A letter of Gideon Hausner, the prosecutor at the Eichmann Trial, to the rabbi of Chemed, Rabbi Shlomo Noah Carole ...

A letter of Gideon Hausner, the prosecutor at the Eichmann Trial, to the rabbi of Chemed, Rabbi Shlomo Noah Carole about the case of the Beit Ya'akov girls
"I am still searching for a way to include in the evidence of the trial the case of the Beit Ya'akov girls in Krakow".
The case of the Beit Ya'akov girls in Krakow is the story of 94 Haredi girls, Beit Ya'akov student, who committed suicide so as not be raped by German soldiers during the Holocaust. On 27.7.1942, the 93 girls were captured by the Nazis. They were moved to a building and held in the dark. On August 10, they were taken to a nice, lighted house and were ordered to wash. They were told that Nazi soldiers will later visit them. Understanding the meaning of the visit, they decided to commit suicide by means of poison they had prepared. Before her death, on August 11, one of the girls, Chaya Feldman, wrote a letter to Meir Shenkolvsky, the secretary of the Worlwide Beut Ya'akov Movement and a member of the central committee of Agudat Yisrael in New York. The letter was smuggled out of the ghetto and at the beginning of January reached its destination.
She wrote: "… when this letter reaches you I will not be among the living anymore. In several hours, everything will belong to the past …we are here 93 girls aged 14 to 22, all students or teachers of Beit Ya'akov … the Germans do not know that the bath they had given us was the ritual immersion before our deaths: we have all prepared poison. When the soldiers come, we will drink that poison. We are all saying confession all day. We are not afraid of anything. We have but one request of your honor: say Kaddish for 93 girls of Israel! Soon we will be with Sarah the matriarch".
The story became a founding ethos and myth in the history of Jewish heroism during the Holocaust.
In recent years, there are scholars who challenge the reliability of the story and claim that the suicide had not been accomplished.