(Jewish Group) The man who escaped from Auschwitz so he could warn Jews of what awaited them there

[Behind the Aegis]

The new book by Guardian and JC columnist Jonathan Freedland tells an entirely true story. But the beginning brings to mind Freedland’s alternate life as a thriller writer, lending a wholly justifiable excitement to the account of a teenager’s daring escape from Auschwitz and his attempts to warn the world of what was happening to the Jews.

It tells the little-remembered story of Rudolf Vrba, the Slovakian teenager, who succeeded in breaking out of Auschwitz in 1944.

Together with his companion escapee Fred Wetzler, with whom he wrote a forensically detailed account of the life of the camp, Vrba was desperate to let the world know of the horrors being perpetrated inside Auschwitz by the Nazi regime, and even more desperate to save any more Jews from going to their deaths.

But, as Freedland painstakingly explains, Vrba was only partly successful. In a series of scarcely credible delays, what became known as the Vrba-Wetzler report was sometimes not taken seriously enough, and, all too often, not believed at all.

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