Anna Heilman, born Hana Wajcblum (December 1, 1928 – May 1, 2011 age 83), referred to in other sources as Hanka or Chana Weissman, was one of the surviving prisoners from Auschwitz who plotted to blow up the crematoria.
The women involved in the gunpowder smuggling chain include Roza Robota (who had direct contact with the men of the Sonderkommando), Ala Gertner, Regina Safirsztajn, Rose Grunapfel Meth, Hadassa Zlotnicka, Marta Bindiger, Genia Fischer, and Inge Frank, among others.
In her online memoir, Heilman claims it was her own idea to smuggle the gun powder to the Sonderkommando.
She, Roza Robota, Regina Stafirstajn, and Ala Gertner were taken to the "Bunker" inside the main camp and tortured for months.
Anna married Joshua Heilman on March 7, 1947, a man who had left Poland for Mandatory Palestine to pursue his university studies one week before the outbreak of World War II.
[citation needed] While in Israel, Anna obtained a degree in social work and had two daughters with Joshua.
[2] Joshua moved to the United States to be a Hebrew teacher and eventually brought the rest of the family to Boston in 1958.
Anna worked with The Children's Aid Society in Ottawa as a bilingual (English-French) social worker.
In 1991, after a ceremony at Yad Vashem to dedicate a memorial to Estusia, Regina, Ala and Roza, Anna told her son-in-law, Sheldon Schwartz, that she had kept a Polish diary in Auschwitz.
It was confiscated and destroyed during a search at some point; and she recreated the entire diary from memory in a displaced persons camp in 1945.
[4] Sheldon persuaded Anna to translate the diary into English and the two of them worked together for 10 years; she wrote and he edited.
[5] Anna Heilman is one of those featured in Unlikely Heroes,[6] a 2003 film about Jewish resistance during World War II.