She survived the gas chambers. Almost 80 years later, her granddaughter tells her story

Nechama Birnbaum was in fifth grade when her teacher gave the class an assignment: Research and share a story that occurred during the Holocaust. Nechama shared a story about her grandmother Rosie.

Young Rosie had been in Auschwitz only a few days when she was assigned to split huge boulders into pebbles. She and her friends were starving; there had been little to eat in the Cehei Ghetto where they had come from, and the watery coffee and soup they ate not only tasted like diluted mud, it scarcely provided any nutrition. Equipped only with the hammers, splitting the rocks was difficult work, but with the meager, inedible food, it became unbearable. At that point, Rosie says, she was a muselman, walking dead.

Only a month previously, Rosie and her family had been living in Crasna, a small town on the border of Hungary and Romania. In May 1944, they were deported to Cehei, a muddy ghetto built around the Klein brick factory, where Rosie and her family were forced to carry heavy bricks across the yard.

From there, she was taken to Auschwitz, where she was separated from her mother and younger brother — they were sent to the gas chambers. Her sister, Leah, was with her, as were some of her friends from Crasna. Their heads had been shaven, and as she slammed her hammer into the boulder with whatever strength she was able to summon, she looked at her friends and noted how different they looked without their hair.

Noticing her sad expression, her friend Lily tried to comfort her. “Don’t be sad. We’re going to Heaven from here.”

Gitty, another friend, said she’d be happy to see what came next, and Chani said she imagined they were bound for the highest level of Heaven.

Rosie’s reaction was different. “You can go to Heaven from here if you want,” she told her friends, “but I’m going home from here.”

This story encapsulates Rosie’s indefatigable spirit and her will to live, even when faced with the most horrific aspects of humanity. Struck by Rosie’s iron will to live, Nechama’s teacher asked her to share Rosie’s story with the principal.

The story left an indelible mark on Nechama, and she never stopped marveling at her grandmother’s resilience and perseverance. She’d always wanted to write her grandmother’s story. She doesn’t remember a time when it wasn’t a dream.

But it wasn’t until her family took a trip to Europe in 2014, when she was 18, that she resolved to share her grandmother’s story with the world — a promise she fulfilled on November 28, 2021, when The Redhead of Auschwitz was published.

As she stood at the entrance of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Nechama thought of the story her grandmother often retold — and was struck by the idea that they were there because of her grandmother’s will to live.

“When I was standing there, it hit home more. She was here, and she was 18, and she said she was going home from here. And now I’m 18 and standing here. My grandmother did go home, and because of her, I’m here.”