Anna Heilman fonds [textual record, graphic material, moving images]

The fonds consists of Anna Heilman's personal papers, speeches, articles and publications relating to her wartime experiences in Auschwitz Birkenau at the Union Munitions Factory where she worked as a slave labourer; the successful plot to blow up Crematorium IV which was part of the October 1944 Sonderkommando Uprising; and the public execution of the four girls in the camp on January 5, 1945 who smuggled the gunpowder out of the factory. Most of the material relates to her international campaign to gain recognition for them and their courage as resistance fighters. Of unique and special interest are several documents relating to the Auschwitz Revolt. They include Anna Heilman's original diary in Polish and her friend Marta Bindiger's eyewitness account of the execution in Slovak. Both were written in post-war Belgium in 1945. The drawings in the fonds consist ot sketches by Anna of the Union Munitions Factory at Auschwitz, and hand-drawn replicas of the idetnfication symbols and numbers that were sewn onto prisoners' clothes.

Fonds also conists of videocassette recordings of five oral history interviews/reminiscences with Anna Heilman conducted between 1994 and 2002 for inclusion in the Shoah Visual History Foundation oral history project, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (U.S.H.M.M.) oral history project, the docudrama "Unlikely Heroes", and a news item featured on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation news.