A Miraculous Escape from Auschwitz
Walter Rosenberg, who later changed his name to Rudolf Vrba, and fellow prisoner Alfred Wetzler escaped from the infamous Auschwitz Death Camp on April 7, 1944. Their method of escape was rather unique, and the comprehensive report they wrote about the mass executions taking place at Auschwitz helped to save the lives of thousands of Hungarian Jews.
Walter was fifteen-years-old when he was forced to leave school and study at home due to the anti-Jewish laws passed by the pro-Nazi German protectorate of Slovakia. Three years later, at age seventeen, he’d had enough. He tore the Star of David off his clothes and left home in a taxi, hoping to make it to Great Britain.
At the Hungarian border, frontier guards captured Walter and sent him to a transition camp. Hoping to improve his situation, he volunteered for a “Work Farm” assignment, which was in reality a one-way trip to Auschwitz. He held various jobs at Birkenau (Auschwitz II), where the gas chambers and crematoriums were located.
By April of 1944, about ninety percent of the new arrivals to Auschwitz (6000 people) were sent straight to the gas chambers each day. One day drunken SS guards spilled the news to the prisoners that Hungarian Jews would soon arrive.
Auschwitz II had a very active underground resistance organization made up of prisoners who worked in various departments in the camp. After the group learned that Rosenberg and Wetzler wanted to escape, the members aided their plans. It was past time to expose the Nazi’s secret crimes to the outside world.
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The underground organization gathered data from the central registry, a list of the SS officers working around the crematoria, drawings of the layout of the gas chambers and crematoria, records of the transports gassed in two of the crematoriums, and a label from a Zyklon B canister. In one department, the prisoners’ job was to sort through the large quantities of items confiscated from the new arrivals and package the goods to send to Germany. From this supply, the underground gathered suits, socks, underpants, shirts, a razor, a torch, glucose, vitamins, margarine, cigarettes and a lighter for Rosenberg and Wetzler.
A barbed wire perimeter surrounded the barracks where the prisoners slept at night. The Nazi guards erected another external perimeter during the day. A stack of wood for constructing new buildings had been placed in a construction area between these two perimeters.
The men created a hollowed-out space in the wood stack, and on Friday, April 7, 1944, Rosenberg and Wetzler, clad in suits, overcoats, and boots, climbed inside their hiding place. A Russian POW had previously told them to soak strong-smelling Russian tobacco in petrol and dry it out to hide the men’s scent from the guard dogs. Their underground helpers piled wood around the escapees and sprinkled the area with the prepared tobacco.
Rosenberg had observed that after someone went missing at Auschwitz, the SS would hunt for them for three days and three nights before calling off their search. The two men stayed in the wood pile undetected for three nights and throughout the fourth day. After nearly 80 hours, they crawled out of their hiding place at 9:00 PM on Monday, April 10th. The external perimeter had been removed for the night, leaving the men free to escape the camp.
Rosenberg and Wetzler headed south to Slovakia, eighty-one miles away. Polish civilians assisted them with food and shelter, and the men crossed the border after eleven days. A peasant family in Slovakia put the men in contact with a nearby Jewish doctor who sent them by train to the Slovak Jewish Council in Žilina.
Although the Slovakian government had turned over thousands of its Jews to the Nazis who deported them, part of the Jewish community was left alone to operate its schools and synagogues as a show piece for German propaganda.
Rosenberg and Wetzler wrote a full report of the atrocities taking place at Auschwitz, including drawings and detailed facts to back up their testimony. Rosenberg signed the report with his new name – Rudolf Vrba. The report was translated from Slovak into German and completed on April 27th. It was copied and taken to Hungary, Switzerland, the UK, Romania, and the United States.
International newspapers eventually picked up the men’s story, and leaders of several countries pressured Hungary to stop the deportations. The United States and Great Britain bombed Budapest on July 2 and dropped leaflets stating those responsible for the deportations would be held accountable.
Although the Nazi’s had invaded Hungary in March 1944 to prevent the country from withdrawing from the war, the Germans had left Hungarian Regent Miklós Horthy in power. After the Allies bombed Budapest, Horthy reasserted his authority and ordered an end to the mass deportations. Prior to that, 437,000 Hungarian Jews had been sent to Auschwitz between May 15 and July 7. The order to stop the deportations spared the lives of 200,000 Jews in Budapest.
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Vrba and Wetzler survived the war, wrote books about their experiences, and lived to an advanced age. Vrba argued to the day he died that more lives could have been spared if the report had been disseminated immediately. He maintained that politics had played a part in keeping their account quiet for a time. Over the years many theories have been presented for why this may have happened, but that’s a story for another time.
Sources: “Escapes and Report Memorial and Museum Auschwitz Birkenau.
“Rudolph Vrba – I Escaped from Auschwitz.” Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team.
“Rudolph Vrba.” Wikipedia.
