On Sunday, 75 years passed since two Slovak Jews, Rudolf Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler, fled from the Auschwitz concentration camp. On this occasion, 93-year-old Gerda Vrbová, wife of Rudolf Vrba, received a Slovak passport at the Slovak Embassy in London.
After their escape, Vrba and Wetzler wrote a 32-page report about what was happening in the death camp, located in southern Poland. As the Aktuality.sk website wrote, according to historians, they thus helped save the lives of some 200,000 Hungarian Jews, who would otherwise have been transported to Auschwitz. No other act helped save that many lives. There were around 1.3 million prisoners in this concentration camp. Some 1,000 tried to flee and fewer than 200 of them succeeded.
Rudolf Vrba was 19 at the time of his escape. After the end of WWII, he left for Canada, where he worked at the University of British Columbia. He wrote over 50 scientific works in the field of neurology. He passed away in Vancouver in 2006 at the age of 82. When he fled from Auschwitz, Alfréd Wetzler was 24. He spent his life in Slovakia working as a reporter, later in the field of sales and then in a library. He passed away in 1988 at the age of 69.
At the moment, Slovak director Peter Bebjak is shooting a movie about their escape.
