Born in the Slovakian town of Trnava on May, 10, 1918, Alfréd Wetzler was mostly raised in the backyard of a synagogue with three brothers. After high school, he worked as a labourer until he was called up for compulsory military service in 1940. According to the Polish historian Henryk Świebocki, Wetzler was arrested in 1941 after he had attempted to sabotage the operations of a brick factory. Repeatedly interrogated during four months in a Bratislava prison, Wetzler was released; soon afterwards the Hlinka Guard came to his parents’ home in order to escort him to the transit camp at Sered, Slovakia where he was soon robbed. To escape the precariousness of life in the Sered camp, Wetzler volunteered, with 1,000 others, to do “farm work” at a little-known place not far from the Czechoslovakian/Polish border.

Wetzler’s name on the camp’s infirmary list at Auschwitz.

Alfréd Wetzler arrived at Auschwitz I on April 13, 1942 and became prisoner #29162. He was transferred the next day to Sector BIb of the men’s camp at Auschwitz II (Birkenau) when it still had only three main buildings. For approximately three months he was a construction labourer along with 200 other Jews, helping to erect an armaments plant. Świebocki, a senior historian at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum (Państwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau), has noted that Wetzler made an aborted escape attempt in 1942. Having noticed there was a sewer pipe that went from the men’s camp in Section BIb to outside the fenced compound, Wetzler undertook reconnaissance by entering the sewer system through a manhole near Barrack 7. The transit through the pipe was surprisingly easy. He was certain he had gone beyond the perimeter of the camp only to discover there was an iron grate at the end of his journey, barring the way. He was only able to crawl backwards to captivity with great difficulty.

Oswiecim book cover

Having benefited from the advice of senior prisoner #7699, Pawel Gulba, Wetzler was able to obtain the coveted job of Schreiber in section BIb of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the so-called French Block, before switching to a similar position at the Block 7 “hospital” where he proceeded to record more than 50,000 deaths. As of January 1943, he transferred to Block BIb, the camp mortuary, for keeping track of prisoners in the camp who supposedly had died of natural causes. For this coveted job as a registrar of deaths within the camp, tallying daily death tolls beyond the crematoria, and keeping track of how much gold was extracted from the teeth of the prison corpses, Wetzler was obliged to work among cadavers on a daily basis, but by maintaining his own small office he avoided hard labour. Although there were problems with hygiene, the job of corpse-counter was one of the best jobs in the camp. The collectors of corpses for Wetzler were able to visit most sectors of the camp and therefore they could provide Wetzler with up-to-date reports on current events. (Wetzler’s advisor Pawel Gulba, referenced as Pavel in Wetzler’s novel, was born in Bobryk, Poland and apparently survived that war; he was registered at the Ebensee Displaced Persons camp in Austria on April 20, 1945.)

In June of 1943, Wetzler was transferred to serve as a clerk for Block BIId where the block leader was a fellow Slovakian, Arnošt Rosin. Approximately two months before Wetzler succeeded in escaping with Rudolf Vrba, Wetzler supposedly had himself transferred to a similar position at Block 9 in order to safeguard Rosin from interrogation. Now that we know that Wetzler and Vrba were really only approached to serve as “guinea pigs” for the builders of the hideout–and they were not the main escape planners from the onset–it is questionable if plans where hatched for Wetzler and Vrba’s participation that far in advance.

Alfréd Wetzler was prompted to write by his wife.

Because Wetzler lived most of his adult life behind the Iron Curtain, many of the historians from Eastern European countries have tended to favour the older figure of Wetzler as being the ‘escape leader,’ diminishing Vrba as a much younger hothead in the process. Because Vrba was consistently an outspoken and penetrating critic of those who were complicit with Nazi operations–including Jews and prominent figures in Israel–there have been efforts to discredit Vrba by elevating Wetzler as the senior and therefore more sober reporter of events. It was always easier to dismiss Vrba as a hothead rather than try to come to terms with the fact that Vrba ultimately succeeded in leading a seemingly comfortable life in the West — as an exemplary scientist who selflessly served as an anti-Nazi courtroom expert witness — complete with a beautiful wife.

Vrba became a decorated war hero after fighting for partisans under Captain Milan Uher. It is much lesser-known that Wetzler was also briefly associated with Uher’s partisan outfit. Through no fault of his own, Wetzler was unable to save twenty badly-wounded partisans, under his supervision, when they were overwhelmed by German troops. Wetzler, with his Auschwitz tattoo, was spared but he underwent interrogation–the nature of which has not been recorded.  His life was spared by the advance of Russian troops. In a letter to Kazimierz Smolen of the Auschwitz Museum on December 18, 1989, in response to Smolen’s letter to him on November 24, 1989, Vrba notes that Wetzler was “a soldier of the Czechoslovak Army in the Partyzan Unit of Captain Milan Uher” until the end of the war and “Wetzler joined me there in February, 1945 and was with us until March, 1945, when he fell again into the hands of Germans. He was liberated in March, 1945 by a surprise artillery shelling of the prison by the advancing Russians.”

The Soviet regime dominated Czechoslovakia for the ensuing decades. Wetzler and his wife were required to embrace communism. They were poor, with minimal material comforts. Rudolf and Robin Vrba sent several gifts of money, in the forms of bonds, via Switzerland.

In Communist Czechoslovakia where the Holocaust was rarely discussed openly, and where antisemitism resurfaced in the 1950s, Wetzler persevered as a modest, calm person and his heroism was not cited or divulged. Far too much of Slovakian society had supported the Nazis. He wore long-sleeved shirts and a jacket to conceal his tattoo and was restricted to low-paying jobs.

Articulate and well-read, he worked as an editor for the humour magazine Roháč, then as a civil servant and a tourist guide. As a retiree, from 1979 onward, he helped in the library on Šalviová Street, in the town of Ružinov, as a part-time, disabled pensioner. A co-worker Darina Horkáová fondly recalled him bringing snacks to work, as well as a slice of bread and a piece of sausage or bacon. He always used a small pocket knife to eat.

Wetzler once asked if Horkáová had read What Dante Didn’t See by Jozef Lánik. She said she had read it and admired it. Known to her fondly as Uncle Fred, he proceeded to borrow his own book from the library without letting her know he was its author. Only later did he reveal Jozef Lánik and Alfred Wetzler were the same person. “My father did not expect gratitude,” his daughter later wrote in the preface to a re-issued version of the novel.

Wetzler and his wife had an apartment on Križna Street. As a chronic smoker with a weak heart, he stopped coming to help at the library in the fall of 1987. He died on February 8, 1988 and was buried in the Jewish cemetery on Žižková Street in Bratislava.

Although he had testified at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials and supplied a deposition for the Eichmann trial, he was never accorded credit as a war hero or a public figure in his homeland until after his death. Posthumously, he was awarded the Order of Ludovit Stur II Class in 1997 and the Cross of Milan Rastislav Stefanik in 2007. A park has been named after him in Ruzinov in front of the Pan-European University. The Bratislava-born, Slovakian President Zusana Čaputová visited his grave on the national Victims of Holocaust and Racial Violence Day. His daughter, Tatiana Kernova, a pediatrician, died in 2012.

*

The extent to which Wetzler’s novel about his captivity in Auschwitz, culminating with his escape, is not reliable as a truthful record of events is glaringly obvious to anyone who takes the time to try and read it carefully. Evidently, few do.

A BBC documentary 1944: Should We Bomb Auschwitz? (above) depicted Wetzler & Vrba.

Living under the yolk of Soviet occupation, Wetzler fashioned his tale to suit Soviet authorities. For instance, he claims the escape hideout was located “in the ‘Mexico’ area, where they intend in the shortest possible time to complete a vast camp for ten thousand Soviet prisoners, whom allegedly they are already holding elsewhere.” The notion that the Nazis were intending to transform their murder factory into a penal colony to accommodate 10,000, already-captured Soviet P.O.W.s is ridiculous.

Filmmakers or historians who lazily adapt elements of Wetzler’s novel to suit their purposes are conveniently failing to accept, or recognize, the extent to which Wetzler twists and distorts the truth throughout. The narration, for example, asks: “How many have they tortured to death, shot, hanged, poisoned, killed with phenol, killed with injections of cancer, typhus, malaria, by electric current or asphyxiation? Altogether three million, possibly more.”

It takes only a nanosecond to remind oneself that Wetzler and Vrba are World War heroes because they famously calculated, in the Vrba-Wetzler Report, with extraordinary care and attention, that the Nazis had murdered 1.76 million at Auschwitz between April 1942 and April 1944.

In fact, this was a conservative estimate, moderated by the overseers of their report. Initially, in 1946, Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss estimated that 3 million humans had been murdered there. That figure mirrors, to a large degree, Rudolf Vrba’s personal estimate of 2.5 million murdered there, plus or minus 10%, which he formally submitted within his sworn affidavit for the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. So-called qualified historians, with their university degrees, who weren’t there counting the trains, have managed to reduce Vrba’s expert evaluation by half.

Wetzler enjoying a cup of coffee after the war.

Filmmakers and historians who use Wetzler’s account as any approximation of the truth are only aiding and abetting the agenda of Holocaust denialists. For instance, the hateful website at holocaustencyclopedia.com can easily disparage the four Jewish escapees [whose reportage was combined for the Auschwitz Protocols] by noting Wetzler’s lie — actually a statement within the context of a novel — while delighting in being able to point to only one error made by Vrba [“One specific claim allegedly learned from the Sonderkommando is an invented inspection of Birkenau’s Crematorium II by Himmler in mid-May 1944, just at the start of the deportation of the Hungarian Jews.”] whose intention, conversely, was to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

In 1945, using his wartime alias Jozef Lánik, Wetzler assembled a pamphlet about the war crimes committed by the Nazi regime in Europe, with an emphasis on Slovakia, entitled Nemecké a gardistické zverstvá. Again, under his assumed name Jozef Lánik, Wetzler published a booklet in 1946 entitled Oswiecim, hrobka štyroch miliónov ľudí. Krátka história a život v oswiecimskom pekle (translation: Auschwitz, The Grave of Four Million People. A short history and life in the hell of Auschwitz in the years 1942–1945). The publisher was listed as Košice: Povereníctvo SNR pre informácie, 1945. Although this volume is a composite of the knowledge gained by all four escapees who met in Bratislava, the other three informants are not credited. Both publications stress the need for reparations and trials.

Wetzler’s confusing, original, semi-fictional work about Auschwitz was first published in Slovak as Co Dante nevidel, (What Dante Did Not See) in 1964. This work had evolved from a fictional short story called Death Lies on the Other Side, in which the narrator references Wetzler’s actual tattoo number. That story had been written in the third person for a literary competition in 1958. According to researcher Nikola Zemring, co-editor of the 2020 version of Rudolf Vrba’s I Escaped From Auschwitz, one of the judges who rejected the submission was Auschwitz survivor Erich Kulka whose own book Night and Fog addressed the same subject matter. Kulka wanted the Auschwitz literary territory for his own.

To put it mildly, What Dante Did Not See is a very awkward amalgam of fact and fiction. In his Introduction for an English version, re-titled as Escape from Hell and first published in 2006, Robert Rozett, as Director of the Yad Vashem Libraries, makes a foolish endorsement, stating Escape from Hell “straddles the line between memoir and literature, in many ways like Eli Wiesel’s much heralded Night.” No, it crosses the line, on nearly every page. But Yad Vashem, in 2006, when that institution was still spearheaded by Yehuda Bauer–who was adversarial to Vrba’s outspokenness and therefore welcomed Wetzler’s alternative voice–was willing to absurdly place Wetzler’s hodge-podge in a class with the most venerated work by Elie Wiesel. In the process, Rozett, seemingly an expert, misspelled Wiesel’s first name as Eli, not Elie.

The lead Auschwitz escapee character named Karol, based on Wetzler, is repeatedly superior to his younger, feckless cohort, Val, a bizarrely deviant substitute for the character of Vrba. The more closely one examines the text, the more one realizes that Escape from Hell is as much a novel of jealousy and revenge–an effort to denigrate Wetzler’s escape partner who has gained respect and notoriety in the West, where he was seemingly leading a seemingly comfortable life–than it is a book designed to educate the world about the Holocaust or Auschwitz.

This novel is so poorly edited that on page 116, the author states, “One thousand two hundred SS men have poured out of their barracks for the hunt.” Ten pages later, we are a Nazi commander who is angry “at one thousand seven hundred trained elite soldiers who cannot find two hungry and half-alive scumbags.” On page 192, when we are told that “Karol” (Wetzler) encourages “Val” (Vrba) to speak in the basement of the old people’s home in Žilina, Val is described as the older prisoner. Skim-reading historians and filmmakers have nonetheless mined this work as a counterpart to Vrba’s memoir.

Journalist and translator Peter Várnai with Eta Wetzler in 2004; Alfréd Wetzler appears between them.

What Dante Did Not See was republished as a non-fiction book in English through the efforts of a Hungarian scientist Péter Várnai, living in Cambridge, England, whose father’s family came from what is now Slovakia. While researching his family roots, Várnai discovered his family name had been changed from Wetzler. He consequently went to Bratislava where he met and befriended Wetzler’s widow, Eta Wetzlerová, and they jointly agreed he was likely a relative of her deceased husband. Várnai set about securing a publisher for an English edition and acquiring the services of a seemingly hapless translator, Ewald Osers, who completed the task in 2006 and who has “asserted his moral rights as the translator.” Wetzler’s novel was then renamed and re-marketed in English as Escape from Hell: The True Story of the Auschwitz Protocol (Berghahn Books 2007). A paperback version was issued in 2020.

In the original Slovak version, the character who clearly represented the older and therefore wiser escapee, Wetzler, is named Karol; the character that clearly represented the younger and less reliable character, Vrba, goes by the name of Valér. In the English version, these names are Karol and Val. This novel was republished in Slovak shortly after Wetzler’s death in 1988. A fourth edition of Wetzler’s Čo Dante nevidel would appear in Slovak, from Bratislava; crediting Wetzler as its author instead of Jozef Lánik, in 2009. This new edition contained the first, complete Slovak version of the Auschwitz Report (Auschwitz Protocols). Hence, it took 65 years before Slovakians could read the most influential and important document of World War II that was heroically prepared by two native sons.

So it is that Wetzler’s warped, fictionalized account freely deviates from the truth — ie. Wetzler claims the two escapees were headed for the Soviet Union (after the world knew Vrba had successfully led them to Slovakia). It has nonetheless served as the purported basis for a Slovakian feature film made in 2021 and viewed globally, The Auschwitz Report, in which the roles of the real-life characters are reversed. The equivalent Vrba character is feckless; the equivalent Wetzler character is the hero. It is important to know that when Rudolf Vrba’s wife, Robin Vrba, refused to give consent to the would-be producer of a new Slovakian feature film that was intended to depict the escape of Vrba and Wetzler, the miffed filmmakers in Europe seemingly responded by rendering a laughably inept depiction of Vrba within their documentary-styled movie.

It is now difficult to ascertain which depiction of the Vrba-Wetzler escape is more ludicrous–Wetzler’s original fictional version or the Slovakian feature film. The original text by Wetzler was written in 1963 and released by Wetzler, under a pseudonym, as a novel, in 1964; almost a lifetime later, the film that was partially inspired by the novel is being marketed with the conceit of being historical, although its director has been on record that it serves as an adapted version of the true story.

ALFRÉD WETZLER REVISITS AUSCHWITZ

In an interview conducted at his home in 2022, the Czech-born novelist Jan Drabek shared a very important story about Alfréd Wetzler that was conveyed by his Drabek’s father.

“My father was in Auschwitz. In 1947, he went back to Poland with a group of Czechoslovaks to give testimony for the trial of the Auschwitz commandant Hoess, and that trial lasted from March 11 to March 29. During that time their hosts took them on a trip around Auschwitz environs.

“Among the former Czechoslovak prisoners that day was also a certain Alfréd Wetzler. When they were passing a small cottage, Wetzler suddenly cried out, ‘Stop! Please stop!’

“Wetzler proceeded to knock on the door of the cottage. An old lady opened it. He took her in his arms and kissed her. Greatly moved, Wetzler came back to the car and asked his colleagues to give him all the money they had. He gave it all, along with his watch, to the surprised lady. His eyes were filled with tears.

“Wetzler explained to her that when he and Rudi were escaping from Auschwitz, in desperation, against all advice, they had knocked on her door and asked for help. This was the same woman who had given them food and clothing and valuable directions. This was the woman who had saved their lives.”

This anecdote about Wetzler’s return to Auschwitz is vital because it illustrates the extent to which Wetzler’s novelized memoir about the escape is indeed fiction. In Chapter 12 of his Escape from Hell, Wetzler, instead, goes to great lengths, for most of the chapter, to describe the pair’s meeting in a forest with a young mother and her young boy named Wladek. The dislikeable character of Val [depicting Vrba] castigates the more admirable character of Karol [Wetzler] for being insufficiently wary.

“You trust the first person we’ve met,” Val says reproachfully–whereupon the more noble character in the novel, Karol, replies, “If you want to live, you’ve got to trust.”

That forest meeting is pure fiction. The first person that Vrba and Wetzler actually met as they were heading towards the Beskid Mountains was clearly the older woman in the cottage, the same person to whom Wetzler so eagerly provided money and his watch. This person who actually took pity on them is completely absent from Wetzler’s version of events.

Whereas, Rudolf Vrba has written: “We chose a house more or less at random. As we made our way round to the yard at the back, chickens darted around our feet and somewhere a goose honked indignantly. An old woman, dressed in the voluminous black frock and white head scarf of a Polish peasant, came to the door and behind her we could see the worried face of a girl about eighteen. In our best Polish, we greeted her in traditional fashion: “Praise be to the name of Christ.”

In Vrba’s version, the pair are told by the old woman that they still have a long way to go to reach the mountains. They slept in her house, chopped wood for her the following day, and were replenished by potato soup. Later this old woman woke them at 3 a.m. and gave them several cups of coffee. They refused her offer of money (“four marks, about a pound”) before recommencing their trek at night.

Vrba writes, “For two reasons I did not want to take her money. In the first place, I felt I owed her much more than she did us. Secondly, I was thinking of Volkov’s cardinal rule–take no money or you’ll be tempted to spend it–and was determined not to break it.”

It would take the pair two more days to reach the halfway point of their journey–the town of Porebka “where Sandor Eisenbach and his three friends had been captured.” Wetzler never references the preceding escape attempt by the foursome who had been involved in the construction of the hideout in Mexico.

The lengthy story that Wetzler tells in his novel about the duo’s first meeting with anyone–that young woman in the woods with her son, during the fictionalized escape of Karol and Val–can only be regarded as fiction.

The anecdote related by Jan Drabek’s father, a non-Jewish lawyer who had been incarcerated in Auschwitz, serves as evidence as to how fanciful Wetzler’s novel turned out to be. The fact, that filmmakers and some historians have seen fit to mistake Wetzler’s bizarre concoction as historical evidence for the purposes of generating entertainment and scholarship is regrettable to an extreme.

*

AN INTERVIEW WITH ROBIN VRBA ABOUT THE WETZLERS

A: Was the schism between Wetzler and Rudi partly because Wetzler and his wife were more in-line with the Communists? And Rudi was not?

R: No. Gerta was a snob, according to Rudi. She didn’t like Wetzler and company [his wife, Eta]. So, she [Gerta] was not interested in that reunion. And Rudi did not like Wetzler’s wife [Eta]. He liked Wetzler. Wetzler was very charming… Rudi told me a story: One day Rudi was in Prague, on the tram, and he saw Wetzler, on the street. The tram was going by and Rudi reached out and pulled the cap off his [Wetzler’s] head. And then they met up afterwards… so they liked each other.

When Rudi left Czechoslovakia and he wrote the book [I Cannot Forgive], the Communists were not very happy because they wanted things from a Communist point of view. They got Wetzler to re-write what he had written right after the war so it had a communist slant to it. [Hence, for Wetzler’s fictionalized version of the escape, he claims the two desperadoes are heading towards the Soviets, not towards Slovakia.]

A: I didn’t know that Wetzler’s story had been re-written at the instigation of the Communists [the Soviets who controlled Czechoslovakia after the war].

R: Wetzler had written something right after the war, but they re-published something [by Wetzler] after Rudi’s book came out.

A: Did you ever read Wetzler’s book?

R: I didn’t.

A: It is bizarrely like a novel but the narrative goes all over the place.

R: I understand it’s a novel based on historical events… and then he made up some things [according to Rudi]. He [Wetzler] said they took out the Zyklon-B evidence. Rudi said that was ridiculous. You didn’t need to take it out. Everyone knew what Zyklon-B was.

A: Much in the novel is very misleading, disturbingly so. People could read that book and assume it’s based on fact. Wetzler borrows some details, I think, from Mordowicz’ escape. [See the biography by Fred R. Bleakley, The Auschwitz Protocols: Ceslav Mordowitcz and the Race to Save Hungary’s Jews (Post Hill Press 2022)] Now there is a movie from Slovakia about the escape that has mostly been based on Wetzler’s fictionalized account.

R: Well, that’s also because they wanted the rights to Rudi’s book and I said somebody already had an option on it. I couldn’t sell them [the rights] to them.

A: This explains why the movie is so skewed in favour of Wetzler.

*

The estrangement that ensued between Vrba and Wetzler over the years is partially attributable to the fact that Vrba knew his friend’s wife had been a Block Leader inside the Auschwitz women’s camp.  This fact is essential for understanding why the two escapees did not remain close friends. Vrba never publicly ‘outed’ his friend’s wife.

Katya Singer was an assimilated Czech Jew who served as Rapportschreiberin in Auschwitz from September 1942 until her deportation to Stutthof in 1944. She gave a recorded interview on July 21, 1991 at the Prague Intercontinental Hotel. The interviewer Susan Cernyak-Spatz, a camp survivor, suggested that “ordinary prisoners in average commandos have said in biographies and other books that the blockovas, especially the Slovakian ones, were beating the prisoners and stealing parts of their rations.”

KS: That is not quite true. Only two were known to beat prisoners, the two youngest. It is always like that. Among a thousand people there are always ten who are evil. But I did not select the blockovas. Every matron had been assigned a block and they had decided who would be a block worker and who would be the blockova. . . . The blockovas would beat a prisoner who was dirty and did not have to be dirty; who was caught stealing and did not have to steal.

SCS: From my own experience in an Aussencommando block, I know that it is not easy to keep clean there.

KS: I know that Etta [SIC] Wetzler was one that beat the prisoners. She was blockova on Block 25 [the death block]; that was terrible.

*

Wetzler met his wife-to-be in Auschwitz where she was Block Leader in the women’s barracks at Birkenau. She was born in Slovakia and grew up in a poor, non-religious Jewish family with two brothers. Her father was an electrician who mostly made money as a travelling salesman for electrical appliances. She once described him as politically naive and “a warm person, but completely unsuitable for trading.” Poverty was her main burden. Only later in life did she realize that she was being sent to the other side of town to visit a rich aunt so that she could be fed lunch. She was humiliated when she had to deliver a “testimony of poetry” in order for her fees to be waived at the German grammar school where she was an outstanding student. When she saw hateful signs condemning Jews, she was not greatly concerned. Her family was seemingly assimilated.

At age sixteen, in August of 1941, Eta sewed a yellow star onto her clothing.

Eta was on the first train of young women who were sent to Auschwitz and arriving March 26, 1942.

Her ability to speak German so well elevated her quickly in the camp hierarchy.

According to a Slovakian SME article by Marek Horvatovic in 2007…

“Her two brothers and mother managed to hide in Liptov throughout the war, her father spent a critical time in Bratislava… Eta did not like to talk about what she experienced in the camp, but sometimes she made a remark that shocked. She was direct, so she blurted out something about the piles of corpses by the ovens and the piece of bread that one of them was holding in her hand, and she, after typhoid, grabbed that skive to survive. And she went on. Or she plebeianly mentioned how fitting it was that she came from modest means. It was an advantage in the Auschwitz jungle and, paradoxically, also the fact that she had been there since 1942. She was among those who kept the camp running, there was no choice, she was responsible for one block in the camp…

“The story of Fred’s escape also became Eta’s story. She stood by him in these ungrateful years, urged him to capture the escape from the Polish Auschwitz to Slovakia, so that a book could be made of it. She was proud of Fred and spoke of him with love even when she seemed to complain. Mr. Alfred Wetzler died in 1988. In America or Britain, such a rare person would have at least a street, if not a square, in every major city. Slovakia is not yet ready for real heroes.

“Eta was a journalist, in Prác and Roľnícky noviny. In 1968, after the Soviet invasion, she took the “wrong position” and was definitively expelled from the party. It was difficult for her to fight through, she “fell down” for a while, but the strong dynamo that always drove her started after a while. Daughter Táňa was here, a miracle that she came into the world after the concentration camp.

“November 1989 was redemption for Eta… She could go directly to Vienna. She was very happy about her freedom. She translated from German, sometimes gave lessons. She had a raspy, smoked voice and strong arms, in which many in her apartment on Bratislava’s Krížna Street liked to lose themselves in order to immediately immerse themselves in great debates… [But] For Eta, Judaism was not a topic….”

[SOURCE: https://jewishcurrents.org/record-keeping-for-the-nazis-and-saving-lives]

MERCILESS MONSTERS & VERITABLE HYENAS

Corroborative evidence to support Rudolf Vrba’s low opinion of his escape partner’s wife can be found in Hermann Langbein’s study People in Auschwitz. “In the women’s camp,” Langbein recalls, “inmates from Slovakia with low numbers rose to the status of a kind of aristocracy.” By August of 1944, most of the female block elders were Slovakian Jews.

Lucie Begow, who arrived in Auschwitz in the spring of 1944, recalls these Slovak women, who had arrived in Auschwitz as teenagers, were referred to as the “camp generation” because they had learned to adapt to the Nazi dictates from the construction phase onward.  “With one exception,” she told Langbein, “their behaviour was more German than that of the Germans.”

There is no reason to believe that Eta Wetzler was that lone exception.

Grete Salus did not mince words describing the temperament of her block elder in the fall of 1944. “The pressure of this position turned almost all of these women into utterly merciless monsters and veritable hyenas.”

Having arrived among the Hungarian transports in 1944, Ana Novac concluded that the Slovakian women were menacing block elders because they resented having endured the most crude years of Auschwitz while relatively recent arrivals had been living comfortably at home with bread with butter. Novac’s description of one such Slovakian block elder begins, “She is alive only when she is giving a beating. Then she comes to life like a tennis player who fell asleep during his training and finally starts a match. Her chin juts out and her beautiful, languid lips are pinched. For an instant she motionlessly eyes her victim. Then there flashes around her mouth that peculiar, somewhat evil, and a bit intoxicated smile that brightens her in the truest sense of the word. She swings her whip backward, only to make it whiz down with all her strength the next moment.”

This section of Langbein’s book from pages 170-to-176 is especially sobering when one views photos of the untainted, Slovakian teenage girls before they boarded that first train of Jews sent to Auschwitz and subsequently obtained positions of authority. “Some of them,” he writes, “but not all, definitely were amoral persons by nature. The majority of them had been made that [way] by the terrible, enervating life that gnawed away at a human being like a running sore… They had become inured to human suffering because they had suffered too much themselves.”

Another Slovakian block elder in the women’s camp was renowned for giving beatings even when there was no Nazi prison official present. Having arrived in Auschwitz as a tall, blonde beauty, the Slovakian Sara Meisels was overheard by Sura Zofia Herson-Nowak saying, “I have lost so many relatives here that I know no pity.”

AN ABSOLUTE BOTTOM OF HELL

Eta, Alfréd and Tana Wetzler, 1964.

In a crudely translated interview in the archives of the U.S. Holocaust Museum from August 19, 1996, Anna Palarczyk nee Szyller recalls a particularly cruel Block leader in the Woman’s Camp at Auschwitz who was from Slovakia. [Please note Etela Wetzler is not specifically identified herein, although she did work in Block 25 when she was 16.]

PALARCZK: … But the object of the greatest theft were of course, most terribly robbed were those in block twenty five, because there, those women, in reality, could no longer eat much and (sighs) and I am still returning to that second fifth block, and to that girl such a beautiful girl, this sixteen…, sixteen years old Slovak girl. She survived to the end, she kn…, she was very cruel, she was afraid, she beat these…, her…, these that belonged to her…, persons, these, these, these… this…, these, these – she was repulsive… but after all they have ruined her life, because she came out, she came out [of the camp] and return to Czech…, returned to Czechoslovakia, and so they put her on trial – no, I don’t know, how…

I don’t know if they put her on trial, or not, well, there had to be some trial, in any event, they prohibited her from studying at a university and all her life she had to work in some kind of PGR, meaning in some kind… a state collective farm… I mean, I don’t know if for the rest of her life, because naturally she also is now old, but…, but…, they ruined her whole life, which…, which she managed to save for herself from that Oœwiêcim, but in such a cruel manner.

Ana Palarczyk

I wondered more than once – could she refuse to be a block leader? What…, what…, what kind of…, what reaction would there have been from the camp authorities to her refusal to be in that block? She could only somehow… but I think that there was not a single candidate who would have gone in her place.

Q: Couldn’t she have been less cruel while already a block leader?

PALARCZK: She could have. I think, there was nothing she could…, she could not save anybody, save she could not, but I think, that she could have gotten for them more to drink, like cauldrons with tea, the so-called tea, something… something there could have been done – only it was the bottom of hell. So, it is easy for us to talk, that…, that something could have been done, but one must remember, that it was an absolute bottom of hell.

Visitors to the Auschwitz Museum can now encounter this refined, filth-free representation of Block 25, where Eta Wetzler was Blockfurherin, and conclude incarceration there might not have been gruesome and deadly.

THE SEVERE BEATING OF ALFRED WETZLER IN AUSCHWITZ

Among the many uncategorized photos in the Vrba archives at the FDR Library is this image of a Slovakian trio of Auschwitz survivors.

Otto Dov Kulka, at left, first co-wrote The Death Factory: Document of Auschwitz (Pergamon Press, 1966) even though he arrived at the camp at age eleven. The rascal on the right is Vrba. There is no Wikipedia entry for the man in the middle—little-known Auschwitz prisoner #29867, Joseph Neumann, of Medzilaborce, Slovakia. About 45 years after he first met Vrba’s escape partner Alfréd Wetzler, Neumann spilled the beans about a hitherto overlooked event concerning Wetzler, #29162.

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Joseph Neumann was born in Eastern Slovakia in 1916 and managed to evade capture as a lumberjack until April of 1942, at which time he was sent by train to Auschwitz I. After processing, he was sent to Auschwitz II where, with a high temperature due to typhus, he was taken to the hospital by a friendly kapo. The next day he was further weakened when a Dr. May from Warsaw was required to extract blood from Neumann for transfusion purposes. Increasingly, Neumann no longer cared whether he lived or died. It was in this deflated state that Neumann met Alfréd Wetzler who had arrived in Auschwitz only a short time before him.

“I offered him my bread because I couldn’t eat,” Neumann recalled in 1988, “but he wouldn’t take it. He said, ‘Keep it, you will need it.’ I was already resigned on life [prepared to die] but he [Wetzler] had some kind of connection there [in Auschwitz]. I decided I wanted to die with him.”

Neumann was able to survive with relative security after he was accorded the easy job of collecting the tattoo numbers of camp suicides, working in association with Wetzler who oversaw the camp morgue for non-gassed, non-executed camp prisoners. Neumann was not an intellectual. He never wrote a book. But these men naturally bonded for self-protection because they were all Slovakians.

Neumann cites the importance of Vrba and Wetzler’s escape in the interview that was conducted by the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois (now Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center) in August 21, 1988. [Accession Number: 1989.346.51 | RG Number: RG-50.031.0051.] but this section is absent from a transcript that was made after the oral interview had been sent to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Oral History branch on December 12, 1989.

In a rough transcription made available on-line by the USHMM, Vrba’s name is not mentioned whereas the USHMM account does cite some of the details of the Mordowicz and Rosin escape. Israeli academic Ruth Linn has continuously alleged that Vrba has been invisibilized by major Holocaust institutions and this could serve as yet another example. One must listen to the original, hard-to-hear, Illinois version of the audio to learn that Neumann and Vrba were acquaintances in Auschwitz.

On the night of March 8-9, 1944, when 3,792 members of the so-called Czech family camp were murdered (including Vrba’s lover Alice Munk), the exceptionally beautiful Renée Neumann and her mother Eda were spared (along with approximately 60 others) due largely to the interventions of SS-Unterscharfuhrer guard Victor Pestek. He then arranged for Renée’s mother to have a relatively secure job in the infirmary.

Madly in love with Renée Neumann, Pestek hatched a far-fetched plan to have a Jewish accomplice travel with him to Czechoslovakia where he intended to forge a Gestapo warrant for the arrest of Renée Neumann and her mother, whereupon he hoped to return to Auschwitz, commandeer a car and a driver (from the Auschwitz staff), and then drive out the front gate of Auschwitz, escorting Renée and her mother to a fictitious trial. After Pestek managed to murder their Nazi chauffeur, they would drive off into the proverbial sunset.

This was a crazy plan; but life itself was crazed in Auschwitz. It was pure coincidence that Neumann just happened to share the same surname with Renée Neumann. “I want to do something to forget the smell of burning human flesh and feel a little cleaner,” Pestek supposedly said.

Neumann’s recollections of Pestek are also contained on pages 57-to-61 Kulka’s The Death Factory. In his Illinois interview, Neumann claims he was asked by Victor Pestek to join him for his audacious escape attempt. Unaware that Rudolf Vrba and Wetzler had already both been asked by Pestek to participate in the same scheme, Neumann conferred with his friend Wetzler as to his opinion of the escape plan. Wetzler advised him to never trust the word of a Nazi. Vrba and Wetzler were aware that recently an SS man named Dobrovolný had offered to help a Jewish childhood friend to escape from Auschwitz, only to turn him in for a pay bonus, whereupon the would-be escapee was brutally executed.

Pestek had been so well-liked as a supervisor of the Czech Family Camp that he had been accorded the nickname miláček—Czech for “darling” or “doll”—and Vrba would later describe Pestek as “the only honourable SS man I ever met… who saw the vileness that lay beneath those smart, green uniforms and had the courage to strike against it.”

Eventually, Siegfried Lederer, a Jew born in Pilsen, Sudetenland, in 1904, agreed to the plan of the Romanian-born Pestek. Lederer was a prudent choice. Before he was apprehended by the Nazis for his covert activities, Lederer had been active in Plzeňák 28, a Czech resistance group in Zbraslav. Just a few days before Vrba and Wetzler would commence their escape on April 7, Lederer became the first Jew to successfully escape from Auschwitz. Lederer and Pestel, in Nazi uniforms, managed to ride out of the camp on bicycles.

The besotted Pestek returned to Auschwitz on May 25, 1944 and somehow managed to establish a hiding place for himself in Mexico, only to discover that his damsel in distress, Renée Neumann, was still unwilling to be liberated if it meant endangering the life of her mother. The other Neumann, Joseph, received a message via the camp underground saying that Pestek wanted to talk to him but fortunately a rendezvous was thwarted when Neumann was recognized and taken to Block Eleven, the punishment block, for prolonged torture.

Pestek was tried by an SS and Police Court at the Katowice branch and shot to death. We know this because the scribe named Unterscharführer Mertens who was present at the trial also attended the execution on October 8, 1944 at the Miedzybrodzie Bialskie subcamp of Auschwitz.

Only near to the end of Neumann’s poorly-recorded two-hour interview do we learn about a beating that Wetzler endured after he was caught by the Nazis persuading a new transport of doomed Jews, trapped inside a train car, to give him their valuables, having told them they were all destined to die anyway.

“In June of 1942,” he says, “Jews from a large vicinity were brought in and were put in isolation. Nobody was supposed to go in or out. Fred Wexler went in and asked the new transports to leave their jewels behind because so they could be used by the living. The SS caught Wexler and beat him. A friend of Wexler [sic] named Miller [sic] got involved and was sentenced to death. Somehow, he [Wetzler] survived with a suitcase from the new inmates.”

Neumann’s narration is clumsy but he had no reason not to be telling the truth. Neumann clearly liked and admired Wetzler. He recalls how Wetzler was helpful and kind to him. Therefore, there is no logical explanation as to why Neumann might choose to invent such a story about someone who apparently had helped Neumann to live.

One can only logically surmise this ‘train robbery’ story is true. Unfortunately, theft of any riches that the Nazis believed belonged to the Third Reich commonly resulted in either a swift death, or else a slow death by torture. Given that Wetzler survived, one can only logically conclude that the beating that Wetzler endured would have been extreme. Upon his arrival in 1942, Wetzler was not year a camp fixture. Hence, he would have been deemed expendable. This is another reason to believe his beating was likely prolonged and intense.

Whether Rudolf Vrba ever learned the details of Wetzler’s attempt to acquire valuables from doomed passengers is a matter of conjecture. Either way, we know theft from the Third Reich was unpardonable. Vrba tells stories about how the Nazis enforced heinous punishments for the theft of seemingly minor items. Therefore, Wetlzer’s attempt to acquire precious gems and currency from doomed Jews was extraordinary—and the beating he received (according to his friend and admirer Neumann) would have been brutal to an extreme in consequence of the severity of his alleged crime.

This story from Neumann could help us to understand why Wetzler would opt to risk his life and leave one of the most secure jobs in the prison hierarchy, a position in which he had his own private sleeping arrangements and a fortifying food supply, in order to try and escape from the hell of Auschwitz. [Escape from Hell happens to be the English title of Wetzler’s semi-fictionalized memoir but its original title in Czech was Čo Dante nevidel—What Dante Did Not See.]

It also helps to explain why Vrba told only his wife Robin the full details of their escape. As previously explained herein, the original plan was for the pair to test the security of the hideout for three full days and then allow two of the builders of the hideout into the chamber. The four men would then wait for another three days to make a mutual escape. But we now know that psychologically and physically, as their distressing situation worsened, Wetzler was unable to remain calm.

Wetzler told Vrba he could not bear to remain another three days and nights within the frigid woodpile. Vrba responded to the elder Wetzler’s sense of desperation and agreed to essentially double-cross the builders of the hideout. In revenge, the two would-be escapees who were excluded added more lumber onto the woodpile, making it seemingly impossible for Vrba and Wetzler to escape.

This nightmarish scenario put the already fragile and weakened Wetzler over the edge of sanity. Once they exhausted themselves and started to run through the darkness, Wetzler’s extremely agitated state made him into a liability. This explains why Vrba told his wife he had to strike Wetzler to bring him to his senses, to keep him quiet, to get him to crawl and run to safety with him—to save his life.

Rudolf Vrba never said or wrote anything derogatory or demeaning about his elder escape partner. He omitted mentioning that Wetzler had taken some money or gold with him during their escape, thereby contravening the advice of their Russian escape mentor, and that Wetzler had made an attempt to go into a village to buy food. This foolhardy decision resulted in a shower of bullets that almost got them killed.

The beating that Alfréd Wetzler received has been a missing piece of the puzzle. It partially serves to partially explain why Wetzler’s post-war life never amounted to much. It’s generous and true to submit that within the repressive Communist and antisemitic society of post-war Slovakia, with a wife who was reviled by other Auschwitz survivors as an oppressive kapo, Wetzler was hugely disadvantaged. Rudolf Vrba knew this—and he sent money. Rudolf Vrba knew this—and he chose not to make the life of his escape partner even more difficult by describing his moments of weakness in print.

Rudolf Vrba wrote at-length about his various beatings and physical privations in his memoir, whereas Wetzler never wrote about the humiliations and suffering he endured at the hands of the Nazis.

Next: ALICE MUNK AND FAMILY CAMP