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Friday June 29, 2007 JEWISH TELEGRAPH 17
| NEWS
AUSCHWITZ HEROISM IS FINALLY TOLD IN ENGLISH AFTER 44 YEARS
Alfréd’s amazing escape
saved over 120,000 Jews
COMPETITION
Win four pairs of tickets
to Israel on Thomsonfly
Peter Varnai meets Eta Wetzler at her home in Bratislava in 2004 in front of a portrait
of Alfréd Wetzler
THE amazing story of the first
two people to escape from
Auschwitz has been published
in English 44 years after it
was written.
BY ROBERT CLAYTON
men created a dossier, known as the
‘Auschwitz Protocol’.
This was eventually telegrammed
directly to Winston Churchill and
led to the bombing of several Nazi
buildings in Hungary, killing officials instrumental in the deportation of Jews to Auschwitz.
Wetzler wrote the account of his
time in Auschwitz and the pair’s
brave escape in 1963, but it has only
just been translated into English for
the first time.
Wetzler, who wrote under the alias
Jozef Lánik, died in Slovakia in
1988.
Peter Varnai, who edited Escape
from Hell, became involved in the
translation of Wetzler’s account
after learning of a possible connection between Wetzler’s family and
his own.
He said: “I knew that my father
and grandfather chan ged their
name from Wetzler to Varnai about
40 years ago in Hungary.
“I started to research the name
Wetzler and discovered that a certain Alfréd Wetzler is an escapee of
Auschwitz.
“I was amazed to discover that
Eta Wetzler still lived in Bratislava
and I immediately decided to get in
touch with her. We met in 2004 and
came to the conclusion that it is
most likely we are of the same family.
“It was then that I decided to take
on this personal project and get
Alfréd’s book published in English.
“I felt that Alfréd Wetzler
deserved due recognition and his
achievement should set an example
of moral courage and determination
for generations to come. Without
their alarming report in April 1944
the Jews of Budapest — and hence
my parents — would not have survived.”
Escape from Hell — The True Story
of the Auschwitz Protocol (Berghahn
Books) tells the remarkable firsthand account of how Alfréd Wetzler
and his friend Rudolf Vrba managed
to escape the concentration camp —
and helped save the lives of 120,000
inmates.
Slovakians Wetzler, 24, and Vrba,
18, were arrested by the Nazis in 1942
and sent to the death camp for slave
labour.
They spent two years working and
witnessin g the atrocities of the
camp, at the same time collecting
information about every aspect of
the killing process and committing
the facts to memory.
In 1944, as the Nazis prepared to
incarcerate an influx of Hungarian
Jews, the camp was extended
beyond its inner perimeter by
inmates.
While working on the extension,
the inmates prepared a secret hideout made up of wooden boards and
before the evening roll-call of April
7, Vrba and Wetzler were hidden by
their colleagues.
The inmates spread petrol and
tobacco around the hiding area to
prevent the guard dogs from sniffing
out and discovering the two hidden
men.
At roll-call that night, it became
app arent that the two men were
missing and a three-day search for
them began.
After the third night, still undiscovered in their hideout, the guards
assumed the men had managed to
get away and the cordon of SS
guards around the camp was withdrawn.
Wetzler and Vrba then managed to
slip past the watchtowers
and
headed
south
“Wetzler is a master at
towards the mountains,
evokin g the universe of
all the time avoidin g
Auschwitz,especially his and
any contact with the
Vrba’s harrowing flight to
new German settlers in
Slovakia.The day-by-day
the passing villages.
account of the tremendous
On the morning of Fridifficulties the pair faced
day, April 21, they
after the Nazis had called
crossed into Slovakia.
off their search of the camp
Havin g smuggled out
and its surroundings is both
with them evidence of the
riveting and heart wrenchcamp’s horror, including,” Dr Robert Rozett,
in g construction
director of
details of the gas
Yad Vashem
chambers and a
Libraries,
label from a canwrites in
ister of Zyklon
the book’s
gas, the heroic
foreword.
HERO: Alfréd Wetzler
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