Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler escaped from the concentration camp in 1944, and denounced the extermination. But at first, many thought it was an exaggeration. Now an essay by Jonathan Freedland tells the story
FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
BERLIN – You can’t believe what you can’t imagine. In the summer of 1942 Walter Rosenbergborn in Topol’cany, in the Slovak rural province, was deported by the Nazis to Auschwitz. He was not even 18 years old. What had betrayed him was his independent and rebellious spirit, which had led him to ignore the collection order given to the Jews of Czechoslovakia to be transferred to Poland. They had stopped him at the Hungarian border while he was trying to cross it dreaming of going to England. It did not take him long to discover that Auschwitz-Birkenau was a factory of death on an industrial scaleconceived by Himmler and his henchmen for the realization of the Final Solution, the extermination of all the Jews of Europe.
Rosenberg, which would take the nom de guerre of Rudolf Vrbathe one who would have consigned him to history, was assigned to clear the ramp, the platform where the trains arrived and on which the selection took place.
Women, children and the elderly were immediately sent to the showers, as the signs said, and ended up in the gas chambers. When the screams, covered by the running engines of the trucks, stopped, other prisoners came in to take out the bodies to take them to incinerate in the ovens. On the trains remained the corpses of those who had died traveling without water, food or toilets, on the platform suitcases and poor things that the deportees had been forced to leave.
The task of Vrba and others like him was to sweep everything away.
He had a formidable memory, Rudolf Vrba. And for two long years he recorded every detail of that mess in his head, even adding up the numbers of people sent to annihilation. And then the deaths from starvation, illness or exhaustion, the suicides, the random killings of the SS. Convinced that the killing machine went on only thanks to a big lie, the one that made the Jews deported to the concentration camp in Poland unaware of their fate, he he became convinced that if the truth of the massacres had been revealed to those who were still in Europe and to the governments of the world, then the Jews would have resisted and the Allies would have acted to stop the Holocaust, saving thousands of lives.
In April 1944, together with his fellow prisoner Alfred Wetzler, Rudolf Vrba managed to escape from Auschwitzhiding for 80 hours in a hole in the ground in the outer labor camp and then walking for 11 days, chased by the Nazis, before reaching his native Slovakia.
They were the first Jews to accomplish the feat, only two others would have succeeded.
The story of Vrba and Wetzler was also told by director Peter Bebjak in the film The Auschwitz Report nominated for an Oscar in 2020.
What happened later was never told in detail.
It does now Jonathan Freedland, English journalist and writer, in a book just released by the publisher John Murray. In The Escape Artist. The Man who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World he documents the drama of the man who fled from hell and was not believed, witnessed the gravest crime in human history, describing it in its most monstrous detail, but ran into a wall of silence and mistrust. Yet, in the end, the report compiled by Vrba and Wetzler triggered a series of international initiatives that they spared the lives of at least 200,000 Jews.
As Freedland says, the 32-page protocol written after the escape was so complete, terrible, full of detail and the minutiae of life inside the concentration camp, merciless in describing the horrors to arouse skepticism mixed with prejudice.
When the text reached the Foreign Office in London, the diplomat who read it first noted: some Jewish exaggeration, these statements are tremendous. Another chios: We waste too much time dealing with these whiny Jews.
Even when the document arrived on Churchill’s desk and he wrote a note to his foreign minister, Anthony Eden, inviting him to ask the air force to bomb the access lines to the camp, the minister in charge of the RAF, Archibald Sinclair, replied that destroying the tracks is beyond the capabilities of the Royal Air Force.
It was no better in Washington, despite Vrba and Wetzler’s report reaching as far as Roosevelt. The text passed from one Department to another without anyone reacting and proposing to do something. And when in the editorial office of Yank, an army magazine that had a piece on Nazi crimes scheduled, its content was ignored because it was considered too Semiticwhile the periodical wanted a less Jewish reportage.
But disbelief permeated even the Jewish Council of Budapest, whose president Samuel Stern even wondered if the relationship was not the fruit of the imagination of the two young peoplefearing that its publication would cause panic and still expose the community to accusations of spreading false information.
Stern decided to keep it secret, while in less than 60 days, between late May and early July 1944, over 473,000 Jews were rounded up in the Hungarian countryside and herded onto 147 trains bound for Auschwitz, where almost all of them were gassed.
Nobody believed the tale of the unspeakable.
Not even those who were already on the trains.
In the book Freedland also tells the story of Czeslaw Mordowicz, also fled from Auschwitz and whose testimony was added to the Vrba report. Mordowicz was then captured again and sent back to the death camp.
Inside the wagon he told his traveling companions what awaited them, inviting them to jump out of the wagon together when it was moving. But they screamed, banged their fists on the doors and called the SS, who beat Mordowicz with the butts of rifles to paralyze him. Until his days in Birkenau.
Yet something happened, thanks to the Vrba and Wetzler protocol. It was in fact the pressures of apostolic nuncio to Budapest, Monsignor Angelo Rottato persuade the regent of the puppet kingdom of Hungary, Miklos Horthy, to stop the deportation of the last 200,000 Hungarian Jews, saving their lives.
Rudolf Vrba died in 2006, aged 81, after a brilliant career as a biochemist.
As Freedland writes, for his extraordinary story he should stand alongside Anne Frank, Oskar Schindler and Primo Levi, whose stories helped us understand the Holocaust. His lesson, which finds great echo today, that we can have all the information we want about an ongoing horror, but to act one must first of all believe in it.