for over 60% of the global Jewish population.
Not a single one of them could have guessed that the moment the new government was established in Berlin, the fateful clock of history had silently begun to countdown. The blood decrees and the visa. September 1939, a firestorm erupted at the Polish border, officially igniting World War II. Just 8 months later, the German military launched the Blitzkrieg campaign, sweeping through Western Europe.
Belgium collapsed in barely less than 6 weeks, forcing King Leopold III to sign the surrender document. In the port city of Antwerp, the studded boots of the occupying forces repeatedly pounded against the streets, suffocating the peace of more than 70,000 Jewish people. An organized purging system immediately went into operation, stripping citizenship rights, permanently confiscating property, freezing bank accounts, and expelling children from public schools.
This administrative brutality rapidly transformed into bloody purges. In 1941, about 200 members of the extremist Flemish National League set fire to and burned down the two largest synagogues in Antworp, smashed shops, and organized open human manhunts in broad daylight. By 1942, the humiliation reached its peak when the military administration forced every victim aged six and older to sew a six-pointed golden star onto their chest to serve the purpose of identification and racial classification.
Mala Zimitbal at this time was working as a secretary for an American diamond company in Antworp. When the office was closed, by virtue of her status as an employee of a foreign organization, she received a life-saving privilege, a refugee visa to the United States. Confronted with this life ordeath opportunity, Mara flatly refused the passport.
She could not selfishly flee, abandoning her blind father and elderly, frail mother to the fangs of tyranny. In early 1942, Mara’s family was completely fractured when her brother had to flee to escape a forced labor decree. Realizing the noose was tightening day by day, Mara left behind a firm promise and boarded a train to Brussels alone to search for secret hiding sellers for the entire family. July 22nd, 1942.
On the way back, destiny crushed the young girl’s plan. The Gestapo organized a surprise raid right at the train station, arresting Mara for not carrying the legal papers of the new regime. She was escorted straight to the Dosin transit camp in Molina, the first stop of the deportation apparatus heading east.
Right at the epicenter of this dispossession, Mara activated her first resistance. Thanks to an extraordinary mind fluent in six foreign languages and speaking German as naturally as a native, she was assigned as a registration secretary, Mara took full advantage of her translation privileges to covertly smuggle classified information, letters, and entrusted belongings out to the resistance network.
At the height of her bravery, she recklessly used her pen to strike the names of countless children off the manifests of trains heading east, keeping them at the transit camp to prolong their chances of survival. Mara had never heard the name Ashvitz, but the intuition of an exceptional intellect warned her that behind those trains, nothing stood waiting but an industrial murder chain.
20 minutes of the production line. September 15th, 1942. The screech of iron tracks echoes and then dies down completely. The train escorting Mara Zimitbal nails itself into the center of the Avitz Burkanau destruction factory. The administrative ledgers of the SS record a dry figure. 1,048 Jewish people crammed into narrow cars right on the windswept platform.
The brutal classification process operates instantly under the cold pointing fingers of the Nazi doctors. The death filter takes place with mechanical speed. Only 230 men and 101 women including Mara, are kept to be drained of their strength through forced labor. The remaining 717 lives, entirely the elderly, women with young children, and infants, are herded straight toward the fortified concrete buildings with chimneys piercing the sky.
Guards force the victims to strip off all clothing using the lie of a disinfection process before receiving their quarters. As soon as the thick steel door locks tight, toxic cyclone B crystals are dropped from the vents. The notebook of SS Dr. Yoan Kmer preserves a chilling statistic. The evaporation mechanism worked perfectly, taking exactly 20 minutes for the poison to extinguish every scream, desperate clawing, and completely end the lives of over 700 human beings in the enclosed space.
In the midst of this swamp of destruction, the ability to speak six foreign languages fluently becomes the life jacket that carries Mara into an unprecedented position of privilege in the Burkanau women’s camp, official courier and interpreter. This status allows her to keep her hair, spares her from wearing the humiliating striped uniform, and grants her a powerful armband to move freely between the detention sectors.
Witnessing the endless stream of innocent people turn into gray smoke, Mara decides to transform this privilege into a silent weapon of war, she steals food and medicine from the SS supply depot to smuggle into the depleted barracks, tips prisoners off before the doctor’s selection schedules so the sick can hide in time.
riskily swaps out the names on death lists to save the living and slips into the confiscation warehouse to reclaim family photographs, returning them to the victims to rekindle their will to survive. Mara’s resistance reaches its highest sophistication when she sends a postcard to her sister in Antworp through the camp’s strict censorship system with the brief words, “I am with Etos.
” To the German sensors, it was merely an innocent greeting. But Mara’s family is instantly stunned by the true message because was the sister-in-law who had passed away in 1940. Through this code, Mara sent a powerful indictment to the outside world, directly exposing the true nature of Awitz. This is not a rehabilitation center, but a factory of death.
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The escape of Syrial number 531. In the heart of the Avitz Burkanau destruction factory, a magnificent paradox is reborn when Mara Zimitbal meets Edward Galinsky, commonly known as Edek, a 20-year-old Polish political prisoner and Catholic. Archival records confirm that Edc was forced onto the very first train to open the camp on June 14th, 1940 when he was only 17 years old, bearing an ultra low identification number, 531.
He survived 4 years of fierce selections by working in the mechanical workshop under Edward Lubush, a rare SS officer who still retained his human decency. The grit of a political prisoner combined with the exceptional intelligence of the Antwerp seamstress crystallizes into a passionate love. Right in the belly of a hell suffocated by brutality, they managed to exchange rushed glances, short messages hidden behind the corners of the barracks.
That trust becomes the fuel for action, driving them both to map out an unimaginable escape plan in early 1944. Their ultimate goal is to smuggle out classified documents, root maps, and deportation lists to expose the crimes of Berlin to the Allies. The escape is calculated down to the precise second thanks to the life ordeath gamble of SS officer Lubush, who secretly provides a Nazi military uniform and a fully loaded handgun.
On the afternoon of June 24th, 1944, the fuse is officially lit with a daring camouflage tactic. Ed puts on the guard’s uniform, posing as an officer escorting a male prisoner on an external mission. That prisoner is Mala. She wears a baggy male prisoner uniform over civilian clothes, her head covered by a large porcelain basin to hide her face from the high angle watchtowers, marching proudly through the main guard gate as unsuspecting soldiers salute.
The oath in the dark dungeon. From June 24th to July 6th, 1944, Mara Zimitbal and Edward Galinsky officially left behind the electrified barbed wire fences of Avitz. For 12 consecutive days and nights, the couple embarked on an exhausting, grueling march, crossing the rugged terrain of the Besidz Mountains to break the relentless manhunt coordinated by the Gestapo network.
Mara’s ultimate goal was to cross the border into Slovakia to find her paternal uncle Channania Hartman completely unaware of a ruthless truth buried in the classified files. Her only remaining relative had already been liquidated in 1942. July 6th, 1944, tragedy struck when freedom was only a few steps away.
Utterly depleted after 2 weeks of hiding in the deep forest, Mara took a risk and stepped into a border town department store using a small gold bar taken from the camp warehouse to exchange for essential supplies. Her haggarded appearance, coupled with the act of trading precious metal, instantly triggered suspicion from local informants.
The German patrol unit received the tip, immediately closed in, subdued, and handcuffed Mara on the spot. Standing in a safe hiding spot across the street, Edex still possessed a fully loaded pistol and a forged passport, he had every opportunity to make a solitary escape across the border to save his own life. However, an oath to live and die together halted the steps of the young Polish soldier.
Edex surrendered his only chance of survival, voluntarily stepping out to reveal himself before the enemy’s gun barrels, accepting the handcuffs just to stand under the same death sentence as the girl he loved. The notorious dungeon system of Block 11 opened once more, plunging both into the isolated underground cells of the Gestapo.
The brutal interrogation machine began to operate in an attempt to break Edex’s will, forcing him to name the SS officer who had provided the weapons and uniforms. The guards continuously used extreme methods of physical torture for many days in a row, but the fortitude of prisoner number 531 triumphed. Edict gritted his teeth and endured the near fatal beatings, maintaining absolute silence to protect the life of his savior.
Right at the center of this violence and isolation, a resilient symbol of resistance was born. Surviving witnesses in neighboring cells recorded that every single night immediately after the roll call bell went completely silent from the dark dungeon of the male prisoners sector, Edex’s warm baritone voice would rise, singing a familiar Italian love song.
That rustic melody drifted along the freezing stone walls, echoing through the horrifying corridors to reach the female isolation sector, becoming a periodic coded signal to Mara that he was still alive, still proud, and would never yield. The slap that broke absolute authority. September 1944, marking exactly two years since Mala Zimitbal was driven down to Burkanau.
The ruling administration of Ashvitz decided to terminate the futile interrogations at block 11 to move toward a public execution. The guards forced tens of thousands of prisoners to form a massive lineup surrounding the gallows in both the male and female sectors to stage a deterrent execution, suffocating any intent of resistance.
At this time, Mara was 26 years old, and Edward Galinsky had just entered his 20s. In the male camp sector, Edc was escorted up to the scaffold in front of thousands of his comrades. Amidst the dense and suffocating atmosphere, just as the commanding officer opened his log to read the indictment, Edek immediately used his foot to kick over the chair, throwing his own head into the noose to claim the right to decide his own death.
Panic overwhelmed the military administrators. They cut the rope, propped him up, and forced him to repeat the procedure in strict accordance with the protocol. In that exact moment, the young soldier used his last breath to shout at the top of his lungs, “Long live Poland!” From below, an anonymous prisoner bellowed, “All caps off!” And thousands of prison caps dropped simultaneously, turning the SS show of intimidation into a humiliating failure.
At the exact same time in the female camp quadrant, a more ferocious script erupted, completely overturning the calculations of the female camp leader, Maria Mandel. More than 30,000 female prisoners were forced to stand in a circle to witness Mara step onto the gallows. The moment the guards advanced to bind her hands, Mara unexpectedly drew a small razor blade hidden inside her clothing line through weeks of solitary confinement, making a decisive slash directly into the vein of her wrist. An SS officer lunged forward to
strip the blade away. But Mara used her blood-drenched hand to deliver a blistering slap straight to his face, breaking the absolute authority of those who claimed to be the master race. Turning toward the deeply shaken sea of people, she screamed out her final words. I was free out there. Their end is near. Be strong. Resist.
This act of defiance threw the camp command into a state of absolute chaos. Maria Mandel frantically ordered Mala to be gagged to silence the call for resistance, then forced her comrades to throw her onto a cart to be escorted straight to the cremation area. Mala’s final minutes became a documented chapter with many conflicting viewpoints from surviving witnesses such as Primo Levi or Higher Kagan.
Some assert that she drew her last breath on the cart due to acute blood loss. Others record that an SS soldier fired a shot to end her life in front of the gas chamber entrance out of pity. Another hypothesis suggests that she swallowed a poison pill hidden in advance or was pushed alive into the flames. Regardless of which form of ending occurred, the actions of the Sonda Commando, the prisoners who operated the incinerator assembly line proved her immense stature.
They halted all work to conduct a prayer service, wept in grief, and unanimously agreed to cremate her ashes separately, a unique and reverent privilege entirely unprecedented in the history of the Awitz death factory. Ashes write the judgment. January 27th, 1945. Less than 6 months after Mala Zimitbal’s slap at the execution ground, the gates of Avitz Burkanau are officially smashed open by the Soviet Red Army.
The collapse of this slaughter factory exposes chilling postwar statistics. Out of 25,000 Jews deported from Belgium, fewer than 2,000 survivors live to see the day of victory. The mechanized gears of Nazi Germany had also crushed Mara’s entire family since 1942. Her blind father, her elderly mother, and her siblings, the very people she had once refused an American visa to stay and protect, all ended their lives inside the airtight poison chambers.
Yet, the SS’s plot to erase every memory of serial number 19,880 failed in the face of historical witnesses. As soon as the gunfire completely ceased, 39 Belgian female prisoners drew up an official declaration for the international court, affirming that their lives were redeemed thanks to the swapped documents and food that Mara had riskily smuggled out during her courier rounds.
That gratitude was inherited by the next generation when Sarah Goodfried, a woman saved by Mara, gave birth to a daughter in 1946 and named her Mara. That child now lives in Tel Aviv carrying the name that stepped through the ashes to walk toward the future. The fairness of history was finally enforced.
In 2017, Mala Zimitbal was postumously awarded the JRJ title, Jews rescuing Jews, alongside a bronze plaque solemnly mounted at her old house in Antworp. In September 2023, exactly 80 years after the day her blood spilled onto the campground, a symbolic monument was erected at the Briesco Cemetery in Poland. Mara has no stone grave.
Her body dissolved into the smoke and clouds of Burkanau. But her resilient act of resistance won the ultimate victory, forcing the brutal regime to face the strict judgment of time. The slap directly to the face of the SS commander proves one truth. Violence can destroy the flesh, but it remains forever powerless against the pride and freedom of a human being.
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