Ala Gertner (12 March 1912 – 5 January 1945), referred to in other sources as Alla, Alina, Ella, and Ela Gertner, was one of four women hanged in the Auschwitz concentration camp for her role in the Sonderkommando revolt of 7 October 1944. Life Gertner was born in Będzin, Poland, one of three children in a prosperous Jewish family. Before the German and Slovakia invasion of Poland, she attended the gymnasium in Będzin. The city was located in the industrial region of Zagłębie Dąbrowskie in south-western Poland on the border with Germany. Geppersdorf labour camp The German military took over Będzin on the first day of the invasion, burned the Grand Synagogue down within a week, and began massive resettlement actions. On 28 October 1940 Gertner was ordered to report to the train station in nearby Sosnowiec, where she was taken to a Nazi labor camp in Geppersdorf (now Rzedziwojowice), a construction site where hundreds of Jewish men were used as forced laborers on the Reichsautobahn section (now Berlinka) and where women worked in the kitchen and laundry. Gertner, who was fluent in German, was assigned to the camp office, where she met prisoner Bernhard Holtz whom she would marry in the Będzin Ghetto in the following year. Geppersdorf was part of Organisation Schmelt, a network of 177 labor camps under the administration of Albrecht Schmelt, a World War I veteran who joined the Nazis in 1930 and rose quickly to the post of SS Oberführer. Because of his familiarity with the local political and social conditions in the annexed region of western Poland, Schmelt was hand-picked by SS head Heinrich Himmler to be "Special Representative of the Reichsführer SS for the Employment of Foreign Labor in Upper Silesia." After his official appointment in October 1940, Schmelt set up headquarters in Sosnowiec and created a labor camp system that would become known as Organisation Schmelt. Schmelt built a highly lucrative slave trade. Over 50,000 Jews from western Poland were forced to work for German businesses, primarily in construction, munitions, and textile manufacturing. The businesses paid Schmelt, who shared a fraction of the money with Moses Merin, the Jewish governor of the region. Almost none of it went to the Jewish laborers. Conditions varied, but were much better than in the large concentration camps: for example, mail and packages could be received in some of the Schmelt camps until 1943, when