8
Though two of the concentration camp boxers in this book successfully escaped from confinement, the vast majority of inmates either perished in gas chambers or attempted to tough out their confinement until liberated by either the Soviets or the Americans.
The 144 inmates who succeeded in escaping were unyielding risk-takers who wanted to seize their freedom. They knew that if they were caught they would wind up with the 900 others who had failed in their attempts and were subsequently tortured then executed. Though burdened by doubts, fears, and anxieties, those attempting to escape focused, like lasers, their thoughts and plans on getting beyond the electrified wires and the range of machine gun bullets. They were willing to risk brutal death in exchange for the rare possibility of freely living without fear and animalistic degradation. Once beyond the net of the Gestapo, escapees were nearly drunk with excitement; they felt as if they had been born anew.
One of the most audacious escapes was devised by Eugeniusz Bendera and largely carried out by a former Polish Boy Scout named Kazimierz Piechowski. (The latter was imprisoned because the Nazis considered the Polish Boy Scouts a criminal organization, for its members had committed acts of sabotage, including blowing up military transports). Working as car mechanics at Auschwitz, Bendera and Piechowski carefully devised a plan that few would have dared to execute. Their plan was given urgency when Bendera learned that he was scheduled for execution. So on the morning of June 20, 1942, the two men, along with Stanisław Gustaw Jaster and Józef Lempart, a Catholic priest, pushed a cart filled with garbage into a storage unit. The guards thought it nothing unusual. Once inside the unit, the men broke into a nearby room that contained military uniforms. There they changed into the uniforms of SS–Totenkopfverbände guards; next, they armed themselves with four machine guns and eight hand grenades.
Parked outside the storage unit was a Steyr 220 staff car that Bendera had often repaired and driven through the camp when returning it to SS commandant Paul Kreuzmann. Guards tended to ignore Bendera, thinking that he was merely chauffeuring Kreuzmann. They would even salute the passing vehicle. The four men got into the car, acting with nonchalance, even laughing. Bendera drove the car and his ersatz SS passengers to the main Auschwitz entrance, known as the Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Sets You Free) gate. Piechowski, who was the most fluent and articulate in German, opened a window and shouted for the guards to open the gate. The guards saluted the commandant’s car and promptly opened the gate. Nervously smiling, worried that they would be followed, yet delighted by the ease of their escape, Bendera and his passengers proceeded for thirty-seven miles.
Deeply ensconced in a densely wooded forest, they abandoned and hid their getaway car. The escapees decided that they would have a better chance at evading capture if they split up. In case one of them was captured, he would not know where the others had gone. He might be tortured, but he would be unable to provide information that would lead to the others also being captured. Piechowski made his way to Ukraine then back to Poland, where he joined the Polish Home Army and fought against the Nazi occupiers. In retaliation for his escape, the Nazis arrested his parents and sent them to Auschwitz, where they were tortured and murdered. After the war Piechowski earned a degree in engineering but was arrested and sentenced to ten years in prison for being a member of the anti-communist Polish Home Army. He was released after seven years and died in 2017.
Bendera followed a different route to the Polish Home Army, where he served, fighting Nazis until the end of the war. In postwar Poland, he had an uneventful postwar life and died in 1970.
Józef Lempart walked for nearly ninety-six miles. Near total exhaustion, he arrived at a monastery in Stary Sa˛cz. Though the Nazis were unable to find him, they did find his mother, whom they arrested and sent to Auschwitz. The SS said her arrest was in reprisal for her son’s escape. Not surprisingly she was murdered. After the war, Lem-part left the priesthood, married, and had a daughter. While crossing a busy street in Wadowice in 1971, he was crushed by a speeding bus and died soon afterward.
Stanisław Gustaw Jaster, the youngest of the escapees, joined a secret anti-Nazi underground military organization. From there he joined the Polish Home Army High Command in Warsaw and became a personal assistant to Witold Pilecki (one of the most daring Holocaust heroes to have escaped from Auschwitz). Jaster’s parents were also arrested in reprisal for their son’s escape. While in Auschwitz they were tortured by the SS who wanted to know the whereabouts of their son. Unable to provide that information, they were gassed and incinerated. None of the escapees’ parents, no matter how brutally they were tortured, were able or willing to provide information about their sons’ whereabouts. Jaster, angry and frustrated that he could not save his parents from imprisonment and doom, devoted himself to defeating those who ran the SS and Gestapo. As a member of the Home Army, he led numerous attacks against the Nazis who were responsible for transporting prisoners to Auschwitz. On one mission, he and his comrades killed all the Nazis involved in charge of a transport train; they then freed all forty-nine of the prisoners, who escaped through the countryside, some of them joining resistance groups.
Jaster could not have had a more remarkable and significant boss in the Home Army than Witold Pilecki, who was a man of unusual courage and determination. Prior to the war, Pilecki’s appearance was that of a strikingly handsome Aryan. His slick blond hair and sharp facial features made him the ideal image of an SS officer. After the war, following years of imprisonment and torture, his face had become sallow and aged, his hair darkened and drab, his features no longer sharply chiseled. Yet his proud countenance was still that of a man of courage and firm beliefs. He would stoically accept his communist-imposed death sentence knowing that he had always acted as a Polish patriot. During his truncated life of forty-seven years, he had been a Polish cavalry officer, a spy, a hunted resistance leader, and a voluntary prisoner of Auschwitz.
Pilecki and an army officer named Włodarkiewicz founded the Secret Polish Army, in which Pilecki served as a cavalry captain. The two men were dedicated to their vision of Poland as a state that would no longer have to cower under an occupation of Nazi cruelty. Pilecki was the more adventurous and daring of the two. As a leader of the underground resistance fighting the Nazis, he disguised himself as a proper businessman, a manager of a cosmetics company, and spied on the occupiers. Had he been caught, he would have been tortured for information and then executed. Yet he seemed as invisible as the air though capable of fierce winds of resistance. He fought courageously in many battles against Nazi troops, invariably leading his comrades to a series of victories. He was like one of those dashing figures from fiction, the Scarlet Pimpernel or Zorro, men who could achieve one victory after another but whose identity would remain a mystery.
Unlike his comrade Włodarkiewicz, Pilecki was a non-sectarian liberal and internationalist. Włodarkiewicz, by contrast, was an extreme right-wing nationalist who wanted Poland to be populated exclusively by Christians. He thought that if there were any Jews left in Poland after the war, they should be expelled. In support of such a program, Włodarkiewicz espoused classic anti-Semitic canards about Jews taking over the world through either a secret capitalist or communist cabal, never considering that communists and capitalists detested one another. From there he developed an inchoate plan to form a fascist puppet government that would make peace with the Nazis but not be controlled by Nazis. He apparently wasn’t sure who would win the war. This was too much for Pilecki. He thought Włodarkiewicz was not only unreasonable but also dangerous, for one could never come to terms with the barbarian Nazis. In addition, Pilecki had no prejudice against Jews. The Jews had long lived in Poland and, he believed, had made significant contributions to Polish culture. Włodarkiewicz seemed unable to accept that the Nazis regarded all Poles as subhuman, a race to be exploited and perhaps ultimately exterminated.
Unable to bridge the gulf that separated their opposing views, the two had a nasty falling out, and Włodarkiewicz would find it difficult to forgive Pilecki. However, faced with the continual onslaught of Nazi atrocities, Włodarkiewicz finally realized the impracticality of his plans and agreed that the Home Army should present a united front against the invaders of their country. Nevertheless, he continued to regard Pilecki as a naive idealist at best, a danger to Polish society at worst. To others, he would attempt to undermine Pilecki’s reputation, expressing his scorn and contempt for Pilecki’s worldview. Intraparty grudges for Pilecki were a waste of valuable time. One was either in favor of the Nazis or against them. And if against them, then one had an ethical and patriotic obligation to combat them. The Nazis were Poland’s enemy, said Pilecki, and the mission of the Home Army must be to sabotage their dehumanizing institutions and destroy its agents whenever possible.
To that end, Pilecki made one of the war’s most memorable contributions to Holocaust history. The resistance was asking for a member to volunteer to be taken prisoner and sent to Auschwitz so that a full report could be made available to the Allies about the nature and extent of atrocities committed at the concentration camp. As a deeply faithful Catholic layperson and Polish patriot, Pilecki believed he had a Christian duty to volunteer, for it could mean that the lives of prisoners could be saved or at least improved. Włodarkiewicz was happy to see him go, no doubt wondering if Pilecki would ever return. Pilecki’s superiors were apprehensive but nevertheless approved the plan and provided Pilecki with a false identity card in the name of Tomasz Serafinski.
On September 19, 1940, Pilecki deliberately went out onto a Warsaw street and stood in the midst of a roundup by the Gestapo. He and two thousand others were scooped up in the Nazi dragnet. He was taken to a barracks where he was questioned and beaten with rubber truncheons for two days. His interrogators never learned of his secret military missions against the Nazis. Not satisfied with Pilecki’s claims of ignorance and of being nothing but an apolitical businessman, the Gestapo agents sent him to Auschwitz, where he was tattooed with the number 4859. Never one to pay obeisance to unlawful authority and being a fighter for liberty, Pilecki organized hundreds of Auschwitz prisoners into a secret resistance movement. They secretly disseminated information to the Polish government in exile in London, which made the information available to British and American officials. In addition to smuggled written messages, Pilecki used a radio transmitter that had been secretly built by members of the resistance. It took them seven months to build the transmitter using stolen parts. Pilecki broadcast messages to the Polish Home Army and to the Polish government in exile until the autumn of 1942, when the SS grew suspicious after hearing rumors of the transmitter’s existence. The guards searched the camp, questioning prisoners about the existence of a radio transmitter, but Pilecki had disassembled it and unobtrusively disposed of its parts. Nothing was ever discovered, and the SS soon believed that it had never existed.
Pilecki hoped that the hundreds of inmates whom he had organized would rise up and topple the SS who ran the camp. In his messages smuggled to the Polish government, he urged them to drop a brigade of Polish soldiers into the camp while simultaneously having the Polish Home Army launch a massive attack on the camp. By 1943, the Gestapo, through its policy of torturing possible resistance fighters, ascertained that there might be an attack on Auschwitz. Under the direction of SS–Untersturmführer Maximilian Grabner, the guards hunted down, arrested, tortured, and ultimately killed many resistance members within the camp. That put an end to Pilecki’s plans. He now believed that any rebellion, even if one could be instigated, would fail and result in unnecessary deaths.1
He decided that he would be more valuable in the fight against the Nazis if he were no longer in the camp. How to escape and bring his eyewitness accounts to the Home Army? So many who had attempted to escape were not only captured but murdered, their debased bodies made into grotesque exhibitions of threat.
Pilecki’s opportunity to escape suddenly was made possible, however, when he was assigned to the night shift at a camp bakery, which was just outside the electrified fence that surrounded the camp. He and two fellow inmates carefully planned an escape that would be simple and violent. During the night of April 26, 1943, they brutally attacked and overpowered a guard, beating him into bloody unconsciousness. They decided not to kill their victim but were careful that he should not be able to alert other guards when he recovered. They used rope from the bakery to tie his wrists behind his back, turned him on his stomach, then pulled up his legs behind him, tying his ankles to his wrists. They stuffed a wet, flour-laden kitchen towel in his mouth. They then cut the phone line. It was dark and the darkness would conceal their flight. Before they dashed into the night, they took with them dozens of secret Nazi documents that detailed orders to commit atrocities and evidence of those atrocities. They believed that once those documents were in anti-Nazi hands there would be action taken to destroy the camp and liberate its inmates.
The three men walked for hours, trudging through a forest, managing not to get lost. They finally arrived at the village of Alwernia where a sympathetic priest hid and fed them. He cautioned them to be circumspect, for SS informers were in the village. He gave them clothes that would be worn by locals. The following morning, they continued on their way, looking over their shoulders to make sure they weren’t being followed. They managed to get to Tyniec, where local members of the resistance provided them with more food, additional clothing, and boots.
They were still not safe for by now the beaten SS guard had been discovered and the SS and Gestapo were searching for the escapees. Travelling by night, they continued on to Bochnia, where members of the resistance hid them in a safe house that was owned by the man whose name, Tomasz Serafinński, Pilecki had used as a nom de guerre during his internment.
Pilecki showed the commanders of the Home Army the smuggled Nazi documents and told them stories of the terror and atrocities experienced by the inmates of Auschwitz. He quickly became frustrated by the Home Army’s decision not to attack the camp. He could barely contain his anger at what he viewed as the indifference or fear that kept the army from a commitment to launch an attack. The army brass claimed that his report of the atrocities at the camp contained many exaggerations, all created to generate an attack of the camp. They could not believe, for example, that there were gas chambers for killing massive numbers of men, women, and children; they could not believe that bodies were incinerated and that sterilization was a common practice. It seemed grotesque and impossible that the camp should contain even one crematorium let alone three and that eight thousand people could be daily pitched into the ovens. The willful blindness of those in charge of the army was unconscionable to Pilecki. Yet he would not cease in his revelations.2
From Bochnia an angry Pilecki set out for Warsaw, and after several days on the run, he arrived on August 25, 1943. There he joined the intelligence and counter-intelligence division of the Home Army. Though he again tried to convince the leaders of the Home Army to attack Auschwitz, he was overruled because it was ascertained that the army did not have a sufficient number of soldiers and even if they did, they did not have a powerful enough armory of weapons to overwhelm the camp’s defenders. An attack, it was decided, could only be successful if the British and American allies were to join in. They would not. Even the Soviet army, which could easily have launched an attack against the camp, chose not to do so. And appallingly, Pilecki’s estimate that by March 1943 there would have been 1.5 million people gassed and incinerated in the camp did not affect their decision. Pilecki’s estimate did not include those who died of starvation and disease.3
After the war Pilecki, though grateful that the Soviets had liberated Auschwitz, participated in the formation of a secret anti-communist unit within the Home Army. And when Poland became a satellite of the USSR, Pilecki’s anti-communism became known to the Ministry of Public Security. In 1947, Pilecki was arrested and tortured: his accusers wanted to know the names of his fellow anti-communists. Pilecki’s collarbones and arms were broken. Pliers were used to yank out several of his fingernails. The pain was excruciating. During the grueling hours of screaming torture, Pilecki revealed not one name. Drifting in and out of consciousness, his broken body in pain and bleeding, he lay in his darkened cell. He was about to become a dead man but until then he would be as uncommunicative as a statue.
Though his physical torture had ceased, Pilecki was about to undergo psychological torture, betrayal, and humiliation. On March 3, 1948, Auschwitz survivor and the future puppet prime minister of Poland Józef Cyrankiewicz, did as he was ordered to do: he obediently testified against Pilecki. Charges against Pilecki included crossing the border illegally, using forged documents, carrying illegal arms, spying for the government-in-exile, and planning to assassinate officials of the Ministry of Public Security. Pilecki denied the assassination attempt as well as the espionage charges; however, he admitted that he had passed information to the Second Polish Corps, which Pilecki said was entirely legal since he was an officer of the corps. It didn’t matter to the court, for Pilecki’s fate had been pre-determined. He was sentenced to death on May 15 and was soon executed by a single pistol shot to the back of his head. The execution took place in Mokotów Prison in Warsaw on May 25, 1948. Pilecki died as a martyr to patriotism, never betraying himself by denouncing his devotion to a democratic Poland, never betraying his comrades. Upon his death, however, he became a non-person. It was not until the tight yoke of communist oppression was removed that Pilecki’s reputation as a Polish hero, patriot, and martyr was firmly established. Today he is a Holocaust hero, and the “Witold Report” is regarded as an essential document on the atrocities of the Holocaust.4
Another extraordinary and courageous Auschwitz escapee who wrote a report on the atrocities in the camp was Rudolf (Rudi) Vrba. He had been born Walter Rosenberg in 1924 in Slovakia. Photos of him as a young man show a handsome face topped with thick black hair. A pleasant smile enhances his features. His prominent cheekbones, strong jaw, and Roman nose give him the appearance of a Mediterranean movie actor. In addition to his good looks, he had a brilliant scientific mind, and his ambition was to be a biochemist. His plans, however, were interrupted when he was among 800 of 58,000 Slovakian Jews who were arrested and sent to jail in a financial arrangement with the Nazis. The Slovakians paid the Nazis to cart off their despised and unwanted Jews. In exchange, the Nazis permitted the Slovakians to confiscate Jewish property and resell it to their countrymen for bargainbasement prices. Vrba refused to be a victim of the government, the Nazis, and neighborhood Slovakians. He regarded the Slovakians who participated in the sell-out of the Jews as nothing but mendacious traitors. He cursed them all and set out to escape to Hungary. He later wrote that he would not be “deported like a calf in a wagon” and decided to join the Czechoslovak Army in exile in England and set off in a taxi for the border. He made his way to Budapest but then decided to leave the country. However, shortly after he arrived at the border, he was identified as a Slovakian Jew and quickly arrested.5
He was first sent to jail and then to Majdanek concentration camp, which had been constructed as a slave labor camp but was then converted to an extermination camp. It operated on the outskirts of Lublin and had seven gas chambers. From Majdanek, Vrba was transported in a windowless rail car with other Jews, all herded together like cattle for the slaughter, to Auschwitz. He planned to escape from the freight train, but when the SS warned their captives that they would kill ten Jews for each one who escaped or attempted to escape, Vrba changed his mind. Once in Auschwitz, he found another rebellious young man named Alfred Wetzler, an Orthodox Jewish editor with a warm, knowing smile and sparkling eyes that concealed a red-hot anger for the Nazis. They soon became friends and knew that one day they would escape from the hellhole in which they had been flung like remnants of garbage.
Vrba and Wetzler, like all inmates, suffered the humiliation of having their bodies and heads shaved, then forced to wear pajama-like uniforms and crude wooden shoes. Once shaved and deloused, each inmate suffered the indignity of having a number tattooed on his forearm, being branded like a cow. Vrba’s number was 44070. All the prisoners were similarly attired, and their rags implied that they were subhuman mongrels, not worthy of decent clothes or decent treatment. SS officers, by contrast, were models of power and elegance: they wore tailored black uniforms designed by Hugo Boss that not only implied power but also authoritarian menace. The camp guards, however, generally wore gray uniforms with a skull on the tip of the right collar. The skull was an emblem of menace: look at the faceless skull and see an image of your destiny either in the gas chambers or in the ovens.
As degraded as his humanity was, Vrba maintained a fierce will to be free. He wanted to be assigned to a work detail outside the camp gates, for it was in the open where he believed he would have a better chance of escaping than if he were assigned to work at one of the camp buildings or crematoria. He volunteered for farm work, not knowing that the farm was part of the Auschwitz camp.
Working on the farm did not last long, for an older man, a kapo named Frank, purchased Vrba for a single lemon (citrus fruits were a rare commodity and much desired to fight off colds and scurvy). Vrba was an attractive commodity, for he was young, strong, and smart. Frank put the young man to work in an SS grocery store. Vrba worked diligently and had access to basic food supplies and soap and water. As a result, he stayed clean, healthy, and fit. Frank appreciated Vrba’s hard work and treated him with kindness. When the SS passed by or were standing by a window or by the door to the store, Frank would often pretend to beat Vrba with a broomstick or short club or just his fists. His blows, which could not be fully seen by the SS, fell as harshly as those delivered by stuntmen in Hollywood movies. When Vrba resumed working, he exhibited neither cuts nor bruises.
Other camp inmates were not so fortunate. Beatings with rubber hoses, wooden truncheons, metal pipes, and rifle butts were commonplace. On July 17, 1942, the notorious Heinrich Himmler arrived at the camp to make an inspection. He observed the gassing of inmates and smilingly uttered his approval. He moved on to observe an inmate being beaten to death for the crime of missing a button on his tunic. Again he smiled and nodded his approval. He told his SS men that he was proud of their discipline and lack of sympathy for subhumans.
As if assessing the value of a farm animal, the SS decided that Vrba’s strength could be better used as a slave laborer, a cog in the machinery of extermination, than in the light work of a grocery store clerk. He was abruptly ordered from the grocery and sent to join a clean-up crew that would unload dead Jews from incoming freight cars and sort out their property, often contained in battered suitcases. Those who appeared to be healthy and strong were selected for slave labor; all others were herded into gas chambers.
Our first job was to get into the wagons, get out the dead bodies—or the dying—and transport them in laufschritt, as the Germans liked to say. This means “running.” Laufschritt, yeah, never walking—everything had to be done in laufschritt, immer laufen. … There was not much medical counting to see who is dead and who feigns to be dead… . So they were put on the trucks; and once this was finished, this was the first truck to move off, and it went straight to the crematorium.
The whole murder machinery could work on one principle: that the people came to Auschwitz and didn’t know where they were going and for what purpose. The new arrivals were supposed to be kept orderly and without panic marching into the gas chambers. Especially the panic was dangerous from women with small children. So it was important for the Nazis that none of us give some sort of message which could cause a panic…. And anybody who tried to get into touch with newcomers was either clubbed to death or taken behind the wagon and shot.6
The guards perceived Vrba to be a diligent worker who didn’t cause trouble. He was obedient and trustworthy. He was a safe choice for promotion and so was elevated to being an assistant registrar and then promoted again to registrar of block 10. He had his own bed and room and no longer had to wear the prison pajamas, an unusual arrangement for a Jew at Auschwitz. Guards were overheard saying that Vrba could be trusted and was nearly as efficient as a regular Aryan. Unbeknownst to the guards, Vbra secretly took extensive notes about his work and wrote detailed information about the inmates he was able to question. He hid his writings knowing that if he could manage to escape he would be able to present a horrifying picture of life in Auschwitz.
It took years, but Vrba finally saw that he would have an opportunity to escape. A kapo named Yup told him that on January 15, 1944, Vrba would be one of a group of inmates who had been chosen to help build new railway tracks that would deliver prisoners to the edge of the crematoria. He was told that the tracks were being built so that 1 million Hungarians could be transported to the camp then quickly and efficiently gassed and incinerated.
Vrba drew up escape plans with Charles Unglick, an imprisoned French army captain. They planned to make their move on January 26, 1944. As the day of their planned escape drew near, Vrba began to have doubts about the likely success of the plan. He thought that there were better than even chances that they would be caught. It was too risky, and if they were caught Vrba’s report on conditions in Auschwitz would go up in smoke along with the bodies of the escapees. He told Unglick he wanted to postpone their escape until he saw a good chance of success. Unglick, however, was ready to go. He had been imprisoned long enough and did not know when another opportunity would arise. He was insistent and Vrba wished him good luck. Unglick hoped to see his friend on the outside. They briefly embraced, and Unglick departed.
Just as Vrba had suspected, Unglick was spotted by guards and they blasted his body full of holes with machine gun bullets. His bloody corpse was dragged by its heels to the center of the camp and propped up on a chair. It was left there for two days as a warning and threat of what awaited anyone who intended to escape. The SS guards were proud of their capture and execution of Unglick and would point an index finger at the prisoners, imitate the ratatat ratatat sound of machine gun fire, and then laugh. Unglick’s gruesome end was not the only one the prisoners had witnessed. When an earlier group of inmates attempted to escape, they too were gunned down by machine gun fire. Their bodies were also dragged to the center of the camp and dumped like a pile of garbage. Their mangled bodies were drenched in blood, some lying face down in the mud, others with their blood-caked faces turned to the sun. The guards propped up most of the corpses in sitting positions, one body leaning against another for support. As the flies invaded the dead, the guards placed a large sign, like a welcoming banner, across the bodies. In large, bold letters, it proclaimed, “We’re back!”7
Cautiously weighing the opportunities to escape, Vrba was not dissuaded by the threats of the SS, nor by the deaths of others who had failed to escape. His escape would be successful. He and fellow inmate Alfred Wetzler, prisoner number 29162, would succeed where others had failed. Wetzler, who was working in the camp’s mortuary, developed a plan that impressed Vrba.
In his book Escape from Hell (1963), Wetzler describes how they managed to escape. The camp’s underground resistance organization helped to plan the escape. A locksmith named Otta made a key that would open the door to a small shed that contained clothes for the escapees to wear instead of their pajama-like uniforms. Their new clothes consisted of leather shoes, socks, underpants, shirts, and even suits that had been tailored in Amsterdam. The underground also arranged for them to have vitamins, glucose, and margarine, all of which had been manufactured in Auschwitz. Once they had reached freedom, they would be able to transmit valuable information to the anti-Nazi forces. The information consisted not only of Vrba’s meticulous notes but information compiled by the underground resistance that included diagrams of the crematoria, the number of transports to the camp, the number of people daily gassed, and the names of the SS guards, all of which would be useful information for the Allied forces and postwar tribunals.
Vrba and Wetzler, like impatient caged wild animals, were finally ready to make their getaway to freedom. On Friday, April 7, 1944 (Passover eve), wearing civilian suits, overcoats, and boots, the men crouched and ran to a large woodpile. Around the woodpile, they hurriedly sprinkled Russian tobacco that had been soaked in gasoline. Its presence would prevent dogs from sniffing out their whereabouts. Then through an opening in the woodpile, they crawled inside and hid themselves in a hollow space that the underground had carved out for them.
Though their disappearance was soon discovered, their hideout was not. That same day, SS–Sturmbannführer and camp commander Fritz Hartjenstein was informed that two Jews were missing from the camp. The two escapees, who were scrunched together like moles in an underground bunker, continued to hide in the woodpile. They remained there for three nights and four days. Constant rain poured through spaces in the woodpile, soaking their clothes and both men developed sore throats. To keep from coughing, they tightly tied strips of flannel across their mouths. Finally on the night of April 9, one of the members of the underground named Adamek urinated on the woodpile while whistling a Polish song. It was the all-clear signal. The two men crawled out of the woodpile and unfolded their stiff and aching bodies and stretched their limbs. They had been so scrunched up in their hideout that they had developed muscle spasms. They were weak and undernourished yet determined to succeed in their journey. Their eyes took several seconds to focus clearly, and the men then studied their map. It outlined a route along the Sola River that they could follow to Slovakia, eighty-one miles from the camp. They would have to live off the land, finding nourishment wherever they could.
To avoid capture, they traveled by night, their boots slogging along the muddy banks of the river. They had some bread that the underground had given to them. They drank water from the river and used the same water to wash their faces. On April 13 they came to a farmhouse where a Polish woman offered them food and shelter. As the men ate fresh bread and slurped down spoonfuls of thick potato soup, the farm woman explained that if the Gestapo found out that she had helped Jewish escaped prisoners, she risked immediate death. Nevertheless, she did not turn from the task of helping the two men. They thanked her.
The next night, they again thanked her and departed the farmhouse and continued on their journey. A few miles on, April 16, they were spotted by the Gestapo. They took off running into a densely wooded area where they crouched behind thick bushes. The Gestapo, not having tracking dogs, lost sight of the men. They searched a small area then gave up their hunt. Vrba and Wetzler cautiously continued on their journey. Whenever they heard the distant voices of soldiers or police or the rumble of jeeps and trucks, they concealed themselves behind trees and waited for the noises to fade into the distance.
They were getting closer and closer to the Slovakian border, and just before they reached it on April 21, the two men were again helped by a pair of sympathetic anti-Nazi Poles who gave them food and shelter. Vrba had been trudging along in ill-fitting boots since the onset of the journey. Now his feet were so swollen that the wet leather painfully pressed against his toes and insteps, creating blisters and abrasions. His toenails, sharp as razors, were cutting into surrounding flesh. He could not pull off the shrunken wet boots. One of the Polish men gave him a knife, and Vrba cut away sections of the boots until he was finally able to free his feet. The Pole then gave Vrba a pair of bedroom slippers that were made of a soft cloth and did not scrunch his toes together. Vrba and Wetzler thanked their hosts and continued toward their destination. They were grateful to the Polish peasants who helped them and didn’t turn them over to the police. The two finally made their way into Slovakia where they were put in touch with a Jewish doctor who said he would help them reach the Slovak Jewish Council. He escorted them to a local railroad station and handed them tickets to Zilina, in northwestern Slovakia. Soon after their train pulled into the station in Zilina, and they were met on the station platform by Erwin Steiner, then driven to the Jewish Old People’s Home where the council had its offices.
Vrba was given a small office where he began to sketch the layout of Auschwitz I and II, including the position of the railroad tracks upon which prisoners were transported to the camp. He had many notes on scraps of paper and set about writing a report of all that he knew about Auschwitz. Over a period of three days he wrote and re-wrote the report. He worked closely with Wetzler, and the two men were tireless, often working throughout the night until their room was illuminated by sunrise. Wetzler wrote the first part of the report, together they wrote the second part, and Vrba wrote the third part. Upon discovering that they had failed to include some vital information, they rewrote the entire report. It took six rewrites for them to feel satisfied that they had included all the necessary and pertinent information. As the report was being written, they handed off pages to Oskar Krasniansky, who translated it from Slovak into German. Though the original report in Slovak was lost, the German translation was completed and ready for perusal on April 27, 1944, twenty days after Vrba and Wetzel had crawled into the woodpile.
What happened to the original report written in Slovak remains a mystery. The men had hidden it behind a painting of the Virgin Mary that hung in their apartment in the Jewish Council. They had given a copy of the report to a man named Josef Weiss, who worked at the Bratislava Office for the Prevention of Venereal Disease. He, in turn, provided copies to Jews in Slovakia who had friends and relatives in Hungary. They translated the report into Hungarian, hoping to make it more readily available to large numbers of Jews. They hoped that the warnings implicit in the report might fire up a resistance movement. What resistance there was by Jews was limited. A Romanian Jew named George Mantello, first secretary of the El Salvador mission in Switzerland, publicized the Vrba-Wetzler Report. A German translation of the report was finally published in Geneva in May 1944 by the World Jewish Congress. It received generous coverage in Swiss newspapers, generating furious outrage among the high command of the SS and the Gestapo. To members of the Nazi high command who realized the war was lost, the report could be used as evidence of war crimes. The report, they believed, would result in vicious reprisals and judicial retribution. The effort to keep the Nazi’s crimes hidden from the Allies had failed. According to British historian and professor Michael Fleming, at least 383 articles about Auschwitz appeared in the Swiss press between June 23 and July 11, 1944, all as a result of the Vrba-Wetzler Report. Fleming added that this figure “exceeds the number of articles published about the Holocaust during the entire war in the Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Manchester Guardian and the whole of the British popular press.”8
The report unfortunately had no effect on the lives of the more than 100,000 Hungarian Jews who shortly after their arrival in Auschwitz were gassed and incinerated from May 15 to May 27. Others however, such as the famed handbag designer Judith Leiber, managed to outwit the Nazi roundup of Jews, though more than 12,000 Jews from Budapest were arrested, shipped to Auschwitz, and killed. Not enough Jews were aware of the report and so were not convinced that Auschwitz meant death. They believed their captors who told them that they would be resettled in a forced labor camp, comfortably housed, and decently fed.
The Allies were infuriated by what they learned of the atrocities being committed at Auschwitz. President Roosevelt and King Gustave V of Sweden wrote to the Hungarian head of state Miklos Horty that the deportations of Jews should cease immediately. Roosevelt backed up his words with a threat: if the deportations did not cease, military action would be taken. It was not long afterward that British and American bombers dropped tons of bombs on Nazi offices and barracks in Budapest, killing more than five hundred people. Horty finally used his influence to stop the deportations, much to the anger of Eichmann and Himmler.
On January 27, 1945, the Sixtieth Army of the Ukrainian Front (a division of the Soviet Red Army) liberated Auschwitz. The soldiers of the Sixtieth Army were hardened by brutal combat and many battle-field atrocities, but what they saw at Auschwitz disgusted them. They had never seen the results of such grotesque cruelty. In the main camp, they found 1,200 starving skeletal prisoners who were barely alive. They were figures out of a nightmare. In Birkenau, the soldiers came upon 5,800 more prisoners. They had all been too weak to make the death march trek out of the camp, but the SS departed so quickly that they failed to kill the living evidence of their crimes, though they burned papers that could have been used as evidence of their gruesome crimes. The gas chambers and crematoria remained. The angry Ukrainian soldiers encouraged the inmates to batter their former tor-mentors, and those who had the strength attacked the few remaining guards. They did so like a pride of ravenous lions, not only beating the guards with their fists but also with clubs and the rifle butts that the soldiers offered as weapons. The soldiers shot a few of the guards left alive by the inmates. Organized vigilante vengeance would follow the unconditional surrender of the Reich (see chapter 9).
Vrba, not being a vigilante, had other means of seeking justice. After the war his commitment to the prosecution of Nazis led him to testify, via affidavit, against SS–Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, one of the major organizers of the Holocaust, and SS–Obersturmführer Robert Mulka, who was second in command to SS–Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Höss, the Auschwitz camp commandant. Eichmann, following a trial in Israel for war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity, was executed in 1962. His body was cremated and his ashes were taken by an Israeli naval patrol boat and scattered just outside Israeli territorial waters. Mulka went on trial in Germany and was found guilty of executing 750 inmates of Auschwitz; he was sentenced to fourteen years in prison. In 1968 he was given a compassionate release from prison due to illness and died the following year. In 1985, Vrba testified against Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel.
Like many Jews displaced by war, Vrba settled in Israel. He was hired as a biochemist at the renowned Weizmann Institute in Rehovot. However he didn’t stay in Israel for long. He was angry that a number of Hungarian Jews who had read the Vrba-Wetzler Report and had failed to warn their compatriots of what awaited them at Auschwitz had now achieved high-ranking positions in the Israeli government. Finding their presence unbearable, he left the country. He next settled in England, where he worked for two years in a neuropsychiatric research unit then spent seven years at the Medical Research Council. From 1973 to 1975 he was a research fellow at Harvard Medical School, where he met his second wife, Robin Vrba. In August 1966, he became a naturalized British citizen. Vrba died of cancer, age eighty-one, on March 27, 2006, in a hospital in Vancouver.
Vrba’s close friend and fellow escapee, Wetzler, died in February 1988 in Solvakia, where he had written his version of the escape from Auschwitz: Čo Dante nevidel (1963), later published in English as Escape from Hell: The True Story of the Auschwitz Protocol (2007).
Wetzler and Vrba were honored for writing the first detailed report on Auschwitz to reach the West that the Allies regarded as credible. Martin Gilbert wrote, “The report … telling for the first time the truth about the camp as a place of mass murder, led directly to saving the lives of thousands of Jews—the Jews of Budapest who were about to be deported to their deaths. No other single act in the Second World War saved so many Jews from the fate that Hitler had determined for them.”9