7 April 1944 | Two Slovak Jews Rudolf Vrba (b. 1924, no. 44070) and Alfred Wetzler (b. 1918, no. 29162) escaped from the German Nazi camp Auschwitz

7 April 1944 | Two Slovak Jews Rudolf Vrba (b. 1924, no. 44070) and Alfred Wetzler (b. 1918, no. 29162) escaped from the German Nazi camp Auschwitz.

In the second half of the 1943 Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler decided to escape. During the further preparations Vrba and Wetzler received civilian garments from prisoners employed in the warehouse for clothes of the murdered Jews, while one of the Polish prisoners provided them with information about the escape route. 

To escape, they used a hiding place (a so-called bunker) made by prisoners employed in levelling the area: Mordka Cytryn (see escape from 29 February and 2 March 1944) and Abram (surname unknown). They, in turn, offered a joint escape to three other prisoners, Getzl Abramowicz, Kuba Balaban and Mendel Eisenbach (see escape from 29 February and 2 March 1944). The latter, in turn, showed the bunker to Vrba, asking for help while the fugitives stayed in hiding for three days. 

On 7 April 1944 they both hid in the previously prepared bunker. After three days, when the SS men stopped the searching action, they came out of hideout and, encircling the camp from the west, headed south in the direction of Slovakia.

 On 25 April after a dozen days of marching, thanks to the assistance of the Poles and Jews encountered on their way, they got as far as Žilina, where they secretly met the representatives of the Jewish Council, presenting them the report about Auschwitz. 

The report withthe information about the camp and the extermination of Jews conducted from April 1942 until April 1944, was written down and then, in the form of an exhaustive report, sent via secter channels to the West. In mid 1944 the report was disclosed through the Allied media. 

The information influenced the actions of the governments of the Allied and neutral states, which began to exert pressure on Hungarian authorities to discontinue further deportations of Jews to Auschwitz.

 Regent Miklós Horthy gave in and on 6 July 1944 ordered to stop the deportations. In November 1944 the report of R. Vrba and A. Wetzler was incorporated into the brochure published in Washington and entitled “German Extermination Camps—Auschwitz and Birkenau”. 

In the brochure there were also two reports of other camp escapees: Jews Arnošt Rosin and Czesław Mordowicz as well as a Pole Jerzy Tabeau (as “the report of a Polish major”).With the report printed in the press, the message contributed to the spreading of the knowledge about the crimes committed in Asuchwitz in the Western world. 

After the breakout Alfred Wetzler and Rudolf Vrba remained in Slovakia, where they joined partisan units  to fight until the end of the war.