The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World

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Vrba resolved again to escape. In Auschwitz he had encountered an acquaintance from Trnava, Alfréd Wetzler (prisoner no.29162, then aged 26) who had arrived on 13 April 1942 and was working in the mortuary. [86] Czesław Mordowicz, who escaped from Auschwitz weeks after Vrba, said decades later that it was Wetzler who had initiated and planned the escape. [87] Their ultimate goal after their escape was to warn the world about Germany's death factories so Jews would stop passively boarding trains that took them to be gassed and staved at camps. At that time the SS was preparing to deport 1 Million Hungarian Jews to their deaths at Auschwitz. To get the word out, they co-authored the infamous Vrba-Wetzler Report, which provided incontrovertible evidence of the Nazi’s mass extermination of Jews at death camps. A complex hero. A forgotten story. The first witness to reveal the full truth of the Holocaust . . .

The Slovak Jewish leaders had arranged a safe house for them in the mountains, some fifty-five miles east of Žilina, in the town of Liptovský Svätý Mikuláš. Walter and Fred were given money to live on and, far more precious, false papers certifying them as pure Aryans of at least three generations standing. That status would give them complete freedom of movement around Slovakia. If they were on a train or in a restaurant that was raided by the police, there would be nothing to fear: these bogus documents were flawless.The Nazi's knew what they were doing was srong, they tried to hide the evidence by burning their victims then using the ashes as fertilizer. We will never know exactly how many were murdered. How many families were wiped off the face of the earth beause of hate and prejudice. On 7 April 1944, after days of delay, weeks of obsessive preparation, months of watching the failed attempts of others, and two years of seeing the depths to which human beings could sink, the moment had finally come. It was time to escape. Walter saw it with new clarity. The difference between truth and lies was the difference between life and death. The factory of murder that the Nazis had constructed in this accursed place depended on one cardinal principle: that the people who came to Auschwitz did not know where they were going, or for what purpose. That was the premise on which the entire system was built. Auschwitz was an abattoir and Walter had seen enough of those in the countryside of his native Slovakia to know that it is much easier to slaughter lambs than it is to hunt deer. If you have to catch animals individually, hunting them down one by one, it is slow, awkward work. It is never as fast or efficient as driving thousands at a time, herded and neatly organised, towards their deaths. The Nazis had devised a method that would operate like a well-run slaughterhouse rather than a shooting party. The Nazis had devised a method that would operate like a well-run slaughterhouse rather than a shooting party.’ Photograph: Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images According to the historian Zoltán Tibori Szabó, the report was first published in Geneva in May 1944, in German, by Abraham Silberschein of the World Jewish Congress as Tatsachenbericht über Auschwitz und Birkenau, dated 17 May 1944. [130] Florian Manoliu of the Romanian Legation in Bern took the report to Switzerland and gave it to George Mantello, a Jewish businessman from Transylvania, who was working as the first secretary of the El Salvador consulate in Geneva. It was thanks to Mantello that the report received, in the Swiss press, its first wide coverage. [131] Hungarian Jews arriving at Auschwitz II-Birkenau, May/June 1944

Then came the crucial line, confirmation that Fred and Walter had passed the rigorous, forty-eight-hour oral examination to which they had been submitted: “The declarations tally with all the trustworthy yet fragmentary reports hitherto received and the dates given with regard to transports to various camps agree with the official records. These statements can therefore be considered entirely credible.” They also spent 15 harrowing days on the run from the Gestapo in Nazi-occupied Poland with no identity papers, no money, no food. They trekked through 85 miles of rugged terrain, moving only at night by the light of the moon, as armed patrols with dogs chased them. Rosenberg, who changed his name to Rudolf Vrba, with his then wife Gerta and daughter Helena in 1953. Photograph: courtesy of Caroline Hilton Vrba has been in Auschwitz for close to two years and has performed very different roles and tasks. He has lived in the main camp, and in Birkenau. He has been part of different commandos. So we get a very good view on many different parts of the camp. and fellow prisoner Fred Wetzler together hatched a daring plan to escape. Photographs: courtesy of Robin Vrba; archive of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State MuseumThe Swiss students made thousands of copies, which were passed to other students and MPs. [136] At least 383 articles about Auschwitz appeared in the Swiss press between 23 June and 11 July 1944. [138] According to Michael Fleming, this was more than the number of articles published about the Holocaust during the war by all the British popular newspapers combined. [139] Importance of dates [ edit ] This whole convoy consisted of about 1,600 individuals of whom approximately 200 girls and 400 men were admitted to the camp, while the remaining 1,000 persons (women, old people, children as well as men) were sent without further procedure from the railroad siding directly to the Birch forest, and there gassed and burned. From this moment on all Jewish convoys were dealt with in the same manner. Approximately 10% of the men and 5% of the women were allotted to the camps and the remaining members were immediately gassed .

Despite the significant influence Vrba had on Klein's life, Klein's first sight of Vrba was the latter's interview in Shoah in 1985. He disagreed with Vrba's allegations about Kastner; Klein had seen Kastner at work in the Jewish Council offices in Budapest, where Klein had worked as a secretary, and he viewed Kastner as a hero. He told Vrba how he had tried himself, in the spring of 1944, to convince others in Budapest of the Vrba–Wetzler report's veracity, but no one had believed him, which inclined him to the view that Vrba was wrong to argue that the Jews would have acted had they known about the death camps. Vrba said that Klein's experience illustrated his point: distributing the report via informal channels had lent it no authority. [223] Reverend József Éliás, head of the Good Shepherd Mission in Hungary, said he received the report from Géza Soós, a member of the Hungarian Independence Movement, a resistance group. [144] Yehuda Bauer believes that Kastner or Ottó Komoly, leader of the Aid and Rescue Committee, gave Soós the report. [145] Éliás's secretary, Mária Székely, translated it into Hungarian and prepared six copies, which made their way to Hungarian and church officials, including Miklós Horthy's daughter-in-law, Countess Ilona Edelsheim-Gyulai. [146] Braham writes that this distribution occurred before 15 May. [147] Part of a series of articles onThe perimeter fence was not like the ones they had known from the inner camp. It did not have lights attached to each post; the wire was not electrified. Even so, the pair were taking no chances. They had fashioned in advance something that could function as a kind of clothes peg, protecting their hands as, working from the bottom, they lifted the wire above the ground. That made an opening big enough for them to crawl through. In August 1942 Vrba was reassigned to the Aufräumungskommando ("clearing-up") or "Kanada" commando, in Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the extermination camp, 4km (2.5 miles) from Auschwitz I. Around 200–800 prisoners worked on the nearby Judenrampe where freight trains carrying Jews arrived, removing the dead, then sorting through the new arrivals' property. Many brought kitchen utensils and clothes for different seasons, suggesting to Vrba that they believed the stories about resettlement. [45] Arnošt Rosin (prisoner no. 29858) and Czesław Mordowicz (prisoner no. 84216) escaped from Auschwitz on 27 May 1944 and arrived in Slovakia on 6 June, the day of the Normandy landings. Hearing about the invasion of Normandy and believing the war was over, they got drunk to celebrate, using dollars they had smuggled out of Auschwitz. They were arrested for violating the currency laws, and spent eight days in prison before the Jewish Council paid their fines. [132] Vrba's position that the Jewish leadership in Hungary and Slovakia betrayed their communities was supported by the Anglo-Canadian historian John S. Conway, a colleague of his at the University of British Columbia, who from 1979 wrote a series of papers in defence of Vrba's views. [261] In 1996 Vrba repeated the allegations in an article, "Die mißachtete Warnung: Betrachtungen über den Auschwitz-Bericht von 1944" ("The warning that was ignored: Considerations of an Auschwitz report from 1944") in Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, [262] Several appeals were made to Horthy, including by the Spanish, Swiss and Turkish governments, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Gustaf V of Sweden, the International Committee of the Red Cross and, on 25 June 1944, Pope Pius XII. [174] The Pope's telegram did not mention Jews: "We are being beseeched in various quarters to do everything in our power that, in this noble and chivalrous nation, the sufferings, already so heavy, endured by a large number of unfortunate people, because of their nationality or race, may not be extended and aggravated." [139]