News Brief

A memorial to Holocaust hero Rosa Robota was unveiled in Sydney.

The Rosa Robota Gates opened last week at the Montefiore Home for the Aged.

Robota was hanged by the Nazis for spearheading a plot to blow up the crematoria at the Auschwitz death camp. She was 23.

Holocaust survivor Sam Spitzer, who claimed this was the world’s first memorial to Robota, was the driving force behind the memorial.

“Everyone who will be brought through these gates will have his or her life span extended,” he said at the unveiling. “She was the greatest hero.”

Spitzer, whose sister was in Auschwitz with Robota, dedicated the gates to his late wife, Margaret.

Robota was one of four women hanged in Auschwitz in January 1945 for her role in the Sonderkommando revolt. The revolt managed to blow the roof off one of the crematoria, and precipitated the Nazis destroying the other crematoria as the Russians advanced on the camp.

Robota, along with Ella Gertner, Estera Weisblum and Regina Sapirstein, had been tortured before they were killed.

Part of the plaque at the memorial reads: “Tens of thousands of people, being descendants of Auschwitz-Birkenau survivors, including children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, owe their existence to the courage and silence of these women.”

Liberal Party leader Malcolm Turnbull, who last week acknowledged his late mother told him she had Jewish lineage, commended the memorial.

“[She was] a heroic women – who was a real hero of the resistance to Nazism, the resistance to the greatest crime we have ever seen in the history of the world,” Turnbull said at the unveiling. “These gates are an acknowledgement of the great strength of the Jewish community and a constant reminder that we must fight intolerance and prejudice in all its forms.”