The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World

Freedland begins to detail the Auschwitz Report’s journey. Krasňanský wanted to warn the Hungarian Jewish people. As it was, the Nazis had begun deporting thousands in cattle trucks.

The anti-Nazi resistance movement in Hungary received a copy of the report. Hungary’s then regent had made antisemitism a core part of his government since the end of WWI and was a Nazi collaborator. For this reason, the resistance leaders did not turn to government leaders for help. Instead, they turned to religious leaders. The resistance focused on several clerics whom they believed still had a conscience.

First, the resistance handed the Auschwitz Report to Dr. Géza Soós, a Calvinist activist and employee within Hungary’s Foreign Ministry. Soós understood the report’s significance. He shared the report with a pastor friend named József Éliás. Soós asked Éliás to translate the report from German into Hungarian and then make six typed copies. Éliás then needed to get the copies to the five most senior figures in Hungarian Christianity (Soós kept the sixth copy for himself). Both Soós and Éliás hoped that these church leaders might then exert pressure on the Hungarian government to avoid the Hungarian Jewish people’s doomed fate.

Éliás enlisted a co-worker, Mária Székely, as the typist. Székely was fluent in several languages. After reading the report once, she knew it was her duty to translate it from German to Hungarian. To avoid detection, Székely worked on the report at her home rather than in the office. German soldiers almost discovered the report twice. Fortunately, Székely completed the translation and created all six copies. The resistance secretly delivered the reports to the church leaders, including the Catholic cardinal Archbishop Jusztinián Serédi. A group of resistance leaders met with Serédi. The Protestant leadership was debating denying Communion to anyone who helped the Germans round up Jewish people or capture resistance members. The group asked Serédi to make a similar edict. Serédi declined. He told the men that “his hands were tied” since the pope refused to confront Hitler (214). Monsignor Mario Martilotti, a representative of the Vatican, also asked to meet with the authors of the Auschwitz Report. Rudi and Mordowicz met Martilotti at his monastery. Martilotti seemed unmoved by their testimony. He only fainted after Mordowicz revealed that the Nazis also murdered Catholic priests. Martilotti promised to sound the alarm, yet his promise went unfulfilled. The Hungarian government continued to deport thousands of Hungarian Jewish people to Auschwitz. The Nazis murdered most of them upon arrival.

While resistance members tried to get the men of God to act, the Nazis continued their deportation of Hungarian Jewish people. They initially focused on the provinces; however, the resistance heard that the Nazis set their sights on Budapest.

The Jewish prisoners were thrilled that two of their people had escaped Auschwitz. However, Walter and Fred’s escape enraged SS officers. The SS officers brutally retaliated against all Jewish registrars, including Czeslaw Mordowicz and associates of the escapees, such as Arnošt Rosin, who was a fellow Slovak Jew and elder at an earlier block where Wetzler lived. The Nazis reassigned Mordowicz and Rosin to hard labor duties.

While working the gravel pit together, Mordowicz and Rosin discovered a hideout. They attempted to pull off an escape. However, their hideout was structurally unsound. Fearing suffocation, the two men emerged from their hideout after 36 hours and promptly fainted. When they awoke, they realized SS officers did not know they were missing. The arrival of two transports carrying Hungarian Jewish people distracted the SS officers, enabling Mordowicz and Rosin to escape the camp and flee to Slovakia. They arrived in Slovakia on June 6, 1944, or D-Day.

After hearing about D-Day, the two men celebrated at a pub, where officials promptly arrested them for looking suspicious. Several Jewish community activists visited the men in jail, slipping them money. Authorities charged Mordowicz and Rosin with the crime of smuggling rather than charging them as Auschwitz escapees. The police transferred the men to another town, which happened to be where Rudi and Fred were hiding. Rudi greeted the men at the train station.

After spending several days in jail, Mordowicz and Rosin gave their testimonies to Krasňanský. Both men emphasized that the Nazis had dramatically increased mass murder with the completion of the railway line to the gas chambers. They estimated that around 14,000-15,000 Hungarian Jewish people arrived daily. SS officers sent 90% of these arrivals to the gas chambers. From these testimonies, Krasňanský produced a seven-page addendum to the Auschwitz Report. This addendum focused on the weeks that separated the first escape from the second.

To ensure the Auschwitz Report reached the right people, Krasňanský sent it to contacts with government connections in London, Istanbul, and Geneva. Not all copies made it to the right people, but a five-page summary of the report eventually made it into the hands of George Mantello. Mantello was once a Romanian businessman but was now the secretary of the consulate of El Salvador in Geneva. After reading the report, he was determined to rescue Jewish people from the Nazis. Some of this determination was personal. Some 200 members of his extended family had been deported in Hungary. He now knew his family members’ fates.

Mantello gave a copy of the abridged version of the report to Walter Garrett, a British journalist working in Zurich, on June 22, 1944. This version came to be known as the Vrba-Wetzler Report. Garrett distilled the report into four press releases designed for easy public consumption. He dispatched these to London via telegram and put printed copies in mailboxes of the city’s newspapers. He was the first to break the news of mass extermination at Auschwitz to the public on June 24, 1944—over two months after Walter and Fred’s escape. Over the next several weeks, the Swiss press published 383 articles about Auschwitz. People finally started protesting in the streets.

Garrett shared the report with Allen Dulles, a senior US intelligence official. Dulles expressed shock over the contents, stating, “We must intervene immediately” (227). He also promised to send the report immediately to Washington. According to Freedland, however, Dulles already received a copy of the report the week prior from Elizabeth Wiskemann, a British diplomat. At the time, Wiskemann suggested that Dulles wire the report to Washington since she had wired it to London. Dulles did not follow her request. Instead, he sent the report to Roswell McClelland, a local Swiss representative to the newly created War Refugee Board, noting it “seem[ed] more in [her] line” (229). McClelland did not send the report to Washington until four months later. John Pehle, McClelland’s boss, tried to publish the report. The head of the Office of War Information refused to publish it, believing it was not credible.

US officials did not publish the full Auschwitz Report until November 1944, seven months after Rudi and Fred first gave their testimony to Krasňanský. Reports reached the hands of both US President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, yet neither supported military action against Auschwitz.

Krasňanský agreed with Rudi. They needed to warn the Hungarian Jewish people about Auschwitz. For this reason, Krasňanský personally handed the report to Rezscő Kasztner, the de facto leader of the Hungarian Jewry, on April 28, 1944. Kasztner presented the report to the Jewish council the next day. The men did nothing with the information. Some even questioned its credibility. Others feared arrest by the country’s Nazi overlords.

Kasztner decided against releasing the report to the Jewish public in part due to the controversial deal he made with Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann. Kasztner agreed to stay silent about the report in exchange for 1,700 export permits for Hungarian Jews. Most of these permits went to members of the Hungarian Jewish leadership group and Kasztner’s family. Kasztner and his leadership group also paid the Nazis with cash and valuables totaling nearly $1.7 million. Kasztner not only kept the report hidden but also perpetuated the Nazis’ web of lies. He told his people that the deported Jews were safe. Deportation of Hungarian Jewish people continued under his leadership. Freedland reiterates that the Nazis murdered the majority.

All four escapees grew frustrated that their testimonies did not reach the Hungarian Jewish people. They decided to clandestinely publish copies of the report and smuggle them to Hungary. The operation’s base was the Office for Prevention of Venereal Diseases in Bratislava. Rudi’s childhood friend, Josef Weiss, worked at the office. He managed to evade deportation. The work’s sensitive nature protected it from the police.

The four escapees remained determined to warn the 200,000 Jewish people in Budapest. Unbeknownst to the escapees at the time, the report made it into the hands of Miklós Horthy, a regent of Hungary, via his daughter-in-law Countess Ilona Edelsheim Gyulai. A journalist snuck the countess a copy of the report. She presented the report to her father-in-law out of a combination of shame, compassion, and self-preservation. Horthy accepted the report but did not stop the deportations until he received missives from the pope and international leaders. There was also mounting public pressure due to press coverage about Auschwitz coming out of Switzerland. Horthy finally ceased the deportation of the Jewish people in Budapest, which enraged Eichmann. Freedland emphasizes that Horthy’s “prime motivation was self-preservation and the assertion of his own authority, rather than the saving of Jews” (247).