The Escape Artist – how an Auschwitz breakout alerted the world

[DGUtley]

The gripping and heroic story of Rudolf Vrba, who escaped the death camp in order to tell the world about its horrors

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It was around September 1942, the month when he turned 18, that Rudolf Vrba came to a momentous decision. He had been imprisoned in Auschwitz since June and was working on the ramp where most new arrivals were sent directly to their deaths. SS men would sometimes reassure them or even joke with them right up to the doors of the gas chambers. What Vrba realised, writes Jonathan Freedland, is that streamlined mass murder depended on “one cardinal principle: that the people who came to Auschwitz did not know where they were going or for what purpose”, since “it’s much easier to slaughter lambs than it is to hunt deer”. It would be his mission to “escape and sound the alarm”.


While preparing to break out, Vrba, a highly numerate man who later became an organic chemist, systematically 'collect[ed] the data of industrialised murder' It took until 10 April 1944, but eventually Vrba and fellow prisoner Alfred Wetzler “achieved what no Jew had ever done before: they had broken out of Auschwitz”. They had lain immobile for three days amid a pile of planks in a lumber yard, after scattering cheap Russian tobacco soaked in petrol all around to put off the tracker dogs. They relied on strict Nazi routine: in cases of escape, the camp was put on full alert for precisely 72 hours before security in the outer areas was relaxed, on the assumption that the prisoners must have got away.


All this meant that the Vrba-Wetzler report, completed at the end of April 1944,provided a far more detailed picture of the Holocaust than the rumours and more fragmentary accounts that had emerged before. Even after escaping from the camp, the two men had many dangerous encounters and strokes of luck as they threaded their way back to their native Slovakia, relying only on a brief glimpse of a children’s atlas Vrba had come across in “Kanada”. There was a warrant out for their arrest and they were surrounded by often hostile Polish peasants, but they had finally managed to get their story out to the world.


World leaders could no longer ignore the Holocaust.

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https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...rted-the-world

[RMNIXON]

Getting out of that Death Camp was hard enough. Then they had to escape from German occupied territory under Police State conditions.

[Mister D]

There was virtually nothing "the world" could do about the Holocaust and the "rumors" were ignored because most of the "rumors" from the First World War were later revealed to be complete fabrications. The public had a healthy skepticism.

[Common]

Once in a while Extraordinary people show us what fortitude, intelligence and courage can do.

[DGUtley]

There was virtually nothing "the world" could do about the Holocaust and the "rumors" were ignored because most of the "rumors" from the First World War were later revealed to be complete fabrications. The public had a healthy skepticism.

IIRC, the Jewish leaders in the US wanted the camps bombed.