July 5


Escape from Auschwitz: told for first time in English

Alfred Wetzler's daring flight from Nazi death camp helped to save more
than 120,000 Hungarian Jews from the gas chambers



A dramatic first-hand account of how a prisoner managed to escape from
Nazi Germany's most notorious death camp and help save more than 120,000
Jews from slaughter is to be told for the first time to an
English-speaking audience.

Alfred Wetzler, a Slovak Jew, was one of the tiny number of people to
escape from Auschwitz-Birkenau, Europe's heart of darkness during the
Second World War, where an estimated 1.1 million Jews arrived of whom
scarcely 7,000 survived the onslaught of the Nazis.

Wetzler and his companion Rudolf Vrba, also a Slovak Jew, were arrested by
the Nazis in 1942 in Slovakia and sent to the death camp for slave labour.
Wetzler was 24 and Vrba was just 18. Wetzler spent two years in the camp,
witnessing some of the worst atrocities known to man. It was this
experience that founded the basis for the memoirs he would later write:
"It is incredible how tough human life can be, how quickly a person, even
with a broken arm, a dislocated foot, a broken head and bitten by dogs,
will do what is asked of him when over him hangs the cudgel waved by the
goodwill of the Reich."

It was in the spring of 1944, with the assistance of other prisoners, that
the pair managed to escape, initially by hiding under a huge woodpile for
four days in the corner of the camp until the search for them was called
off. The duo then escaped through a hole under a fence at nightfall. But
it was what they did afterwards that was truly heroic. The two men had
also smuggled out damning evidence - a ground plan of the camp,
construction details of the gas chambers, crematoriums and, most
convincingly, a label from a canister of Zyklon gas.

The dossier, later known as the Auschwitz Protocol, was telegrammed to
Churchill when the pair finally made it back to Slovakia. The evidence
eventually led to the bombing of several government buildings in Hungary,
killing Nazi officials who were instrumental in the railway deportations
of Jews to Auschwitz. The deportations halted, saving up to 120,000
Hungarian Jews.

The historian Sir Martin Gilbert said: "Alfred Wetzler was a true hero.
His escape from Auschwitz, and the report he helped compile, 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."

The accounts of Wetzler's time at Auschwitz and his daring escape has been
made available this week, 19 years after his death, in a book entitled
Escape From Hell: The True Story of the Auschwitz Protocol. Wetzler
originally wrote the account in 1963, under the pseudonym Jozef Lnik,
which he used in the Slovak resistance movement.

It has taken until now for the work to be translated into English. Peter
Varnai, a scientist at Cambridge University has lobbied for the book to be
translated and published for English audiences. He said yesterday: "I
sincerely believe this story should set an example of high moral courage
for new generations."

Sir Martin concurred: "Although Alfred Wetzler did not know it, his
courageous escape proved a life-saving one for a whole community. Wetzler
had been a central figure in one of the most remarkable acts of saving
lives in the Second World War."

(source: The Independent)