The greatest escape
The fact they risked their lives to warn others is incredible
AUTHOR JOEL ON THE FOUR ESCAPEES’ COURAGE
EYES wide with fear, Jewish prisoners Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler held their breath while the Auschwitz guard climbed on top of the woodpile they were hiding in.
And as his dog began barking furiously, the pair could only pray the Russian tobacco and gasoline they had smeared on their bodies would put it off their scent.
“If the SS found us we’d have been killed,” said Rudolf who had sneaked with Alfred into the hideaway in a no-man’s land between the camp’s inner and outer perimeter fences.
“We heard boots hit the earth, his shouts and the clicking of a hound’s nails above us, then silence.”
It was a pivotal historic moment that would astonishingly help save hundreds of thousands from the camp where over a million died.
Because Rudolf and Alfred then made their great escape and walked 85 miles in German-occupied Poland to raise the alarm over Nazi plans to speed up the killings.
Their daring breakout was followed by friends Czeslaw Mordowicz and Arnost Rosin a month later in May 1944.
MEMORY
Tomorrow is the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. And few people today have heard of these men who alerted the Allies about the slaughter and stopped thousands more Hungarian Jews from being deported to the camp.
Czechoslovakian Rudolf had the camp layout inside his head along with vital details of Nazi plans gleaned from the job that had kept him alive – sorting the belongings of Jews coming off transport trains.
And his amazing memory for prisoners’ names would later be checked against records to prove his and his fellow escapees’ unbelievable stories about the camp where Angel of Death Dr Josef Mengele performed deadly experiments on prisoners.
Author Joel C. Rosenberg, who later researched the men’s story for The Auschwitz Escape, said: “The fact they risked their lives not just to explain the fate of thousands of Jews, but to warn others is incredible.”
Rudolf was 17 when he was transported to Auschwitz in June 1942. Because he was young he was made to work and was spared the gas chambers.
He heard guards boast of new camps being built in Hungary and “tasty Hungarian salami” to be made in coming months.
His anger at what he had witnessed – SS officers choosing who lived and died with a flick of a hand – was boiling inside him.
In an interview after the war, Rudolf said: “When I saw the Nazis with bamboo sticks, herding old men and women and children into the gas chambers I thought, ‘It is my duty to jump on the neck of the first one’. But I also knew the moment I made the first move I’d be killed and many others too in reprisal.” Seeking a way to strike back, Rudolf began plotting an escape with Alfred, a prisoner from his home town. Alfred, then 25, had a job as an administrator, keeping track of the transports and numbers of prisoners coming in. That information would prove vital to the Allies. The pair decided
to go for it after the massacre of around 4,000 prisoners in the Czech Family Camp at Auschwitz.
They had been paraded in front of Red Cross inspectors with unshaven heads and normal clothes instead of striped uniforms to mislead them about the Final Solution. Once the inspections were over, they were murdered.
Rudolf and Alfred got workers on an extension to the death camp to build a woodpile with a hole to hide in.
On April 7, 1944, the two men sneaked into it. They knew from escape attempts by others that the guards would search for them for three nights before giving up.
Author Joel said: “Russian prisoners had a pungent tobacco that would cover their scent from the dogs. They mixed it with stolen gasoline and smeared it over themselves.”
On the third night, when the SS guard around the outer fence was withdrawn, they got away and, after 15 days of walking by night, made it to the border with unoccupied Slovakia.
They took their story straight to the Jewish Council in Zilina. A secretary there, George Klein, read Rudolf’s chilling testimony and said he knew he was “looking at the truth”. The council contacted their counterparts in Budapest who were at first sceptical. But when escapees Czeslaw and Arnost turned up and confirmed the evidence, there was no denying it. The four combined their recollections in a report – the Auschwitz Protocol – that proved what the Allied forces already suspected. On July 2, the US air force attacked Budapest, and the deportations of Hungarian Jews to the death camps ceased. After the war, Rudolf settled in London with girlfriend Gerta Sidonovi. She said: “He said he had seen our friends killed in the gas chambers.” Joel added: “The story of these courageous men is the greatest escape ever.”