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Two Jewish DPs walk along a street in Brussels, Belgium.

Pictured are Hanka Wajcblum (right) and Marta Bindiger Cige (left).

The two women became friends while they were prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Marta took care of Hanka after her sister, Ester Wajcblum, was arrested and executed as a co-conspirator in the revolt of October 1944. Marta was born in Bardejov, Czechoslovakia and was deported to Auschwitz in 1942.

Ester (Estusia) and Hanka (later Anna Heilman) Wajcblum, were the daughters of Jakub and Rebeka (Jaglom) Wajcblum. Both parents were Deaf. Ester was born in Warsaw in 1927 and Hanka, in 1928. Their older sister, Sabina, who married Mieczyslaw Zielinksi, spent the war in the Soviet Union. After the family was forced into the Warsaw ghetto, their father was assigned the task of making wooden crosses for grave markers at German military cemeteries. The family was deported to Majdanek in May 1943, where Jakub and Rebeka perished. Ester and Hanka were transferred to Auschwitz- Birkenau in September 1943, where they were assigned to forced labor at the Union munitions plant. After being recruited into the fledgling resistance movement by Ala Gertner, Ester and Hanka became involved in pilfering gunpowder from the munitions plant and transferring it to Roza Robota. She, in turn, transferred it to the Sonderkommando underground. On October 7, 1944 the gunpowder was used in blowing up crematorium IV in Birkenau. Ester was among the four young women who were arrested as co-conspirators. After being tortured, she was publicly hanged in Auschwitz-Birkenau on January 5, 1945. Hanka was later transferred to Neustadt Glewe labor camp, a sub-camp of Ravensbrueck, where she was liberated in May 1945 at the age of sixteen. After the war she immigrated to Palestine, where she married Joshua Heilman in March 1947.