13/04/2026
“The man who ruled this place with unbridled authority – serving in effect as both kapo and block elder – was actually a Jew. Unusually large in stature, his name was Yaakov. The Germans had appointed him ‘all-powerful’ in Auschwitz. Even prisoners of German origin and SS men of various ranks feared him. Yet toward Jewish children he was gentle and kind, and more than once we were lucky enough to receive sweets from him.”
(Beni Wircberg, From the Valley of Slaughter to Sha’ar HaGai, Hebrew, on the kapo Yakov Kozalchik)
The phenomenon of the Jewish kapos – prisoners appointed by the SS to oversee their fellow Jews in camps and ghettos – remains, to this day, one of the most painful, complex and unresolved issues in Holocaust remembrance.
For many survivors, the kapo embodied the system’s most brutal face. Yet each had a human story steeped in contradiction, fear, the instinct to survive, and at times even courage and self-sacrifice.
Their figures provoked fierce debates in Israel in the decades after the war; what standards of morality and human behavior could be expected in the very throes of the struggle to stay alive?
Some forty Jewish kapos who had immigrated to Israel were prosecuted under the N**is and N**i Collaborators (Punishment) Law. Most were acquitted or received relatively light sentences.
During the Adolf Eichmann Trial, a Jewish kapo named Vera Alexander from Czechoslovakia caught the public eye. She had served both as a kapo and as head of a labor unit in Auschwitz.
Her testimony stood out among those of regular survivors; she explained the essence of the kapo’s role, showing how, at times, those appointed to such positions managed to save lives. Presented by the prosecution as a figure who supported and protected others, her words helped reshape public discourse in Israel, revealing the deep ambivalence inherent in the role.
Alexander recounted how, as a block elder in Auschwitz, she secured soap, food and clothing for the women under her charge; how she helped one prisoner hide her child in the block; how she tried to transfer women marked for the gas chambers to labor instead; and how she refused to conceal what was truly happening from the prisoners – even though she’d explicitly been ordered to remain silent.
“Tell me, Mrs. Alexander,” asked prosecutor Gideon Hausner, “how was it possible to be a block elder in Auschwitz and still preserve your humanity, your Divine image?”
She answered in hesitant Hebrew, her face drawn with anguish:
“It wasn’t easy. It required great tact as well as strategy. On the one hand, to listen to the orders and carry them out; and on the other, to harm the prisoners as little as possible – and to help them.”
Before the Eichmann trial, public attitudes toward the kapos had been starkly different. Alexander recalled that one day, while waiting for a bus, she was confronted and shouted at by a fellow survivor. The woman had apparently recognized the number tattooed on Alexander’s arm – 5236 – as an indication of her early arrival in Auschwitz.
Like Vera Alexander, Judita Magiliuskaite also served as a Jewish kapo.
She was born in Rietavas in western Lithuania – a strikingly beautiful girl, with golden hair, blue eyes, and fair skin. Yet what nature had granted her may also have sealed her cruel fate…
Of three sisters, Judita was the only one to survive the Holocaust. Fleeing home from German forces with her family, she moved from one ghetto to another: the Telz ghetto where her sisters were both killed, the Šiauliai ghetto where she was first appointed as a kapo in charge of a labor unit. From there she was transferred to the brutal Stutthoff concentration camp near Danzig, then to Gutowo slave-labor camp and finally sent on a death march towards Germany.
Why was Judita chosen, of all people, to serve as a kapo? Surviving women later accused her of volunteering for the role to improve her chances of staying alive. Others speculated – without any real basis – that her rare beauty was the reason.
On one point, however, there was no dispute: all along their hellish path – from the Šiauliai ghetto, through the Stutthof camp, and on to Gutowo – Judita was one of only two Jewish women who served as kapos.
The other kapo didn’t hesitate to strike Jewish prisoners with a wooden plank or a soup ladle, and looked after no one but herself and her mother.
Judita, by contrast, never raised a hand against anyone. She consistently tried to help all the prisoners – not only those she knew from her hometown of Rietavas – and treated them with quiet decency.
She would even try to scr**e a little extra from the bottom of the pot, where the richer remnants of the thin soup – little more than rotting vegetables – collected. And so, throughout, she came to be known simply as the good kapo.
Severely beaten together with all the other kapos by her fellow prisoners when they were finally freed by the Soviet Red Army, Judita was left crippled, unable to stand or walk without assistance. She was too fearful to seek shelter in Israel, and remained in Lithuania, marrying twice and cared for by a family friend, until her death in 2008, aged 83.
📷 Photo: Vera Alexander giving testimony at the Eichmann trial.
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