Joy was not an emotion often seen in the death camp of Auschwitz, where more than a million Jews were murdered. Nor were acts of humanity, or the ability to show defiance much in evidence. But Fania Landau and Zlatka Snajderhauz managed this minor miracle.
By the time the Soviet Red Army arrived to liberate the camp on January 27, 1945 – now 80 years ago – only 7,000 prisoners were left. The SS had forced the remaining inmates on a death march from Poland to Germany to keep their victims out of the hands of the Allies. Fania Landau and Zlatka Snajderhauz were on that march.
Fania’s life had taken a horrific turn in 1941 as she walked outside the Bialystok Ghetto, a north-eastern Polish town which was 60% Jewish. Shortly after the launch of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, the Nazis took control of Bialystok.
Within a few hours, 2,000 men, women, and children were forced into a synagogue, and it was set alight. Drunk soldiers with machine guns surrounded the building, ensuring no one escaped. The SS then set up a ghetto.
Fania’s father was an indentured labourer in a ghetto factory. Through a colleague, he managed to secure a pass for his daughter, which allowed her to go to Augustów, a nearby spa town, to clean the villa being constructed for a Nazi official. The trip’s true purpose was to find a hiding place for her brother.
Fania had unlawfully removed the mandatory Jewish stars from her pristine white dress and concealed the few meagre pieces of jewellery that her family owned – her mother’s wedding ring and a small gold brooch – in case she needed to pay or bribe someone. However, before she could get very far, a nine-year-old Polish boy shouted “Jew!” from across the street.
Fania protested and tried to laugh it off. She made the sign of the cross and approached a priest, asking whether he had any news from Bialystok. “It’s burning,” the priest said, gleefully adding: “And the Jews are frying.”
The Nazis arrested Fania and sent her to the Stutthof forced labour camp, where she dug holes, broke heavy stones, and moved them pointlessly from one location to another.
In 1943, she was transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she worked in the Union-Werke munitions factory, filling casings for German bullets with gunpowder. The kapos, Nazi prisoner supervisors, kept a vigilant watch for any minor infractions, some of which could result in death. Nevertheless, the women occasionally incorporated dirt from the floor into the bullets, rendering them useless.
It was here that Fania and Zlatka met and became best friends. On Fania’s 20th birthday, December 12, 1944, Zlatka decided they would celebrate. In an act of resistance, she made a ‘cake’ for Fania, scrounging from the other women’s daily rations and icing it with butter and marmalade.
Zlatka also wanted Fania to have a gift, a memory. Zlatka had always loved handicrafts and rallied the other women to gather whatever they could – bits of cloth and paper – and created a palm-sized origami heart, the Heart of Auschwitz.
On the purple cloth cover was an embroidered ‘F’, and inside, as the heart unfolded, she asked fellow prisoners – listed as Hanka, Mania, Mazal, Hanka W, Berta, Fela, Mala, Ruth, Helene (Lena), Rachela, Eva Pany, Bronia, Cesia, Irena, Mina, Tonia, Gusia (Guta) [and] Giza – to write messages for Fania.
“May your life be long and sweet,” wrote Mazal. “Freedom, freedom, freedom,” wrote Mania.
“There was no point in being afraid,” said Zlatka in her testimony at the Montreal Holocaust Museum. Who knew if they would be alive tomorrow but they were here today, and it was worth the risk to show that the Nazis could take almost everything away from them, but not their humanity.
Like every extraordinary story, the fact that the women weren’t caught was, quite frankly, miraculous. Although the guards suspected something was amiss, they never discovered the heart despite beatings and searches, and the women remained silent.
Fania kept the heart hidden in the camp, slipping it under a rip in the bunk bed above or buried in the straw on the floor below. Fania can’t remember how the heart survived on the death march of January 1945, but she believes she kept it safe, snuggled in her armpit. It was her only possession.
After the war, Zlatka and Fania returned to Bialystok to see if anyone had survived. Sadly, no one had. However, Fania’s brother had a friend, Yudel, who was alive. He and Zlatka married and began a new life in Buenos Aires.
Fania met Aron Fainer, an officer in the Polish Army, where he had volunteered. They emigrated to Sweden as refugees, where their daughter Sandy was born. The family relocated to Toronto in 1950, and many decades later, Sandy and I met in London.
She told me about the history of the heart and how her mother kept the precious souvenir in her bedroom drawer. Fania would sternly admonish Sandy and her brother never to touch it, and although Sandy didn’t understand its significance, she was fascinated by the heart and kept returning to it. Fania donated the heart to the Montreal Holocaust Museum in 1988, where it now serves as the museum’s centrepiece.
In April 2024, I went to Germany with Sandy, where she gave a talk with Karina Feller, Yudel and Zlatka’s granddaughter. “My grandma made this wonderful gift to Fania to celebrate life in the middle of the horrors of Auschwitz,” said Karina.
The heart symbolises love, friendship, hope, humanity and resistance. Fania said: “I wanted to show that in Auschwitz, there were still human beings, and people gave me a present.”
On Holocaust Memorial Day 2025, which marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, we commemorate all the victims of genocide, past and all too present. At a time of rising fascism, we can never forget. All the voices of the victims need to be heard until there are no more victims, and perhaps one day “never again” really will be never again.
Genocide: Personal Stories, Big Questions by Heidi Kingstone is published by Yellow Press
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