'Forgotten' Holocaust heroes help Slovakia come to terms with its Nazi history
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Loading... - Ivan Masny
- 30 Mar 2023
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Composite image of Rudolf Vrba (L) and Alfred Wetzler (R), Slovakian Jews who escaped from Auschwitz -
In April 1944, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler became the first Jews to escape from Auschwitz. Not only did the two Slovaks manage to flee the short distance across Poland to make it back to their homeland, their 32-page testimony of the barbarism they witnessed at the Nazi extermination camp, the so-called “Vrba-Wetzler report”, made clear to the world the true horror of the Holocaust.
That report was highly detailed, with the two young men able to draw maps of the camp, detailed diagrams showing where the barracks were location, where the gas chambers and crematoriums were. Vrba even committed to memory details of train arrivals, where they came from, and how many people were on board: crucial details which later helped the Allies understand the true extent of the Nazi genocide.
The lives of up to 200,000 Jews in Budapest were saved when their deportations were halted after the Vrba-Wetzler report came out, argued Jonathan Freedland, author of one of the most acclaimed nonfiction books of last year, "The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World", the story of Vrba and Wetzler retold for English speakers.
Their names deserve “to stand alongside Anne Frank, Oskar Schindler and Primo Levi, in the first rank of stories that define the Shoah,” Freedland said, though added: “That day may never come.” When Wetzler died in Bratislava in 1988, he was “bitter, drunk and forgotten,” the Israeli author Ruth Linn wrote in a book about the pair. Vrba, who emigrated early from post-socialist Czechoslovakia, passed away in 2006 in Canada. Read More…
