Review
07.08.2013

A REMARKABLE AND INSPIRING STORY

Alfred Wetzler: Escape from Hell: The True Story of the Auschwitz Protocol

Alfred Wetzler

Escape from Hell: The True Story of the Auschwitz Protocol

Berghahn Books, New York, Oxford, 2007

This book comes at an important point in history, for Slovakia and the world. The Holocaust and its literature are topics that still make headlines. Just a few months ago, Holocaust deniers held a conference in Iran to “prove” that many of the facts about the Holocaust were exaggerated. And, in Slovakia, the debate is still raging over the legacy of Father Jozef Tiso, the priest who led the country when it was a Nazi puppet state, and just how complicit his regime was in the deportation of Slovakia’s Jews.

“Escape from Hell” was written by one of those Jews, Alfred Wetzler, who, along with his companion, Walter Rosenberg, was the first person to escape from Auschwitz. The book was first published in Slovak in 1964 – under Wetzler’s pen name, Jozef Lanik – and again in 1989. This is the first edition in English. The story is written in a third person voice so that Wetzler and Rosenberg (represented as Karol and Val in the story) could incorporate events that occurred to others. Wetzler and Rosenberg were clerks in Auschwitz, which gave them freedom of movement around the camp and access to important evidence – a ground plan, details of the gas chambers and crematoriums, and, most damningly, a label from a canister of Zyklon poison gas. After their escape in 1944, after more than two years as prisoners in Auschwitz, they compiled this evidence and their testimony into a report known as the Auschwitz Protocol and released in to the world, eventually saving the lives of over 100,000 Hungarian Jews.

But the protocol was initially met with disbelief from western governments and humanitarian organizations. In one instance after their escape, the men report this exchange with a Swiss journalist and a lawyer:

When [Val] speaks of the liquidation of families, of men driven to slave labour, and of their women and children, who were murdered, the Swiss stops chewing his gum for a moment and asks:

‘Women too?’

‘And children,’ Val answers wearily.

‘You mentioned hunger in Majdanek [death camp],’ says the lawyer. ‘Was that hunger there from the start or did it only begin later?’

 

After escaping from Auschwitz, Wetzler and Rosenberg made their way on foot to Slovakia, hiding in bushes during the day and walking only at night. They eventually reached Žilina, where friends supplied them with Aryan identity papers.

Wetzler’s assumed name was Jozef Lanik, an identity he also used while a member of the Slovak resistance movement. Rosenberg’s was Rudolf Vrba, which he kept for the rest of his life.

The book was translated by Ewald Osers, a multilingual Czech translator who has translated over 150 books.

 

(...)

 

There are many times when the text is downright poetic – even transcendent – perhaps not so surprising when one considers that Osers was credited by Nobel Prize-winning poet Jaroslav Seifert with helping him win the prize: Bread…

            Every evening you receive it with trembling hands. You take it eagerly and make sure that there is no bit of crust missing from your piece. Bread is all-powerful; bread keeps the dying little flame of life inside you burning. You eat ten or twenty grammes of bread, the little flame flickers more strongly inside you, your eyes get a little clearer and, for a while at least, a little more warmth flows through your veins. You pick up a crumb of bread from a puddle or from dung, unhesitatingly you’ll pull it out from a dead man’s pocket. You pull it out boldly and without a twinge of conscience because you know full well that he would do the same. He knew the value of bread and long ago forgave you your action in advance.

            Such text powerfully conveys Wetzler’s harrowing experience, and shows the courage it took to survive the horrors of Auschwitz and bring it to the world’s attention.

            Overall, Wetzler’s is an important story, simply and movingly told.

            As distinguished British historian Martin Gilbert writes in the book’s Foreword: “Wetzler [was] a central figure in one of the most remarkable acts of saving lives in the Second World War. The publication of his book enables his remarkable and inspiring story to become known in full for the first time, and is a tribute to his memory.”

And Pavol Mešťan, director of the Museum of Jewish Culture in Slovakia, told The Slovak Spectator weekly newspaper: “This type of literature usually tends to suffer from sentimentality or naturalism. Wetzler's book suffers from neither. It should be included in the curricula of all secondary schools in Slovakia.”

This reviewer strongly agrees.