Anna Heilman

Anna Heilman

ANNA HEILMAN (née Wajcblum) was born on 1 December 1928 in Warsaw, Poland. She and her two sisters, Sabina and Ester, grew up in a traditional, assimilated Jewish family. Anna’s father, Jakob Wajcblum, ran a factory producing Polish crafts, and her mother, Rebeka Wajcblum, was a homemaker. As a child, Anna attended a Catholic public school.

During the German aerial assault on Warsaw in 1939, Anna and her mother were nearly killed when their apartment was bombed. Anna’s sister, Sabina, and her fiancé fled to eastern Poland before the Germans captured the city. The rest of the family was incarcerated in the Warsaw ghetto in 1940. Anna secretly attended Hashomer Hatzair meetings and put up posters for the Zydowská Orgánizacjá Bojówa (ZOB), a Jewish resistance group in the ghetto. After witnessing the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943, Anna was deported with her parents and Ester to the Majdanek concentration camp, where the sisters were separated from their parents.

In September 1943, Anna and Ester were transferred to the Auschwitz Birkenau death camp. They were put to work in the Weichsel Union Werke munitions factory, from which they smuggled gunpowder to aid in the Sonderkommando Uprising. Ester and three other women--Rózà Robota, Alla Gärtner, and Regina Safirsztain--were publicly executed in the camp in January 1945 for their part in the insurrection. That same month, Anna was transferred to the Ravensbrück and the Neustadt-Glewe concentration camps, both in Germany.

Anna was liberated from Neustadt-Glewe by Soviet and British forces. She immigrated to Brussels, Belgium, and lived there for one year. In 1947, Anna immigrated to Palestine and reunited with her sister Sabina. She married Joseph Heilman and gave birth to two daughters in 1951 and 1953. The family immigrated to the United States in 1958, and moved to Canada two years later, where Anna worked as a social worker. Anna and Joseph have four grandchildren.