Jews from Holland, the majority German emigrants. The rest of the convoy, about 2,500 persons, gassed. Rosenberg, who changed his name to Rudolf Vrba, with his then wife Gerta and daughter Helena in 1953. Photograph: courtesy of Caroline Hilton

Reverend József Éliás, head of the Good Shepherd Mission in Hungary, said he received the report from Géza Soós, a member of the Hungarian Independence Movement, a resistance group. [144] Yehuda Bauer believes that Kastner or Ottó Komoly, leader of the Aid and Rescue Committee, gave Soós the report. [145] Éliás's secretary, Mária Székely, translated it into Hungarian and prepared six copies, which made their way to Hungarian and church officials, including Miklós Horthy's daughter-in-law, Countess Ilona Edelsheim-Gyulai. [146] Braham writes that this distribution occurred before 15 May. [147] Part of a series of articles on The tenor of the questioning irritated Walter. He could see that these men were interested in what they were hearing, that they were deeply engaged in it, but they were hardly brimming with human sympathy. They were officials, bureaucrats, in the business of seeking precision rather than showing compassion. Of course,Walter affected not to care, but it needled him all the same. Then they headed west, towards the little birch wood that gave Birkenau its name. They advanced not on foot, but on their stomachs, inching along, commando style. They did not get up until they had reached the trees, the same small forest that held the pits that had once burned corpses day and night.

Escapees from Auschwitz

On 26 June the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that 100,000 Hungarian Jews had been executed in gas chambers in Auschwitz. The BBC repeated this on the same day but omitted the name of the camp. [160] The following day, as a result of the information from Walter Garrett, the Manchester Guardian published two articles. The first said that Polish Jews were being gassed in Auschwitz and the second: "Information that the Germans systematically exterminating Hungarian Jews has lately become more substantial." The report mentioned the arrival "of many thousands of Jews... at the concentration camp at Oswiecim". [161] On 28 June the newspaper reported that 100,000 Hungarian Jews had been deported to Poland and gassed, but without mentioning Auschwitz. [162] The unfortunate victims are brought into hall (b) where they are told to undress. To complete the fiction that they are going to bathe, each person receives a towel and a small piece of soap issued by two men clad in white coats .

Vrba moved to Canada in 1967, where he worked for the Medical Research Council of Canada from 1967 to 1973, [191] becoming a Canadian citizen in 1972. From 1973 to 1975 he was a research fellow at Harvard Medical School, where he met his second wife, Robin Vrba, [209] originally from Fall River, Massachusetts. [210] They married in 1975 and returned to Vancouver, where she became a real-estate agent and he an associate professor of pharmacology at the University of British Columbia. He worked there until the early 1990s, publishing over 50 research papers on brain chemistry, diabetes, and cancer. [209]The Slovak Jewish leaders had arranged a safe house for them in the mountains, some fifty-five miles east of Žilina, in the town of Liptovský Svätý Mikuláš. Walter and Fred were given money to live on and, far more precious, false papers certifying them as pure Aryans of at least three generations standing. That status would give them complete freedom of movement around Slovakia. If they were on a train or in a restaurant that was raided by the police, there would be nothing to fear: these bogus documents were flawless. Several appeals were made to Horthy, including by the Spanish, Swiss and Turkish governments, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Gustaf V of Sweden, the International Committee of the Red Cross and, on 25 June 1944, Pope Pius XII. [174] The Pope's telegram did not mention Jews: "We are being beseeched in various quarters to do everything in our power that, in this noble and chivalrous nation, the sufferings, already so heavy, endured by a large number of unfortunate people, because of their nationality or race, may not be extended and aggravated." [139] The Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer argued that while the Council knew that being sent to Poland meant severe danger for Jews, at that stage they did not know about the Final Solution [258] It is true, Bauer wrote, that Jewish Council members, under Karol Hochberg, head of the council's "department for special tasks", had worked with the SS, offering secretarial and technical help to draw up lists of Jews to be deported (lists supplied by the Slovak government). But other members of the Jewish Council warned Jews to flee and later formed a resistance, the Working Group, which in December 1943 took over the Jewish Council, with Oskar Neumann (the lawyer who helped to organize the Vrba–Wetzler report) as its leader. [260] Vrba did not accept Bauer's distinctions. [259] Responses [ edit ] Yehuda Bauer

Faced daily with the threat of dying. Rudi had to be strong and his will to survive beyond any means. In his struggle all he could think of was to escape and warn others. He calculated that if the perscuted Jews rose and faught that the senseless murders would stop. Risking his own life, Rudi and his friend Wetzler. A struggle to get to safety both Vrba and Wetzler gave the accounts and numbers of those being murdered in cold blood in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Gerta, then the only person still alive who had known Vrba before Auschwitz, told Freedland: “I trust you”. She died not long after their last phone conversation, leaving him with an extraordinary treasure trove of letters and family photographs, a powerful and compelling start for this book. It concluded with a list, billed as a ‘Careful estimate of the number of Jews gassed in Birkenau between April 1942 and (according to countries of origin)’: And yet too few heeded the warning that Vrba had risked everything to deliver. Though Vrba helped save two hundred thousand Jewish lives, he never stopped believing it could have been so many more.There was only one exception to that rule. If an inmate was missing, presumed to have attempted an escape, the SS kept up the outer ring of armed sentry posts for 72 hours as they searched. After that, they would conclude that the escapee, or escapees, had got away: from then on, it would be the responsibility of the Gestapo to scour the wider region and find them. If a prisoner could somehow hide in the outer area, during those three days and nights after the alarm had been sounded – as Walter and Fred were doing now – then he would emerge on the fourth night into an outer camp that was unguarded. He could escape. The perimeter fence was not like the ones they had known from the inner camp. It did not have lights attached to each post; the wire was not electrified. Even so, the pair were taking no chances. They had fashioned in advance something that could function as a kind of clothes peg, protecting their hands as, working from the bottom, they lifted the wire above the ground. That made an opening big enough for them to crawl through. Rudolf Vrba beschrijft hoe hij opgepakt werd, hoe het transport verliep, zijn vele baantjes in Auschwitz, de epidemieën in het kamp, de mishandelingen, de dood die overal aanwezig was en het einde van miljoenen mensenlevens in de gaskamers en crematoria. Another interesting note (and again, maybe because I've read countless memoirs and non-fiction about the Holocaust, I'm scrutinizing more than I should). Vrba mentions Hess and Himmler multiple times, but only Josef Mengele once. I find this odd, as Mengele was ultimately responsible for the decision about who died and who lived.