The denunciations of Wrpa and Wetzler led to the rescue of the 200,000 Jews of Budapest, who were to be deported to Auschwitz on July 10, 1944.

The genocide of the Jews of Europe was covered by the Nazis with secrecy and deceit. The orders spoke of “relocation”, giving the evacuees the illusion that they would start a new life, taking children’s toys and even pots with them. After a nightmarish journey, about 1,000 people, like animals crammed into the train at the sight of the “Work for free” sign, thought that their suffering was over. But immediately they saw death, which lurked everywhere, from typhus, hunger, bullets, clubs or from poisonous gases Zyklon B.

Auschwitz-Birkenau, being a death machine, also became a Third Reich enrichment machine. Only from the gold teeth of the victims in the two years 1942-1944, six tons of gold were mined, and in 1942, from all German concentration camps in Poland, the value of confiscated valuables was estimated at 2 billion dollars in 2020 prices.

The book describes how two young prisoners put their audacious escape plan into action by hiding in a makeshift hideout for three days and nights (April 7–10) while the SS searched for the fugitives. Thanks to resourcefulness and luck, they crossed swamps, mountains and rivers in 10 days to Slovakia, where they arrived on April 21. Their goal was to immediately sound the alarm by writing a detailed 32-page account of the brutality they faced, describing through plans and cold facts the systematic extermination between April 1942 and April 1944 of 1.7 million Jews, from of which 45,000 are from Hellas. . The goal was to attract international attention and mobilize allied governments and Jewish organizations to stop the massacre.

Materials from their report were published two months later, on June 24, first in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, and then in other Swiss newspapers, and on July 3 in the New York Times. In addition to the Jewish organizations, the Pope, Roosevelt and Churchill were also in the know, but without the last two military actions to stop the evil. Aerial bombardments of the railroad tracks leading to Auschwitz were ruled out as impractical, as was the bombing of the concentration camp due to fear that many Jews would be killed by Allied fire. Thus, salvation from heaven never came to mortals. In the end, however, the 200,000 Jews of Budapest, who were due to be deported to Auschwitz on July 10, were rescued after Allied pressure on Hungarian regent Miklós Horthy, after 434,000 Jews from the Hungarian village had already been sent to a concentration camp. crematoria.

Unlike Wetzler, who remained in Bratislava and died “bitter and forgotten”, Vrba continued his escapes. An itinerant biochemist researcher, he fled Czechoslovakia in the 1950s, first to Israel and then to England, where he became an assistant professor of medicine in Vancouver, Canada, where he died in 2006. leading Jewish organizations in Hungary and Slovakia “because they sold their souls to the devil” during the war. In between, he testified as a witness in several trials of Nazis and Holocaust deniers and gave a lengthy interview for Claude Lanzmann’s famous documentary The Shoah.

For the author, the rest of the world, although aware of the “Final Solution”, was inactive due to skepticism or prejudice. Vrba did not consider himself a hero, because while his actions saved 200,000 lives, he failed to save many others (“saving one life is tantamount to saving the whole world”). The shadow of Auschwitz may have haunted him everywhere, but he lived a full life and helped the world and history to know the truth about the Holocaust.

* Mr. Achilleas Paparsenos was the head of the Greek press office in Geneva.