I Escaped from Auschwitz

If you’ve been following my posts, you might be wondering what in the world was I thinking when I began to read a book about Auschwitz. The answer is, I don’t know. But I felt compelled to read it. As I progressed in my reading, it became clear that the author had something important to tell me. My reaction to the book was complex: I was both horrified and inspired. I’d never read a holocaust story quite like it. And it was well worth the read.

This remarkable tale was told by Rudolf Vrba. In 1942, he left his town, Trnava, Slovakia. As a teenager, he had become aware of the restrictions that were growing against Jews, and finally decided when deportation laws were enacted, it was time to leave. In spite of the dangers, a number of people helped him escape along the way. But he was captured by the Hungarians, viciously beaten, and then put into a transit camp. From the moment he arrived in that camp, he was obsessed with figuring out how to escape. On the train to Auschwitz, when people were told they were being sent to a resettlement camp, a boy cried out:

‘Anyone who thinks there is a resettlement area at the end of this line is a fool. We’re all going to die!” I did not believe the last part of his statement. I had no intention of dying. The first part, however seemed reasonable enough, for the lies were falling fast. I decided I would not let my rucksack off my back, let alone out of my sight. I made up my mind, indeed, that from that moment on, I would trust nobody.

His determination to live, as well as not to trust anyone, were likely key to his survival.

Once he arrived in Auschwitz, he knew he would have to rely on his wits to stay alive. He learned when to lay low, when to ingratiate himself to the Nazis, and when to take advantage of situations that would keep him alive.

His determination to escape never wavered, and his intention was to alert key governmental figures of the mass extermination that was taking place, with the hope of saving many lives.

As the months passed, Vrba encountered a man with whom he developed a trusting relationship, who knew how to plan an escape. He knew this was his opportunity to escape Auschwitz. The plan was risky, and could easily fail, but he had to take the chance. He also had learned that there was going to be a massive extermination of Jews as they watched changes that were being made in Auschwitz/Birkenau:

The Nazis, we estimated, were preparing to kill at least a million people. For a while, we wondered in which country they would find so many Jews left, but gradually, as the clues filtered through to us, we realized who were destined to break all records. It was the Hungarians, whom most of us had thought were reasonably safe.

The Nazis knew that to be successful, their plans needed to remain secret:

Secrecy was essential for the success of this mass murder program. I escaped from Auschwitz, together with my fellow prisoner Alfred Wetzler, on April 7, 1944, with the intention of alerting the Jewish Council in Hungary about the impending and imminent danger facing the Jews in Hungary.

Vrba and his fellow prisoner were met with skepticism when they first told their stories and shared their warnings, but they were heavily interrogated by the Jewish Council and others. They were then asked to document their story and wrote what became the Vrba-Wetzler Report, and many Jewish leaders recognized its veracity. Tragically, however, this information was not transmitted to the Jews in Hungary:

I only learned after the war that more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews were brought to Auschwitz after our escape and died a terrible death there up to mid-July 1944 without ever having been warned by the Hungarian Jewish Council about the true nature of ‘resettlement.’

As a result, 400,000 people were betrayed by the leading Jews in Hungary.

Representatives of all major religious denominations would have known what was happening (they received copies of the Report) but didn’t alert the Jews.

2,000 rich and well-connected Jews were saved by withholding the information, and were given safe passage to Switzerland.

Other Jews in Hungary who would have read the Report about the extermination plans promised to keep the information secret to save their own lives.

* * * *

In my opening paragraph, I wrote about my being horrified and inspired by this story. The horrors were not just the atrocities committed in Auschwitz but the willingness of so many people to let 400,000 Hungarian Jews die there.

And the inspiration came from Vrba’s relentless determination to escape the camp and let the world know what was happening. When Jews look at their past, they often focus on the times they didn’t fight back or take action; the Holocaust is the classic and most devastating example. We saw that attitude transform when the State of Israel was formed.

In these days of war and death and challenges to Jews and Israelis, we can look to Rudolf Vrba for inspiration:

‘I wrote this book with gratitude to all those who contributed to the defeat of Nazism. I only hope that I, too, have contributed to this end to the best of my knowledge and abilities and that this book will help to open the eyes of many to prevent the bestial forces, which we thought we had broken, from ever returning.’

The bestial forces persist, but we will still fight back.