Like getting to the North Pole, or competing in a beauty contest, it’s tough to be remembered if you come in second.

Therefore, history has not been kind to Czeslav Mordowicz and Arnošt Rosin.

By the time they escaped from Auschwitz-Birkenau, in May of 1944, and they confirmed the Nazis had commenced their plan to murder all of Hungary’s 800,000 Jews, their predecessors Rudolf Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler had already escaped 50 days earlier to produce the Vrba-Wetzler Report, thereby making the Holocaust undeniable.

“While Vrba and Wetzler are known, Mordowicz and Rosin are almost unknown.” — Dr. Jan Hlavinka, Institute of History at the Slovak Academy of Sciences, co-editor of Uncovering the Shoah: Resistance of Jews and Their Efforts to Inform the World on Genocide.

Martin Gilbert’s Take

For a concise summary of the importance of this pairing in Holocaust history, the following text from Sir Martin Gilbert’s essential Auschwitz and the Allies (Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1981) affords a quick synopsis, reprinted herein with the permission of his widow and copy editor, Lady Esther Gilbert:

On May 27 a further escape took place from Auschwitz itself. The escapees were a young Polish Jew, Czeslav Morodowicz, and a Slovak Jew, Arnost Rosin.

During the second week of June 1944 news was finally received in Geneva which was to transform Allied knowledge of Nazi brutality. The source of this news was the information sent from Slovakia, consisting of two separate reports: the detailed account by Vrba and Wetzler of the gassing procedure, and the news brought later by Mordowicz and Rosin, that the deportation of Hungarian Jews was actually in progress, and that they too were being gassed. 

Mordowicz and Rosin had reached the Slovak border on June 6, and had made contact, as Vrba and Wetzler had done, with the Slovak Jewish leadership. The two new escapees told their story, not only the facts once more of the nature of life and death at Auschwitz-Birkenau, as Vrba and Wetzler had told, but also their own eye-witness account of the arrival and destruction of tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews in the week before their escape. As Vrba later commented: “Wetzler and I saw the preparation for the slaughter. Mordowicz and Rosin saw the slaughter itself.”

On reaching Slovakia, Mordowicz and Rosin had been taken to the small hill town of Lipovsky Mikulas, where, as Mordowicz later recalled, they were brought to a room next to the one in which Vrba and Wetzler were already waiting, whereupon the Slovak Jewish leaders, led by Oskar Krasnansky, cross-examined both pairs of escapees, checking one against the other every detail of their description of “normal life” at Auschwitz: “how we were dressed, what we ate, the reality of the Auschwitz life. That was the most difficult for them to believe, the reality. We gave them the names of young Slovak Jews who worked in the Sonderkommando. Some were known to them ….”

Mordowicz and Rosin then made their special report, covering the events at Birkenau between April 7, the day on which Vrba and Wetzler had escaped, and May 27, the day of their own escape. At the beginning of April, they reported, some 1,700 Greek Jews had arrived, of whom 200 had been “admitted to the camp” and the rest “immediately gassed”. Between April 10 and April 15 some 5,000 Polish Jews and non-Jews arrived, including two or three thousand women from Majdanek, of whom 300 were Jewish girls. The new arrivals were given tattoo numbers “running from approximately 176,000 to 181,000”; then, three days after their arrival in Birkenau, the 300 Jewish girls “were all gassed and burned”.

At the end of April 3,200 more Greek Jews had reached Birkenau, of whom all but 200 were “exterminated”. At the beginning of May “smaller transports” of Dutch, French, Belgian and Greek Jews had arrived, most of whom “were put to work in the Buna plant at Monowitz. Then the “mass transports” from Hungary had begun: “the spur railroad track which ran into the camp to the crematoria was completed in great haste,” Mordowicz and Rosin reported, “the crews working night and day, so that the transports could be brought directly to the crematoria. Only about 10 per cent of these transports were admitted to the camp; the balance were immediately gassed and burned. Never had so many Jews been gassed since the establishment of Birkenau.”

Even the capacity of the crematoria had not been enough for these new arrivals. Mordowicz and Rosin told their questioners. As a result, “great pits 30 metres long and 15 metres wide were once more dug in the ‘Birkenwald’ (as in the time before the crematoria) where corpses were burned day and night.”

Shattered by this new information, Krasnansky returned to Bratislava, where he and his colleagues prepared a combined Vrba-Wetzler and Mordowicz-Rosin report, for transmission to the west. “I put the two reports together, and prepared to send them off again,” Krasnansky later recalled. And only seven days later, by means of yet another courier, but this time a reliable one, a copy of the combined report reached neutral Switzerland. Its recipient was Dr Jaromir Kopecky, the Geneva representative of the Czechoslovak Government-in-Exile: it reached Geneva on June 13.

At last the reality of Auschwitz-Birkenau was clear to the outside world. The “unknown destination in the east” finally had a name. The camp which had hitherto been believed to be one of the many labour camps in Upper Silesia was revealed to be the largest single killing centre in Europe. The place where it had earlier been reported that several thousand Jews and several thousand Poles had been murdered was shown to be the site of the murder, during the previous two years, of a million and a half Jews, brought there not only from Poland, but from all over Europe, and still being brought, at the incredible rate of 12,000 a day, from Hungary.

[See also https://www.martingilbert.com/blog/the-also-rans-auschwitz-and-the-allies/]

*

As co-editor with Robin Vrba for the re-issue of Vrba & Bestic’s I Escaped from Auschwitz: The Shocking True Story of the World War II Hero Who Escaped the Nazis and Helped Save over 200,000 Jews (Racehorse Publishing 2020), the Czech researcher and academic Nikola Zimring has also privately contributed an excellent nine-page summary of events from which several hitherto unknown details about the relationship between the two pairs of escapees have been gleaned, as well as additional details about the latter escape:

— The pair planned their escape with support of a kapo named Adam Luženicky, who was a Polish political prisoner.

— The gravel pit in which they hid was only four hundred meters (approximately) from the arrivals train ramp in Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was nonetheless in the “outside perimeter” of the camp (beyond the guarded “inner perimeter wherein the prisoners slept and were guarded).

— Mordowicz had planned to take his friend Borenstein from Płońsk (where Mordowicz had lived and married) but he was selected for duty in a new Sonderkommando unit.

— When Mordowicz selected Rosin as a substitute, the two men barely knew each other. Rosin was chosen largely because he was physically strong.

— Their supply of fresh air in their gravel pit hideout was so insufficient, the pair only remained in hiding for a day-and-a-half.

— As search parties were generally maintained by the Nazis for three full days after an attempted escape, they were very fortunate that service dogs and search parties were temporarily diverted by the arrival on Sunday night of two trainloads of Hungarian Jews.

— Rosin later told Erich Kulka that they were both so overwhelmed with fear as they were escaping that at one point they actually considered returning to Auschwitz.

Czeslav Mordowicz

Upon his arrival at Ben Gurion Airport on March 5, 1965, while being interviewed by the Israeli press, Czeslav Mordowicz showed off the rose tattoo on his forearm. It had been added to hide the scar where his prisoner’s number had been chewed off after he had been recaptured by the Nazis.

Born on Aug. 2, 1919, in the town of Mlawa, in central Poland, as the eldest of two children born to a grain merchant, Herman Mordowicz, and his wife, the former Anna Wicinska, who acted in the local Jewish theatre, Czeslav Mordowicz graduated from the Polish Gimnazium and was making his living as a tutor, hoping to pursue engineering, when, at age 20, he fled the German invasion with his family on a horse-drawn wagon to Warsaw.

Finding Warsaw dangerous and unwelcoming, the family set about trying to return home to Mlawa on foot. Stopping at Płońsk, Czelav remained to help some friends revitalize a grocery store that had been looted by Germans. His sister, Rachela, continued with her parents back to their hometown.

In Płońsk, Czelav found a job as the manager of a fine furniture factory that had been taken over from its Jewish owners by a German interloper who lacked expertise. Czelav married his Jewish hosts’ 19-year-old daughter, Szulamit, and tried to settle down in Płońsk, later noteworthy as the birthplace of Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion.

When Jews in Płońsk were forced into a ghetto, Czelav was able to remain employed by the German furniture manufacturer as a truck driver. Shortly before the Jewish ghetto in Płońsk was to be destroyed and everyone was to be deported, Czelav’s employer asked him if would prefer to go into hiding but Czelav refused to abandon his wife and his in-laws. They were all deported from the Płońsk Ghetto to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Mordowicz’s first wife, Szulamit Perelmuter, whom he had married while in the Płońsk ghetto, was gassed upon her arrival at Auschwitz in December, 1942. Working as a slave labourer in Auschwitz, loading bricks and gravel onto wheelbarrows, Czelav Mordowicz was separated from his in-laws—and he never saw them again.

Like Rudolf Vrba (who Mordowicz never met inside Auschwitz), Mordowicz was able to advance within the camp hierarchy due to his ability to speak German. Like Vrba, also able to survive in Auschwitz as a clerk, he had gained greater mobility within the camp and was able to briefly re-unite with his father by speaking through a camp fence. He learned that his sister had also been gassed. His father died soon after their conversation.

Mordowicz, at 23, first met Wetzler, at 24, while waiting for a truck to take away the day’s latest crop of corpses within the camp. As an old hand, Wetzler had the privileged job of recording the prisoner numbers for the corpses of each inmate who had died of natural causes that day (ie. starvation, disease, starvation, disease, electrocution on the fences). Waiting for the truck, Mordowicz accepted Wetzler’s offer to come into his small mortuary ‘office’ of sorts. Inside, Wetzler cheerfully warmed himself over a small fire, brewing some coffee in an aluminum pot, surrounded by cadavers, calmly using a frozen corpse as a bench.

In the wake of Vrba and Wetzler’s escape in April of 1944, Mordowicz would meet Rosin after they were both demoted to work as laborers in the gravel pit. All eight Jewish clerks had first been severely beaten with a wooden club in a failed attempt to extract confessions of involvement in the successful escape. Mordowicz told his biographer Fred Bleakley that he passed out, as did others, until a bucket of cold water was poured on his head.

After torture, Mordowicz was reassigned to Block 18. For his work detail he was overseen by “a hulking, bald-headed man of about fifty years of age,” Adam Rozycki, a convicted murderer who had gained the respect of the SS guards by brutally murdering many of his charges and operating a smuggling pipeline in the camp for food items and vodka.

Oddly, this sadist with a sneering smile and wooden leg gave preferential treatment to Mordowicz, possibly because he was a Pole and it was rumoured Germany could be losing the war. Once he was on the “outside” at the end of the war, Rozycki would need some fellow Poles to vouch for him if he was to be re-accepted into Polish society. Or else Rozycki could have been befriending Mordowicz to double-cross him, assisting with the escape initiative only so he could turn him into the SS and gain credit for foiling the escape.

Rozycki said he wanted to escape with Mordowicz. This didn’t make much sense to Mordowicz. How could he expect to run with a peg leg?

Mordowicz diplomatically told his would-be partner that local residents on the ‘outside’ would see his peg leg and he would be too easily identified. Rozycki accepted this logic and told Mordowicz to find an alternate cohort as soon as possible.

Initially, Mordowicz selected Josef Borenstein, a friend from Płońsk who had been with him on the train to Auschwitz. But Borenstein was unexpectedly transferred to the Sonderkommando squad.

Mordowicz asked Arnošt Rosin to be his partner.

Rozycki oversaw the preparation of the gravel pit hideout with the help of two (unnamed) Polish prisoners. The gravel pit was only 400 metres from the main arrivals ramp at Birkenau.

Both Vrba or Mordowicz would escape from Auschwitz in hideouts that were designed and built by others.
Both would occupy cavities in construction materials in the camp’s outer perimeter.
Both would take the advice of the Russian prisoner named Volkov about using tobacco previously soaked with petrol to deter the police dogs
Both would plan to remain in their hideout for three days until the Nazis had called off their search.

Neither gave much credit to the facilitators of their hideouts.

Arnost Rosin

Rosin – early photo

Born on March 20, 1913 in Znina (or Snina), when it was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Rosin grew up with six older siblings. Possibly, this helps to explain his later affinity with Rudolf Vrba, who had three older siblings.

In 1939, Rosin was taking courses in Bratislava (known as Pressburg in German, Pozsony in Hungarian) in preparation for relocation in Palestine. According to Robin Vrba, Rudolf Vrba told her that prior to the war Rosin had also been a professional thief. It is also little-known that Rosin did his Hachshara (a Hebrew term describing work in preparation for emigration Palestine) at the Ripper distillery owned by Moric Ripper before the war.

Apprehended by Hlinka guards in April of 1942, while returning to visit his family for Passover, Rosin became one of approximately 58,000 Slovak Jews (out of approximately 89,000 in total) who were deported to “resettlement areas in the east.” After he was initially held in Snina with twenty other Jewish men, he was taken to Huménne, then brought to Žilina. There, he later claimed, “the Guard members in their black uniforms… taught us the first concentration camp lesson. They would swear, beat and kick us without reason, and rob us or our personal belongings.”

Sent to Auschwitz on April 17, 1942, Rosin was relocated to Birkenau two or three days later (accounts vary) where he would meet historian-to-be Erich Kulka and his friend Otto Kraus who, together, would publish Death Factory, generally regarded as the first (albeit unreliable) book about Auschwitz-Birkenau. Published first in the Czech language in 1946, it would be translated into many languages. Twenty years later Rosin would provide an oral account of his ordeals when he was interviewed by Kulka, in Czech, in 1965, and this material would be held in the Yad Vashem Archives, subsequently made more widely available by Eduard Nižňanský:

Zwardoń Train Station

“Together with about 1,000 men, I was taken to the Žilina train station where they put us into cattle cars. When the sliding doors were shut and locked with heavy padlocks, and numerous members of the Hlinka Guard were commanded to accompany the train, we began to sense that something bad was afoot. They drove us at night in the direction of Čadca and the train didn’t stop until it reached the Polish border station Zwardoń in the morning. We were commanded to get off the cars, opened by the Hlinka Guard members. We were counted and handed over to German soldiers who forced us into the cars again and accompanied us on our further journey. On 10 April we arrived at a station denoted Oswiecim – Auschwitz. SS soldiers in uniforms were waiting at the station and took us to the Auschwitz concentration camp…

“Only on the second day we began to sense how bad it was. The SS were marching us already from the station at an unusually fast pace and I was intrigued to see the inscription ´Arbeit macht frei´ over the gate through which we entered. I saw high fences with barbed wire all around, and inmates in striped clothes with shaved heads. What is going on here? Where are we? Prison clothes? We are not criminals, are we? […] In the twinkling of an eye we were undressed, shaved, our hair was cut and then the SS came and started to call us names, beat and kick us in a way which defies description…

“Birkenau was like hell. The camps were being filled up, new ones were opened, flames went up from the crematoria and the pits day and night. I could see that the end of the whole camp was drawing inescapably near and there was nothing to wait for. It would be better to die on the run! I knew it was the only chance but I did not know where to find a good ally.”

Little White House, Little Red House, locations

Among the 200 Jews who arrived in Rosin’s transport, Rosin was selected to dig pits in the forest to bury naked Jews who had been gassed in one of two farmhouses that been renovated into gas chambers. For about twenty days he endured this gruelling and macabre task, burying the mainly Jewish corpses hauled from the two renovated farmhouses (known as the little Red House and the little White House) for asphyxiations.

According to the historian Erich Kulka in a Jewish Social Studies article in 1985, Rosin was the only survivor from that specific outdoors Sonderkommando group of 300 Slovakian Jews deported in April of 1942. Having found a gold chain in a loaf of bread, Rosin was able to bribe his block Schreiber Leo Polak and gain a transfer to a different unit.

As improbable as a fairy tale, Rosin’s life was be saved after a friend in the Sonderkommando brigade had gifted him some bread taken from a murder victim, Rosin was startled to discover within that gift of bread—unbeknownst to the person who had given it to him—was a gold chain. This miraculous discovery enabled Rosin to bribe his block Schrieber, Leo Polak, to get him transferred to a different block, leading to safer work.

Hence, Rosin would become one of the precious few who ever survived a tenure within a Sonderkommando brigade in 1942. According to Kulka, he was the lone Slovakian Jew to survive his Sonderkommando brigade among the 300 Slovakian Jews who arrived with him in April.

Rosin eventually became part of an informal camp resistance. For a Yad Vashem interview he recalled, “It was a group of friends, in my case Bandy Muller, Fred Wetzler, Ota Kraus, Erich Schon, Ada Rosenfeld, Honza Cespiva and others. We were collecting every piece of information and exchanging it among ourselves, often fooling ourselves that things would turn out for the good… We were helping each other with a piece of bread or by providing our friends with clothing, shoes, better work and, if they were sick, by hiding them from control or selection at the block until they recovered. We were encouraging one another by saying, ‘Wash yourself, keep your head high, do not let them beat you to death.”

Rosin rose in stature as the Blockleader of Block 24 where he befriended the Schreiber Wetzler, leading to his acquaintance with Vrba. As a Slovakian Jew, he was then suspected of complicity in Wetzler’s escape even though Wetzler had seemingly taken the precautionary measure of getting himself transferred from Block 24 two months in advance of his escape attempt.

After Vrba and Wetlzer escaped, Rosin was consequently interrogated and tortured before he was banished to work in the gravel pit. He managed to convince the Nazis he was angry at Wetzler for keeping him the dark because he had wanted to try escaping with him. The ruse worked.

Their Escape

On Saturday, May 27, around noon, Czelav Mordowicz and Arnošt Rosin, dressed in electricians’ overalls, met at the water pump near the gravel pit, as planned. They quickly slid inside their narrow hideout, essentially a bunker inside the gravel pit, overlaid with wood, propped up with some improvised posts. The principle was to emulate the bunker that had been used by – but not made by – Vrba and Wetzler within a lumber pile.

The hiding space measured approximately seven-feet long, six-feet wide and two-and-a-half feet high. Rosin, who was taller, squeezed into position first. The smaller Mordowicz, at five-foot-eight, had to bend his knees to fit alongside. Two Polish helpers secured a wooden covering over the sloping entrance, while inserting an air pipe of lead.

As agreed, Mordowicz tested the air pipe and knocked twice on the wooden roof to signal the cramped pod was ventilated. Emulating Vrba and Wetzler, the escapees had spread fuel-soaked tobacco to disperse Alsatian search dogs. The duo anticipated remaining hidden for three days; whereas it has been revealed in Holocaust Hero that Vrba and Wetzler were originally required to remain hidden for six days.

The difficulties faced by the escape’s leader, Mordowicz, were arguably greater than those faced by Vrba and Wetzler who were essentially volunteers as part of a larger team. For starters, Mordowicz was burying himself in a tiny chamber, within a gravel pit, with less oxygen and less provisions than Vrba and Wetzler, with an escape partner he hardly knew. As well, in the wake of the escapes made by Siegfried Lederer (April 5) and Wetzler/Vrba (April 7-10), the number of guards who watched the prisoners had increased and roll calls were being held every two hours.

Realizing that Vrba and Wetzler must have taken advantage of their jobs as roving clerks to better gauge the camp procedures, the Nazis had interrogated and tortured the eight remaining Jewish clerks, or schreibers, including Czelav Mordowicz. Along with other Jews in Auschwitz-Birkenau with administrative responsibilities, he’d been forced to lower their pants, bend over a table, step into foot stirrups and be repeatedly struck with a wooden club. As previously mentioned, Mordowicz and several others eventually passed out. All clerks had lost their jobs.

Although Arnošt Rosin was not a clerk, he, too, had also lost his relatively privileged job as blockleader of Block 24 where he had necessarily come into frequent contact with Wetzler. Even though “Fredo” Wetzler had managed to get himself transferred from Block 24 to Barrack 9 prior to his escape (to minimize possible repercussions on associates), the Nazis were determined to ensure there would not be another humiliating escape that served to raise the morale of their prisoners. Rosin, too, was interrogated, beaten and tortured. He saved his skin by pretending he had been angry that he had not been asked the Vrba and Wetzler to escape with them.

Mordowicz’s escape plan went awry almost from the start. In the pitch-blackness, they spilled their can of water. Next, they realized their one-inch-thick, three-foot-long pipe, inserted to ensure there would be fresh air, was seemingly plugged. When siren sounds and the search parties predictably commenced around five o’clock in the afternoon, the pair huddled in fear and imagined they would be buried alive. They wondered if their two helpers, who were hoping to use the same escape plan if Mordowicz and Rosin succeeded, could have blocked the airway to kill them. That way, they could remove the bodies and use the hideout for themselves, not worrying whether Mordowicz and Rosin had been captured outside the camp and then tortured to make them reveal the hiding place.

“The gravel pit was a nightmare,” writes Allan J. Levine in Captivity, Flight and Survival in World War II.  Like Vrba and Wetzler, the pair could hear the search dogs barking and the SS guards shouting. With their ventilation opening clogged, Mordowicz managed to create an airway about the width of two fingers to be keep them alive.

Terrified and feeling weak, it did not strike them as feasible to stay in hiding for three days, as Vrba and Wetzler had done, until the search parties were called off. Even though they knew the search parties would continue for another day-and-a-half, they decided, before they fainted, they had to take the risk of digging themselves out of their gravel pit, having hidden there for two days instead of three.

Rosin recalled the details in an interview that is stored at the Yav Vashem archives:

“We were really scared. We were upset and our hearts were beating fast. We found it more and more difficult to breathe, we thought we would suffocate. After three hours of searching in vain for a ventilation opening, we resorted to a desperate and dangerous act. We pulled the propping beam from the bunker entrance inside. The gravel which covered the entrance penetrated inside and reduced the space in the bunker but at least we could breathe a little better.

“… On Sunday evening, we could not stand it anymore. Our hands and feet were numb. We could not move. We decided to crawl between two watchtowers which we could see from our bunker.…We were lucky that evening. Several trains with Hungarian transports had arrived at the ramp. There was much commotion and confusion in the whole camp, we could hear the whistling of the locomotives, noise, shouting, barking of dogs, so that the watchmen did not hear us when we crawled beneath them.

… At the moment when the Birkenau death camp, no more than 400 metres from our bunker, was filled with transports and the selected deportees were being guided by the SS to the crematoria, accompanied by dogs barking, beating and shouting, we escaped from that hell, into the opposite direction.”

That night, with two trainloads of Hungarian Jews arriving almost simultaneously, all the so-called “service dogs” were diverted to terrify the Hungarian Jews, most of whom would be murdered. The pair decided to push the roof off and crawl to the top of the quarry, but forgot to bring along their extra loaf of bread. With the SS diverted by the action on the ramp, Mordowicz and Rosin took the extreme risk of simply crawling to freedom between two watchtowers.

Using the flames from the crematoria as a landmark, they managed to reach the Sola River about two miles away. They had agreed to go towards Krakow, about thirty miles away, and eventually reach Warsaw. Perhaps they could join the Red Army or reach Gdansk, cross the Baltic and end up in neutral Sweden? But these dreams and schemes required them to first swim across the Sola River.

Mordowicz could not swim. Rosin stripped off his own clothes and carried them, with his boots, to the other bank of the river. Then he returned to assist Mordowicz who held his own clothes and boots aloft. During Rosin’s successful efforts to keep Mordowicz from being pulled downstream and drowning, Mordowicz’s shoes fell into the river and were lost.

Reaching the other side, they dressed and decided to share one of Rosin’s shoes each. They wrapped their other bare foot with strips torn from their shirts. This detail would later be inserted in Wetzler’s novelistic account of his own escape with Vrba. Seven decades later, Slovakian filmmakers would use Wetzler’s fanciful tale as a blueprint for realistically depicting Vrba and Wetzler’s travails.

Their haphazard escape was a blend of folly and good fortune. At one point, Polish-raised Mordowicz and Rosin traded a wristwatch with a boatman for his footwear. Another time, when they saw German troops, they stood in their work overalls and pretended to examine some electricity wires overhead.

When a Polish peasant woman forewarned them that Nazi patrols were gathering young Poles to dig anti-tank trenches on the deadly Eastern Front, they turned south, deciding instead to try and reach Rosin’s hometown in Slovakia. At one point they were so traumatized they even considered the prospect of returning to Auschwitz.

“We lost all hope and did not have the strength to walk any further,” Rosin recalled. “We had imagined that if we got out of the camp, we would have a good job! Everyone we ask will help. But fear took over us outside, we saw that danger was lurking around every corner, that someone would betray us, that they would capture us and take us back to the camp…

“When Mordowicz and I put our heads together in the evening, we admitted to each other that we were nowhere near as afraid in the camp as we were out here in the open air. In Birkenau, as experienced prisoners, we lived more calmly. We had become accustomed to the idea that death awaits us, and we have pushed its occurrence to the farthest possible limit…

“Outside, however, the world was foreign. Lacking experience, afraid of light, space, people, we felt safe only with darkness. The enthusiasm that we managed to escape and that we were bringing news to the world gradually faded away in proportion to the loss of our physical strength.”

In desperation, they hopped a train they assumed would take them in the direction of Nowy Targ in southern Poland (an historic, mountain town, aka Królewskie Wolne Miasto Nowy Targ, known as Nový Trhin nearby Slovakia). While cowering on the roof of the train, they passed a sign telling them they were only twelve kilometres away from Auschwitz.

Map showing Auschwitz and Spišská Stará Ves, where Mordowicz an Rosin ended up on the train. 

Before the train reached any station, they alighted and eventually reached an area that was close to Spišská Stará Ves, a small town in the Prešov Region of north Slovakia. They knew they had reached Slovakia when they saw a matchbox on the ground with Slovak writing. By June 6, they had reached the Slovak village of Nedeca. Euphoric, Rosin went to buy beer and cigarettes at a kiosk but he was refused service.

When a peasant told them that Allied forces had just invaded Normandy, they rejoiced to learn that victory could be at hand. Rosin immediately decided they must celebrate at the nearest tavern. Mordowicz reluctantly consented. They were promptly arrested because the kiosk manager who had rebuffed Rosin had promptly alerted local police as to the presence of two suspicious strangers.

As they were arrested and taken to the courthouse at Spišská Stará Ves, Rosin recognized an acquaintance, Juhas Aladar, from his hometown of Snina, who quickly brought word of their arrest to the leaders of the local Jewish community.

Two Jews named Alex Mangel and Moskovic managed to deliver dollar bills to the pair of incarcerated fugitives, whereupon they could be charged with smuggling foreign currency. It is conceivable that some bribery of local officials was also involved.

The pair’s court case was reassessed as a financial crime. That called for a court hearing in the district capitol of Liptovský Mikuláš, two hours west by train, on the Váh River, nearer to Žilina (and about 285 kilometers from Bratislava).

To the surprise and relief of Rosin and Mordowicz, they were met on the platform of the Liptovský Mikuláš train station by none other than Rudolf Vrba, who hugged them both and reassured them they would receive help. With their forged identity papers, both he and Wetzler were able to visit the fugitives in prison, awaiting trial. This detail has been overlooked in Bleakley’s version of events in his biography of Mordowicz, The Auschwitz Protocols (2022). Either Mordowicz did not wish to tell his biography or he forbade his biographer to mention the involvement of Vrba and Wetzler in the process that led to their release.

Each man received eight-day sentences and the Jewish community paid their fine of 5,000 Slovak crowns. Upon their release, Oscar Krasniansky arrived from Bratislava on behalf of the Working Group in Bratislava to take their statements about Auschwitz. This occurred in the home of a local man named Boby Reich.

Both Bleakley and Erich Kukla confirm that the two sets of escapees met in a safe house in Liptovský Mikuláš. Mordowicz had never met Vrba before. The worst fears of Vrba and Wetzler were confirmed: Between May 12 and May 27, Rosin and Mordowicz estimated that approximately 100,000 Hungarian Jews were gassed upon their arrival. There was no end in sight.

“Wetzler and I saw the preparation for the slaughter,” Vrba wrote in the magazine Jewish Currents in 1966. “Mordowicz and Rosin saw the slaughter itself.”

Free At Last

In the late spring of 1944, soon after their arrival in Slovakia on June 6, Mordowicz and Rosin shared their revelations with Oskar Krasňanský who interviewed them at the home of Rabbi Boby Reich, a Jewish leader in Liptovský Mikuláš. The pair brought the news that the first transport of Hungarian Jews on May 10 was assigned for labour detail. Thereafter, between May 15 and 27, between 14,000 and 15,000 Hungarian Jews were arriving daily and 90% were being sent immediately to the gas chambers. They also confirmed that the spur railroad track that enabled train shipments to be brought directly to the crematoria had been completed, thereby further streamlining the genocide process.

Returning to Bratislava, Krasňanský and his colleagues drafted a German-language report for the Allies, combining the reports from all four escapees. According to Martin Gilbert, a copy was received by Dr. Jaromir Kopecky, the Geneva representative of the Czechoslovak Government-in-Exile: it reached Geneva on June 13.

As the local Jewish underground amalgamated the Mordowicz-Rosin Report with the preceding Vrba-Wetzler Report for the Auschwitz Protocols, to eventually also be appended by the Polish Major’s Report, the foursome adapted to the strain of hiding in public. Initially, they were like a brotherhood, with code names.

Arnošt Rosin adopted the alias Stefan Rohac. The second-eldest, Wetzler, adopted his future pen name Josef Lanik. Czeslav Mordowicz adopted the alias Peter Matus (or Petr Pudlka). And with new identity papers for Rudolf Vrba as of May 23, 1944, the teenage Slovak originally known as Walter Rosenberg would jettison his birth name forever.

The dynamics between all four men were celebratory, then cordial, but gradually some antipathy would arise between the two most overtly egocentric characters, Vrba and Mordowicz, the only pairing that had not crossed paths in the camps. After the quartet of whistleblowers were sent to live in the town of Liptovský Svätý Mikuláš, 55 miles east of Žilina, Vrba and Rosin would live together in one apartment in Bratislava while Mordowicz and Wetzler lived together on the outskirts of Bratislava in the home of a Catholic family.

Piarist Monastery, at Svaty Jur

During the summer, Mordowicz and Vrba were sent to the monastery, built in 1720, for a clandestine meeting some 14 kilometres from Bratislava with someone who they assumed was the Papal Nuncio, a representative of the Pope. Apparently, according to his biographer, Mordowicz did most of the talking to the Catholic official because he was more adept at French.

Mordowicz was critical of Vrba for accepting a cigar in the red-carpeted lounge and laughing, “as if they were at a party.” At nineteen, in Mordowicz’ eyes, Vrba was showing his age. These details perhaps tell us as much about Mordowicz as they do about Vrba.

Mordowicz told his biographer that their conversations with the “Monsignor” continued for five-and-a-half hours, while the Pope’s representative took copious notes but remained seemingly incredulous of their ghastly revelations pertaining to Auschwitz. Fearful that the “nuncio” might leave the meeting at any minute, Ceslav tried a final gambit. “Monsignor, listen to me. Not only are Jews being murdered, even people wearing” — and he pointed to the white collar on the nuncio’s neck – “but the murder of priests is not like the Jews gassed in the ovens at Auschwitz.” Mordowicz elaborated. He said the Nazis were killing priests elsewhere, in Krakow and other European cities.

At this juncture, according to Mordowicz, the papal nuncio screamed and fainted, falling to the floor. Hundreds of priests had been disappearing and, according to Mordowicz, the Catholic Church did not know why. Hence, it was Mordowicz who finally succeeded in galvanizing the attention of Pope’s representative who, hitherto, had not been suffused with distress about the mass murder of Jews.

Again, according to Mordowicz, he was the one who urged the Catholic Church to send their eye-witness testimonies to statesmen in England, America, Sweden, the Red Cross and the Pope. The nuncio promised to comply.

In this version of history, it is Ceslav Mordowicz who should be accorded credit for being the primary spokesperson at this vital meeting that mobilized international leaders and the Pope to put the necessary pressure on Admiral Horthy, the leader of Hungary, to finally stop the train transports of Jews to Auschwitz. Monsignor Martilotti did alert Pope Pius XII, as promised, but Rudolf Vrba (and/or his co-author Alan Bestic) failed to give him credit for doing so in Vrba’s memoir.

Responding to Mordowicz’ grievance, Vrba tried to make amends with a footnote in a subsequent edition, but Mordowicz would hold a grudge to the end of his days. The newest edition of I Escaped From Auschwitz therefore contains two clarifications pertaining to this matter (displayed in footnotes on page 309, not relegated to the back of the book):

“The Report was sent to Msgr. Angelo Burzio, who was not Papal Nuncio, but was in fact [the Papal] charge d’affaires in Slovakia (the lower rank or an apostolic delegation), since there was no nunciature in Slovakia at the time. But Krasňanský—by mistake—referred to him as Nuncio, and this is why the author referred to him as Nuncio as well. The author actually met with Msgr. Mario Martilloti, who came to Bratislava on an errand from Switzerland, and who was a member of the Vatican nuncio office.

“The author visited Svaty Jur with Czelav Mordowicz, the Birkenau prisoner who escaped six weeks after Vrba and was able to reach Slovakia. The author left him out from the book, which caused friction between them. Here is the author’s explanation why he excluded Mordowicz:

‘I did not mention Mordowicz at all because at the time of its writing (1963), I lived in England, having left Communist Czechoslovakia in 1958. Mordowicz at that time still lived in Bratislava under the neo-Stalinist regime of Antonin Novotny. To publicly describe in England a close connection between myself and Mordowicz might have caused him problems.’”

-Rudolf Vrba

An equally important story from 1944 that concerns heroic actions taken by Vrba on behalf of Mordowicz and Wetzler was not told by Vrba. It was only recorded about seventy years later by Mordowicz’s biographer.

Images of Nitra, circa 1944.

In September of 1944, when Wetzler decided he would risk a visit to the western Slovakian town of Nitra to see his brother and his family, Mordowicz opted to join him for the excursion. Mordowicz’ own family had perished in Auschwitz. His mother and sister were most likely gassed upon arrival and father had died as result of exhaustion from forced labour not long after his arrival. Mordowicz never went anywhere without a revolver in his trench coat.

Officials on the train to Nitra were easily fooled by their fake IDs. After the pair slept in the Nitra train station (due to the curfew), they set off around dawn only to be stopped by two Slovakian policemen in a park. They were curious about why the duo was out so early in the day. When Mordowicz and Wetzler provided their identification papers, claiming to be clerks, the two policemen became more suspicious and ordered the pair to walk towards the main square, at gunpoint. Their identification papers were withheld, pending closer scrutiny at the police station. Before they got that far, Mordowicz whispered to Wetzler in French, “We go as far as the next corner, not one step more.”

Mordowicz pulled out his revolver and fired into the air. The two guards panicked as Mordowicz fled in one direction and Wetzler fled in another. Mordowicz shed his distinctive trenchcoat and ran up the hill towards a monastery where he spotted some stairs leading to a belltower. There he hid behind some scaffolding that was surrounding the church. When the bells pealed at the end of mass, his ears ached. He nonetheless hid near the top of the church for a long time. News that two dangerous partisans were loose in town spread throughout Nitra. Mordowicz eventually risked shielding his face with a newspaper and walking to the train station only to discover that trains would not stop that day at Nitra due to the emergency situation.

Mordowicz walked fifteen miles to the next rail stop at Leopoldov, caught a train, and made it back to Bratislava. There he pleaded with Rudolf Vrba to go to the apartment of Wetzler’s brother in Nitra and try to find out what had happened to Wetzler. Risking his own life, Vrba obtained a new set of false identification papers for Wetzler. Vrba located Wetzler hiding in a mountain cabin (or at the brother’s apartment; accounts differ). With new ID, Wetzler and Vrba managed to escape a second time–this time from the police in Nitra–and made it safely back to Bratislava.

Vrba had a much more convivial relationship with Rosin. According to Robin Vrba, her husband told her that Rosin had somehow procured some gold coins and had kept them concealed during his escape with Mordowicz. When Vrba was leaving to join the Partisans, he took two of these gold coins from Rosin’s stash. Many years later, when the two friends were re-united, Vrba returned these same two coins to Rosin. There was a moment of levity when Vrba asked Rosin if he had noticed that two of his coins had gone missing. Rosin said, yes, he knew two coins were missing. He also knew who had taken them.

“How did you know it was me that took those two coins?” Vrba asked.

“That’s easy,” Rosin replied. “Anyone else would have taken all of them.

*

The Ripper Distillery

After Mordowicz and Rosin were fortified with fake papers, as well as a monthly stipend, the foursome opted to separate themselves from the paternalism of Krasniansky and the so-called “Working Group.”

Due to Rosin’s previous affiliation with the Slovak distillery originally owned by Moric Ripper—then taken over by, or sold to, Leopold Kulka—they found employment with the Ripper distillery.  Kulka was still living in Žilina with his family because he had received “Exemption from deportation for economically needed Jews” from the Slovak (fascist) State in 1942.

While seeking female companionship wherever they went, the bachelor quartet likely consumed as much liquor as they sold until a second wave of deportations from the Sered concentration camp in Slovakia began in summer of 1944. When the foursome understood they could no longer depend upon the support and protection from the local Jewish leaders, Vrba left for Nagyszombat, where his mother was living, and found his way to the partisans; Wetzler took refuge with his brother in Nitra.

Mordowicz as Sisyphus

It was during this period of great suspicion and unrest, in the autumn of 1944, that Mordowicz was arrested by pro-Nazi militiamen and accused of being a Soviet spy. Initially Mordowicz succeeded in using his false identity papers, covering his tattooed Auschwitz prisoner number with surgical tape, but this proved to be a temporary ruse.

The privations and beatings that Mordowicz suffered after being re-captured have been summarized in an article by historian Eduard Nižňanský in 2018:

Mordowicz was arrested because he was sitting with Wetzler’s sister-in-law in the Palace restaurant, and it became suspicious that he was conversing with a Jewish woman. He tried to escape, but the guards caught him, and when he was arrested, they beat him so that he ended up unconscious at the command of the HG. He was interrogated by Jozef Vozár, who used to be the commander of the Jewish labor camp in Séred. During the interrogation, they thought he was a Soviet agent because he could not speak Slovak well. The guards also abused him during his interrogation: “To the questions about who I met, where I lived, where I stayed, I always gave negative answers, i.e. that I didn’t live anywhere, I didn’t meet anyone, etc., so I received a lot of cruel blows. They beat me up in such a way that Vozár himself handed me a mirror to see what I looked like and said that I fainted at least twelve times during that one hour.” Above all, Mordowicz was careful not to mention Rosin. He eventually admitted that he was Jewish but claimed to be Slovak. He had a document sewn into his trousers stating that his name was Koloman Altmann and that he was from Lőcse. However, Vozár did not believe him.

He was later handed over to the Gestapo. Mordowicz understood that he was indeed in deep trouble. “I was ordered to strip naked. This was the culmination of everything: my tattooed number was glued over with leucoplast. I tried to stand so that the bottom of my right arm was not visible, I switched to German and emphasized that I was a simple Jew.” The tattooed number pasted over with leucoplast was not noticed by the Gestapo.

Years later, Mordowicz could not say exactly where he was detained and when he was transferred to Sered. However, he mentioned that at that time many Jewish residents were arrested in Bratislava.

His trials continued in the deportation car. “I was still isolated in a wagon, but I didn’t know where the transport was going. There was talk of going to Wiener Neustadt. This was in October 1944, after the uprising. I was in a terrible state: mentally, physically, morally exhausted, I was not viable. In the train, I used my last strength to warn the others about where the transport was going, that they couldn’t believe the Germans, because we were going to die – but they threw themselves at me, beat me…

“I kept repeating that we are going to die, let those who can escape, and I am willing to show the way. They beat me, kicked me, I lay unconscious, I was dead.”

Only Mordowicz could understand how dire his situation was. After having been beaten to a pulp as a troublemaker, while being deported back to Auschwitz from Ghetto Płońsk in Poland, he still had to prepare for the hell he knew was coming. It was entirely possible the SS would recognize him on the platform. He had only been gone from Auschwitz for five months. Worse, his tattoo would immediately identify him as an escapee and he knew full well he would likely be tortured before he was killed.

Mordowicz decided to take the only possible precautionary measure that was available to him. During that second train journey to Auschwitz, Mordowicz succeeded in chewing off much of the tattoo on his forearm.

“I had nothing at my disposal,” he later recalled, “only my own teeth.”

The enormous wound filled with pus but that was the least of his worries. As soon as he stepped off the train, he knew nothing had changed. As the selection procedures began on the ramp, he vowed to grab a pistol from a Nazi and shoot himself, killing one Nazi first. Then someone on the ramp tapped him on the shoulder.

Mordowicz turned and saw a childhood friend from Mlawa, a Sonderkommando whose job was to seize and unload all the baggage. Ceslav followed him, as directed, and managed to circumvent the selection queue for Crematorium III. The friend took him past a wooded area, near the “sauna/bathhouse,” to meet a Slovakian tattooist he knew. This tattooist named Lale Sokolov, born in Krompachy in Eastern Slovakia, agreed to create a tattoo to conceal the damage done by his teeth. Sokolov (who was later featured in a novelized 2018 romance, The Tattooist of Auschwitz, a debut novel by Heather Morris that became a #1 New York Times bestseller, translated into 27 languages, and subsequently adapted for a TV series), provided a new tattoo number so he couldn’t be identified as an escapee. This new number was surrounded by a fish-shaped tattoo to disguise the damage done by his teeth.  

A Peacock television series in 2024 depicted the tattooist who saved Mordowicz in Auschwitz.

This ruse worked long enough for Mordowicz to disguise himself as a Slovak worker. Respected and recognized by other prisoners as an escapee, Mordowicz was given dark glasses and placed on sick leave for two days, avoiding any labour detail. He was told his new name was Peter Reichmann and he was to be sent out of Auschwitz the next day on a train transport with fifty other Slovak workers bound for Germany. He therefore became an extreme rarity: a man who escaped from Auschwitz twice.

For the next six months as “Peter Reichmann,” Mordowicz worked in a furniture factory in Friedland, in central Germany. As it became increasingly obvious from reports smuggled into the camp that Germany was losing the war, Mordowicz, unlike many other prison workers, was apprehensive. He knew the Nazis. He expected the Germans would kill all the prisoners before surrendering. Mordowicz decided he must escape—again—or die. He managed to secure an escape kit consisting of food, cigarettes and a revolver. “I did it once,” he said, “and I can do it again.”

On May 6, 1945, three days prior to the camp’s liberation, four other friends in the camp joined him. Security at the camp was becoming increasingly lax. Mordowicz and his group simply walked out of the camp after they had short-circuited some wire fencing in the camp. The surprised Germans in the towers thought they were Russians because the group started using Russian. The group walked into the surrounding woods where they remained until the official liberation three days later. He was free, 210 miles from Berlin… after nearly six years as a refugee, prison inmate and runaway.

Mordowicz stayed in Friedland for a few days (exact duration unknown) until he decided to return to Bratislava and look for Wetzler, Vrba and Rosin. He felt there was no reason to return to his native town of Mlawa in Poland because he knew his entire family was dead. He reached Bratislava and there he met the trio who were happy to see him. They knew nothing of his fate until then.

Czeslaw Mordowicz 1947 as a 24-year-old Polish Jew.

Mordowicz in 1995. From a screen shot from his five hours of interviews for U.S. Holocaust Museum. Mordowicz began to learn English upon his arrival in Canada in 1985.

After the war, retaining his name Stefan Rohac to avoid being identified as an Auschwitz escapee, Mordowicz found a job as a clerk for an electronics company in Bratislava. He would also reunite with Rosin for a motorcycle trip, retracing their escape route.

While taking night school classes for an economics degree from Komenskeho University, he met a young dressmaker, Ester Golubowicz, a Polish Jew, born in Lodz. As a concentration camp survivor, she had lost her spouse in the camps and opted to restart her life in Slovakia. They married in 1946 or 1948. Mordowicz received a degree in Economics and gradually rose in his work, eventually becoming Managing Director of Distribution for Technomat and later General Manager of a sister company Electroodbyt.

Mordowicz worked in Bratislava until immigrating to Israel in 1965. After his retirement, Mordowicz and his wife moved to Toronto in 1985 where their daughter Ester died in February of 1993. Feeling himself to be underserved by history, Mordowicz died in Toronto on October 28, 2001, resenting Rudolf Vrba’s charisma and believing he and Arnošt Rosin deserved to be venerated as the second-most vital pair of Holocaust whistleblowers.

Both Rosin and Mordowicz had brief tenures in Israel where they learned, as Vrba had realized, that the Israeli establishment was not keen on publicizing either of their escapes. Both feats of heroism gave rise to an exceedingly uncomfortable question: Why didn’t Jewish Councils forewarn the Jews of Hungary about the contents of the escapees’ two reports?

Arnošt Rosin and his bride, Manželia Rosinovci.

Rosin on a kibbutz in Israel where he remained for only one year. [From archive of Juraj Šeb]

Arnošt Rosin, who had served Rudolf Vrba’s best man for his wedding, married a Czech woman in 1946. He served as a witness for the Auschwitz war crime trials held in in Kraków, in 1947, during which time he confirmed the identities of defendants SS–Oberscharführer Ludwig Plagge and SS-Unterscharführer Fritz “Bulldog” Buntrock. Both were found guilty of war crimes and executed the following year. He appeared on the sixteenth day of trial, on December 11, 1947.

Rosin and his wife stayed for one year in Palestine (Israel, as of 1948) before returning to Czechoslovakia in 1949. He eventually worked for the Czechoslovakian state television network from 1960 to 1966. Known for his black humour, Rosin moved to West Germany in 1968 and died in Düsseldorf, Germany in 2000, at age 87.

In 2018, Juraj Šebo, wrote a 200-page biography of Rosin, I Was There… published by the Museum of Jewish Culture in Bratislava, under the direction of Pavol Mešťan. Rosin, who was childless, had served Šebo as a surrogate father. The author Šebo knew Rosin as he was growing in Bratislava from ages 6 to 25.

Mordowicz and Rosin retraced their getaway trail from Auschwitz for a motorcycle journey after the war. © Dagmar Wertheim, daughter of Czeslaw Mordowicz.

“I admire him for being optimistic,” said Šebo, “despite what he experienced in Auschwitz. I remember him as an elegant man who liked to joke, always smiling. When he appeared in society, he knew how to entertain so much of the past. Rosin was completely different – he considered it a closed chapter of life after escaping from hell. I have no doubt that Auschwitz left a trace or scar on him in his soul, but it was not visible from the outside.”

Due to geographical and political barriers (residing under Soviet control behind the Iron Curtain), Wetzler, Mordowicz and Rosin were less capable or less willing to speak frankly about the Holocaust. It was only human nature for them to envy and look askance at Vrba’s opportunities and abilities to do so, seemingly to take centre stage, particularly for Mordowicz and Rosin after they learned their privations and heroism were absent from his memoir published in 1963.

Vrba, for his part, never felt he was under any obligation to placate Mordowicz’s bruised ego. He felt there was no apology required if his co-writer Alan Bestic had decided his memoir should not confuse his English readers by adding a flurry of difficult-to-pronounce foreign names, taking his drama sideways in order to also include Mordowicz and Rosin’s own complicated escape narrative.

Refuting Allegations that Vrba Stole the Limelight

1. At a conference in Žilina in 2015, historian Eduard Nižňanský of Bratislava University provided a basic and yet oft-overlooked explanation as to why the audacious and heroic escape of Mordowicz (prisoner #84216) and Rosin (prisoner #29858) has long remained obscure: “Unlike the case of Alfréd Wetzler and Rudolf Vrba, the story of the escape of A. Rosin and C. Mordowicz is virtually unknown. In my opinion, one of the reasons is that they, unlike the two previously mentioned, never wrote about it.”

2.  In 1963, the general public still knew precious little about the Holocaust. Rudolf Vrba did not yet have the English skills to write his own memoir. Vrba therefore told his stories to a veteran journalist, Alan Bestic, who skillfully edited the material to get readers in England to the end of every article, and then to the end of their remarkable book. Although he had visited Poland soon after the war ended, Bestic was a journalist, not an historian. He quite sensibly chose not to over-complicate a story that was significantly entitled I Cannot Forgive. Bestic wisely limited the perspective to one protagonist.

3.  Wetzler’s wife Eta is on record saying that her husband refused to talk to any Western journalists. At the same time, knowing his three friends were trapped behind the Iron Curtain, where being Jewish was a disadvantage, Vrba erred on the side of caution and shrewdly refrained from drawing attention to two of his comrades. It was not feasible for him to eliminate Wetzler from the story, but Vrba chose not to draw attention to Mordowicz and Rosin by name. It is relevant to note that Ceslav Mordowicz and his wife Ester did not tell their own daughter she was Jewish until 1965 (when she was a teenager).

Wetzler’s book written under a pen name.

4. Not “naming names” was in keeping with the standards of extreme secrecy that had been prevalent inside Auschwitz for survival. Vrba’s resolve in this matter was mirrored by Wetzler’s own reticence to identify any of the escapees by their real names when he produced a novelized version of his own escape, according fictitious names to himself and Vrba.

5. When Wetzler novelized his story, he brazenly added events that had occurred during Mordowicz & Rosin’s adventures and he generated a portrait of his protagonist’s co-escapee—named Val instead of Vrba—that is consistently derogatory and demeaning. Wetzler never asked permission for these literary trespasses. In contrast, Wetzler is depicted I Cannot Forgive as faultless. If Vrba’s intention was to hog the limelight, he would never have painted such a flattering portrait of his colleague.

6. Vrba saved Wetzler’s life when all four were living in Bratislava. The information is in Fred R. Bleakley’s biography of Mordowicz, published in 2022. Vrba never wrote about that, or even mentioned it. If Vrba was a man who was motivated by self-glorification, he would have drawn attention to his selfless heroism. He did precisely the opposite.

7. Vrba is easily one of most riveting and physically impressive interviewees in Claude Lantzmann’s epic documentary, Shoah. His screen time is only matched by his Slovak colleague Filip Müller. Vrba continued to shine as a “star witness” for trials of war criminals and Holocaust deniers. If Wetzler and Mordowicz were jealous of Vrba, Vrba can hardly be blamed for being charismatic, provocative and handsome.

8. Vrba chose Rosin to be his best man for his wedding, not Wetzler or Mordowicz, both of whom were present. Although Rosin did recognize that he and Mordowicz could have been featured in Vrba’s memoir, there were less complaints about Vrba from Rosin than from Mordowicz who was imprisoned in Auschwitz twice, and who certainly suffered far more prolonged and intense physical torture than his colleagues. After Vrba and Wetzler escaped, Mordowicz and Rosin were brutalized by the Nazis and demoted to hard labour. If Mordowiz consciously or subconsciously blamed any of his physical or psychological suffering on Vrba and Wetzler, possibly all of that blame was shifted to Vrba after Wetzler died in 1988.

Alfréd Wetzler. 

Wetzler 1948 book jacket

9. It is important to note that when Wetzler published a short book about Auschwitz as soon as World War II had ended, he did not give any credit for cumulative findings to his other three friends. Vrba never objected. Vrba understood that his friend was not stealing his thunder; rather, if anything, by not naming the three others he was protecting them. “I discussed this matter with Rudi,” says researcher Ruth Linn, when approached by this website, “and he said he didn’t care about getting credit. He just wanted to see the information get out.”
In English, if translated, the title for Wetzler’s 80-page book would be Oswiecim: Tomb of Four Million People. The first Slovak language edition was printed in Kosice in 1945 by the Information Ministry of the Slovak Republic. It was assembled (“sostavil”) rather than written (“napisal”)  by Jozko (or Josef) Lánik, the pseudonym for Alfréd Wetzler. He did not credit or divulge the names of the three other main eyewitnesses whose testimonies and experiences had helped him describe in detail the horrors of Auschwitz from page 5 to 73. Obviously, he was particularly indebted to Mordowicz and Rosin because they were able to give him information about Auschwitz after Wetzler and Vrba had escaped in April of 1944. The short but authoritative book details Auschwitz Birkenau from 1942 to 1945.

On page 3, Wetzler describes the rise of fascism and racism; he also cites the misinformation about Auschwitz that appeared in Slovak newspapers.  On page 4, he describes how the truth about the killing machinery was kept secret–thereby emphasizing to the reader the importance of his small book based on eyewitness reportage. It is noteworthy that in the last two sentences on page 4, Wetzler asks for revenge to be taken. On page 5, he mentions “two Slovak boys” who were deported from Slovakia in 1942. Later, he refers two other runaways from the concentration camp, one Slovak and one Polish.

One of Vrba’s closest friends in Vancouver, Helen Karsai, recalls Rosin telling her the book had been translated into four other languages. Mordowicz had mentioned this book to her but she cannot recall Rudi’s reaction when this book was mentioned. It is her understanding that when the contents of this book were largely disbelieved, Wetzler became melancholic. The fact that the contents of Oswiecim: Grave of Four Million People were not taken seriously in the late 1940s served as a motivator for Vrba to make his own attempt, using a different style, incorporating storytelling, in 1963.

10. Mordowicz’s primary complaint concerned Vrba’s decision not to praise him in his memoir when describing an important meeting with a representative of Vatican, “an elegant man of about forty,” at a monastery near Svätý Jurwho, about five miles outside of Bratislava. They assumed the person they were summoned to meet was the ‘Papal Nuncio’ but, in fact, it was a lesser Catholic official later identified as Mario Martilloti, “a handsome man who looked to be in his thirties.” Vrba not only fails to credit Mordowicz’s leading role in their prolonged meeting, he also does not mention this meeting included the Jewish Council representative Krasňanský, a French translator identified as Mikulan Holländer and Wetzler, who, according to Mordowicz, remained outside standing guard, with a gun.

As inappropriate as it might seem to some, the Four Jewish heroes in World War II can be likened to the Beatles. Sardonic Rosin, the eldest, was like Ringo, the eldest, keeping the beat, not expecting the limelight. Long-suffering Mordowicz was the under-appreciated George, knowing he was essential but under-sung. Sometimes aloof, Wetzler, with a high IQ, was akin to worldly-wise John. Both cocky charmers, Rudi and Paul were born for centre stage, the crooners that were swooned over. Only Paul got knighted; Rudi wrote a book translated into a dozen languages. The band members always resent the lead singers, it has been ever thus.

*

Mordowicz Takes Center Stage

Mordowicz gave video testimonies for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the USC Shoah Foundation. He also gave several interviews, starting in the early 1950s, to Auschwitz Museum representatives who came to interview him in Bratislava. Later he was contacted by historians Gideon Reif in Israel, Sir Martin Gilbert and Stephen Berg from Union College in Skenectady who was instrumental in bestowing upon him an honorary doctorate in Humanities.

Fred R. Bleakley, who published The Auschwitz Protocols: Ceslav Mordowicz and the Race to Save Hungary’s Jews (Wicked Son 2022), first interviewed Mordowicz for an article in the Wall Street Journal, having spent much of his writing career as a financial editor. Bleakley had received a Master’s at the University of Missouri School of Journalism and he was living in Portland, Maine, with his wife Jane Berentson, when his 211-page book on Mordowicz was published. Among its many worthwhile features are Mordowicz’s own drawing of the pair’s hideout within the gravel pit as well as a photo of Mordowicz and Rosin, alongside their motorcycles, on a road trip, retracing their escape route from Auschwitz, in the Tatra mountain range, in the late 1940s.

Mordowicz also participated in a project with the Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles to commemorate Wetzler’s name and history. Mordowicz believed Wetzler had also been unfairly overshadowed by Vrba. Possibly this explains why recognition for Vrba at the Wiesenthal Center remains paltry, almost non-existent.

The release of the biography helps to clarify why Mordowicz felt aggrieved. According to Bleakley’s account, Mordowicz’ well-meaning daughter Dagmar came to Vancouver and met with Vrba several times, hoping to heal the rift, but her attempts at reconciliation fell on stoney ground. Despite her father’s dislike of Vrba, he became a beloved figure in her youth as she was growing up abroad. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, as an architect in Toronto, she was able to visit the West Coast of Canada on business and made numerous attempts to patch the rift, visiting Vrba. Having lunch together at the University of British Columbia faculty club, she told him, “You guys were like brothers and didn’t have anybody else.”

She later recalled, “I tried to discuss the issues between Rudi and my father with no result. Rudi did not like to be challenged and my father was extremely proud and considered it beneath him to reach out to Rudi. They were both stubborn, conceited and affected by the Holocaust very much.”

Mordowicz’s wounded pride never healed. They never met during the whole time they were both living in Canada. They last met in Bratislava in 1958 when Vrba was en route to Israel. Meanwhile, the historian Sir Martin Gilbert collectivized them. He credited the combined reportage of Vrba, Wetzler, Mordowicz and Rosin in the Auschwitz Protocols as “the largest single greatest rescue of Jews in the Second World War.”

Rosin Goes Solo 

Arnošt Rosin (right) in 1946, at age 29, when he also married

As the least-known escapee of the quartet, Arnošt Rosin liked to quip that gambling was part of his family history. A family fortune had been won and lost by one of his relatives.

Gambling had rendered the Rosin family destitute, he liked to quip, and this was a blessing in disguise—when the pro-Nazi Hlinka Guard came to steal all their accumulated wealth, the Rosin family had none.

Born on March 20, 1913 in eastern Slovakia, Arnošt Rosin died as a free man in 2000 in Germany—by far the least known and the most humble of the major contributors to the Auschwitz Protocols.

Google-translated Information herein is from a little-known, public service website for Slovakian local history collection Traces of Judaism (Snina and Surroundings) by Jaroslava Marcineková, yet to be published as of early 2026.

Rosin states:

I was born a year before the outbreak of World War I and was 26 years old before the outbreak of World War II. I spent my childhood in Snina, a small town in the east of what is now Slovakia, part of the then Austro-Hungarian Empire.

My parents were Jewish, but not very religious. They went to synagogue once a week, and that was all. I went to primary school in Snina and then graduated from the Business Academy in Humenné and Košice. From 1933, I was employed as a trainee at the Tatra company, where I later worked as a salesman of agricultural machinery, tractors and other technical equipment.

I wanted to go to Palestine, but first, I had to serve in the army. Since I was capable and healthy, they drafted me and assigned me to an infantry regiment in Kroměříž. When I returned from military service, I continued to work for the same company in Bratislava until the outbreak of the war in 1939. I lived in a community where we were preparing to leave for Palestine. During the day we worked, and in the evenings we studied and prepared for the journey to the Promised Land.

We were a large group of people, consisting of various kinds of Jews – Orthodox, religious, less religious, and non-religious. We were people from different backgrounds politically, too – leftists and rightists. We all participated in retraining courses. It was a community where we gave up everything and received only what we needed for clothing and food. There were two cooks who cooked for us. We did business, and from what was sold, we all lived.

Until 1942, we were not directly persecuted. At the beginning of 1942, however, we had to go into hiding. At the end of March that year, I came to see my parents in Snina. Immediately after me came two gendarmes. They were both acquaintances but they said, ‘Mr. Rosin, you will come with us!’ I answered: ‘I don’t even live here, I don’t have a permanent residence here. I live in Bratislava,’ but they didn’t care, they took me anyway.

I went in the first transport of young men and boys, first to Humenné and then to a collection camp in Žilina. After a few days, in April 1942, we were sent to no one knows where…

On the way, we heard the name Auschwitz, but we had no idea what it was about. After crossing the Polish border, they drove us in disgusting cattle wagons. At the final station, we saw some prisoners. I thought the must have committed some crimes because they were dressed in striped clothes.

We stayed in Auschwitz I for two days. There they registered us and tattooed us. They didn’t have any proper equipment for this, they just used a piece of wood to stamp the numbers on our hand with tincture or some kind of ink and that was it. After that we had no name, just a number.

That was a terrible two days. At night we stood in one stone block in a beer hall. There was much shouting, beating and moaning. We got soup during the day and had no idea what was going to happen. They gave us clothes, wooden Dutch shoes and then there was an immediate departure to Birkenau. A few people could not stand the journey on foot and simply died. Anyone who didn’t know how to run, they didn’t survive. They were killed or bitten by dogs.

We arrived at a place where there were three-story stone blocks. Our block was number 13 or 20, I can’t remember. The building had small windows and inside in the center was something like a furnace with a chimney. It looked terrible. We slept with five. Some had a little straw under them, but some none at all.

The next day we went to work. We didn’t work inside in a factory, but outside in a gravel pit. We walked for about an hour to the place where we started digging. Nearby I noticed a small brick house that had only a door and was empty. We dug a pit about 100 m wide, 150 m long, 2.5 m deep. We didn’t understand what it was supposed to do. We speculated that it could be trenches or something like that.

For lunch, they brought us four barrels of soup. Everything was going on in a hurry. In the evening, we got a piece of bread and that was it. Then they counted fifty people who were supposed to stay in the place where we worked. So, we went up and down for two days, and on the third day they separated two-hundred-and-fifty people who were supposed to stay in one block.

They formed the infamous Sonderkommando for burying the dead. We didn’t see the first fifty people again. They became the first victims of gasification. They turned on the gas in the small house that I noticed on the first day. Through a small opening, they threw Zyklon B in, and fifty people were no longer among the living. Then they had them driven in an iron wagon about two hundred meters along the tracks to a pit that we dug. They trotted us to the hole we had dug, and gave us shovels to throw dirt back again.

At lunch, we were given small loaves of bread. When I broke that bread, I found a women’s gold watch inside. I quickly hid it and thought to myself that something was wrong here. I asked the block clerk ‘Bulloch’ if he could transfer me to another block. I gave him a gold watch that I had found in the food supply, and he transferred me to another block. The others remained in the penal unit. Everyone from that unit was locked in one block and only went to work and back.

In December, after I had left, a man named Schmulleck or something like that came there. He wanted to organize an escape, but it was discovered. And since no one wanted to reveal anything, the entire unit was sent to the gas because of him. I was incredibly lucky to get out of there in time.

I was in the camp for six weeks as prisoner number 29858, and like many other prisoners, I contracted camp typhus. Almost half-dead, I lay in the barrack completely on the floor. One camp orderly noticed me and said, ‘He’s still alive.’ He pulled me out and placed me with the living. Yes, that’s how I survived. A person must have a bit of luck.

For two or three days, I had a fever of thirty-nine to forty-two degrees, and I knew nothing about myself. I just lay there, and then somehow, I got through it. Another person who was sick was a Kapo from Birkenau who was supposed to organize the whole camp. He caught typhus and ended up in the same barrack as me. I did not know who he was. I gave him water to drink like the others, and he told me, ‘You are a good boy. When I get out of this, I’ll help you.’ I thought to myself: ‘When you get out of this, how exactly could you help me?’ I didn’t know he really was what he said was, a block leader in the camp. Once he got out of it, he became the Kapo of the entire camp again.

After that, he sought me out and asked: ‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m working in the quarry, at the gravel pit,’ I replied.

And he said: ‘And can you write?’

‘Of course I can, very well,’ I answered in surprise. ‘Well, anyone can write,’ I thought to myself.

And so he made me his clerk. In the block, there was always a leader and a clerk. The clerk kept the card index, wrote things down, cut bread, and distributed food. At lunch, we received three hundred liters of soup; I had a spoon and could eat, even take a little more since I had to distribute it to the others.

We could also steal a bit of the bread. We got long loaves, cut them in half, and from the center, we would take some. I’m telling the truth. We stole from the others to survive. I was a clerk for several months, and then I became a kapo, that is, the leader. And I had better access to food, but one also needed luck for that.

At the beginning of 1944, I moved to the so-called “Kanada” block, where all the seized clothing of prisoners and the dead was collected and distributed. From there I could supply others with food and even Germans with marks, dollars, gold items, or other valuables that people had brought with them for the transport.

Once an SS officer hinted to me that he needed a bag for his wife. I told those working on the ramp that I needed a nice bag and I sent it to him. Sometimes the Germans would go to Krakow or Katowice to spend money. For them, fifty marks was a lot of money. For us, who worked in the Kanada” block, it was like lighting a cigarette. Twenty cigarettes were like twenty dollars. Money had no value for us, but it did for them. For us, food and staying healthy and being able to work were what mattered.

After the escape of Rudolf Vrba and Alfréd  Wetzler in April 1944, I was interrogated by two camp Gestapo officers on suspicion of helping them escape. Both Wilhelm Boger and Pery Broad were later indicted in the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials for their cruelties and brutal torture methods.

Broad threateningly placed a pistol on the table and said, ‘Now you will tell me the truth.’ To which I replied, ‘If I had known anything, I would have escaped with them. What is waiting for us here?”

This cheeky reaction of mine saved my life again. I got beaten, they knocked out my last three teeth and then they got on their motorcycles and left.

I knew about their escape, but only marginally, no details. I had sent them socks and bread to the hiding place. I knew Wetzler from the thirty-ninth. We were training together in Palestine. I only got to know Vrba in the camp.

In April 1944, preparations were underway for the so-called Operation Höss – the deportation and killing of Hungarian Jews under the direction of Auschwitz camp commander Rudolf Höss. From the end of April to mid-July, 435,000 Hungarian Jews were transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in locked cattle wagons. In order to be able to immediately implement a “special measure” for the 12,000 to 14,000 people arriving daily, Höss ordered the construction of a ramp directly into the gas chambers. I became a first-hand witness to this deadly construction.

From May 15, mass transports from Hungary arrived. The railway line inside the camp was completed in a hurry so the transports could be redirected directly to the crematoria. Only about 10% of the people from these transports were accepted into the camp. The rest was immediately gassed and burned.

Never before had so many Jews been gassed since the establishment of the Birkenau camp. Three crematoria were in operation day and night (the fourth was being repaired). And since the capacity of the crematoria was not sufficient, graves began to be dug again in the birch forest (as in the time before the crematoria), where corpses were buried day and night. Thus the ‘capacity for destruction’ was almost unlimited.

Now I definitely knew I had to run away when everything was coming to an end. Because of my contacts with Wetzler and Vrba, I had been transferred to forced labor in a gravel pit as a punishment. There I met Mordowicz.”

Mordowicz and I were not particularly close friends, but we knew each other well. We prepared everything over the course of a few weeks. We couldn’t plan it long-term or prepare as if it were a bank robbery. It was about whether you go or not. Either it would work out, or it wouldn’t.

Taking risks was in my blood, so I went for it. Czeslaw Mordowicz was a Polish Jew who arrived at the camp at the end of 1943. His number was 84216. He once told me, ‘I have a good hiding place at the gravel pit.’ The gravel pit was in the outer area and was not guarded as well as the camp. We met a few times and talked about the escape.

Taking risks is in my blood.”

It was gambling. I bet everything on one card that card came my way. We didn’t know the route or the area around the camp. We only guessed that we would head towards Warsaw and join the partisans. On the way, we changed our decision and headed towards Slovakia.

Our hideout was a pit about one meter deep. Before, two Russian prisoners had hidden there. We had prepared civilian clothes, two cans of food, bread, and salami in advance. We put it all into an old briefcase and took it to the pit. In the middle of the pit, there was a wooden pole that held a plank to cover the entire hole. First, one person went in there and then the second one.

Only two people knew about our hiding place and escape: Kapo Adam from the block of Mordowicz and one professor. They placed a board over us and covered it with gravel. They scattered tobacco on top, that filthy Russian makhorka, so that the dogs wouldn’t sniff us out. It was on Saturday, May 27, 1944.

After an hour in the hiding place, we heard sirens wailing and the call for roll call. The sirens kept sounding every now and then until the evening. I don’t know if more prisoners tried to escape that day. Just as almost nobody knew about our escape, we didn’t know much about others either, whether someone else was planning to escape or not.

Whether our act was a big deal didn’t matter to me. I did it for myself, to save my life, and I’m alive. That’s the most important thing for me.

We stayed in that pit on Saturday and Sunday, and on Monday evening we came out. It wasn’t as simple as I’m telling it here now though. Imagine a dug hole, with a pole in it, on which a plank covered with gravel rests. We braced ourselves against the pole with our legs and were afraid that the plank might fall on us and bury us alive.

From time to time, we had to lift the plank with the pole to get a breath of fresh air. We didn’t have enough strength to keep it lifted. We could only do it with great effort. Meanwhile, above our heads, we could hear the barking of dogs, running, and the shouts of guards, SS men, and others who were searching for us. There were about fifty to sixty people hunting for us until evening.

We were completely silent. On Monday evening, we scraped the soil with our fingers and tried to lift the plank. It was really hard work. We forgot that we didn’t have much strength. When we managed to do it, we peeked out and breathed in fresh air. Lights were visible everywhere up to a kilometer from the camp. We were already outside but not yet beyond the fence. During the day, guards patrolled with dogs, but in the evening, they only illuminated the area.

We jumped out of the hole like hares, not seeing a thing. We crawled on all fours, and under the cover of darkness, we could slip unnoticed through the less-guarded outer part of the camp and get past the unarmed barbed wire. The grass was already quite tall; it was the end of May.

After a kilometer, we saw cherry trees and then a river. At first, we wanted to cross via a bridge, but we changed our minds. We waded through the river. We stripped naked, tied our clothes into a bundle, hung it on a branch, and both of us crossed. But we lost Mordowicz’s shoes, and he started shouting that he couldn’t go without shoes and that he would go back for them.

I decided to give him mine instead. When I reminded him of that incident thirty years later in Canada, he just said, ‘Well, you were a gentleman.’ [Rosin’s recollections about footwear, or lack thereof, do not coincide with Mordowicz’ account.]

I went without shoes for two days. Then I found some shoes in a yard, but they were too small for me, so I made a hole in the front and they were fine. On the third day, I bought a pair of shoes from a man. At first, we had watched him for a day. We saw that he was alone and that he was an older man, so we asked him if he would sell us his shoes for marks or dollars.

After all, he could buy new ones. Everyone wondered where we got the money from. Well, of course, from the camp. Life there was expensive, but not money or gold. That wasn’t anything rare, just life, that was the most precious thing.

After six days on the road, we arrived at a farmer’s house. We watched it and saw only one woman. She had a small house, and next to it was a barrel for rainwater. We drank from it, even though it smelled terrible. We told ourselves that we would definitely get sick from it. We went inside and offered her marks and dollars for food. She gave each of us ten eggs, cooked them, but we could only eat three or four. After that, we could only eat with our eyes.

“We are workers,” Mordowitz said. She had two sons, and both had been taken to dig trenches against the Russians. The Russians were already close to Warsaw. We asked if we could sleep inside. She said no because she was afraid. Sometimes patrols come, and she has two sons and doesn’t want to lose her life. So, we stayed outside and slept in a shed on hay. We fell asleep for a few hours and in the morning we went on. We were afraid she might betray us.

When we were about sixty kilometers from Zakopane, I already refused to walk. We took a train, but before Zakopane we got off again and continued on foot. In this way, with great luck and with the help of Polish farmers, we managed to cross the Polish border into Slovakia at the beginning of June.

We were traveling through the forest and were so tired that we leaned on each other and fell asleep. We woke up at dawn. Some people were already working in the field.

Suddenly, I noticed some Slovak matches on the ground, and so I knew that we were home. We went down to the first tavern in the village and bought food and drinks, and then we got on a village cart that was going to the mill. [Rosin’s decisions once he was inside Slovakia clearly contradicted advice from the Russian prisoner Volvov that Vrba had heeded.] The guy on the cart mentioned that the radio had announced the start of the invasion. It was June 6th, when the Allies landed in Normandy, and it was exactly on that day that we entered Slovakia. We stopped at one store, but they didn’t want to sell us anything for marks or dollars, only for korunas. We went to a second store, and there they did sell to us, so we stayed there. We ate a little, drank a bit, and suddenly my friend says, “Look, some red caps.” They were gendarmes, who immediately shouted: “Hands up!”

They searched us and then interrogated us. I told them that we had been working in Hamburg and were going home. But they still couldn’t let us go because they had already reported it to the boss, who was supposed to arrive around five. When the chief gendarme arrived, an incredible coincidence happened that, so to speak, saved our lives. When I told him my name and the town I came from, the chief gendarme realized that he knew my parents and my brother, who was a notary.

Miklus prison in Liptovský Mikuláš

He took us under his protection and let us sleep at the station for another night. Out of compassion, he arranged contacts for us with Jews who had not yet been deported because they had an exemption as economically important persons and had connections to the Jewish underground resistance in Bratislava. He advised us not to tell the truth, but to say that we were Jews and that we were hiding here. So we lied and claimed that we had been hiding here and were exchanging money, buying and selling dollars. This way they officially put us in prison in Liptovský Mikuláš for currency manipulation.

Vŕba and Wetzler also came to see us there. We served ten days and paid a fine of 10,000 crowns. Then they let us go. Vŕba and Wetzler provided us with false papers and IDs.

My name was Štefan Roháč and my friend’s name was Peter Matúš. With the false papers, we went to Bratislava and lived there. Each of us separately. I stayed with Vŕba (Walter Rosenberg) and my friend (Mordowicz) stayed with Wetzler. Two streets apart. That’s how we survived until August 1944.

When the uprising broke out and raids began, my friend (Mordowicz) ran away. He was in Nitra, but they caught him and he had to go to the Sereď collection point. And from there back to Auschwitz. On the way, he bit his forearm so that the Nazis would not see his number, they would immediately know that he was a defector. Later, from Poland, he got somewhere to Germany, where he worked in a leather factory. Fortunately, he managed to return to Slovakia after the war.

Arnošt Rosin, at left, not long after he escaped from Auschwitz on May 24, 1944. (Vrba is on the right. The man in the middle is Josef Weiss, who worked for the Bratislava Ministry of Health.) Photo date approximately June-July 1944.

We wrote down our testimonies in the protocols. They compared them with the testimonies of Wetzler and Vŕba, who after their escape had described only preparations for the extermination of Hungarian Jews. We saw and experienced with our own eyes how the Nazis burned them by the thousands every day immediately after arriving at the ramp.

Almost 90% of those arriving from Hungary ended up in the gas immediately. Our story was so shocking that at first they didn’t want to believe us that it really was. Our horrifying and alarming narrative of what had happened at Auschwitz forced the Jewish side to make repeated appeals to the Allies to bomb the railroads leading to Auschwitz and the camp itself, in order to save at least a few thousand people who had not yet been deported.

The telegram to the U.S. War Department ended with this urgent appeal: “Don’t waste a single day. Help finally.” But the bombing did not come, because the primary goal of the Western powers was a military victory over Germany, and not a halt to the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.”

The killings at Auschwitz continued until January 1945.

At first, I thought it would really help if the Americans bombed Auschwitz, and I believed that it would happen, but later, when I saw the situation, I stopped believing that they would do it. I have the feeling that even the biggest enemies have their agreements. We prayed that they would bomb not so much Birkenau, but the station and ramp in Auschwitz. Maybe they said to themselves, after all, ninety percent of Jews are there, and that’s why they delayed bombing, but there were also gypsies, Christians, communists in the camps…

We wrote an account of what happened in Auschwitz and Birkenau with Rabbi Weissmandel. We spent a few hours with him and told him what we had experienced. His office in the basement on Židovská Street was constantly buzzing, people were going up and down and there was a huge fear in the air. When everything was recorded and our conversations were over, the protocols were sent to Switzerland and England. The papal nuncio then sent us American cigarettes. I smoked them for the first time in my life.

After the war, I went to Snina to find out what had happened to my father’s house, since I already knew that the entire family had perished in one of the concentration camps, because almost the entire Jewish community from Snina had been taken away to die at the same time. I don’t know how it happened, but my father had transferred the house to someone else, though I didn’t care why or how.

Slovaks are peculiar people. They would say to each other: ‘You were lucky, your Jews didn’t come back, and you don’t have to give anything back.’ But my brother’s notary house was still there. It was a beautiful villa. When my brother arrived from England, we sold the house and divided the money. I didn’t want to live there. Why should I? Neither did my brother.

Out of the whole family, three of us brothers remained. One in America, and the two of us still in Slovakia. My brother Anton was an English soldier. He got to England via Romania, Palestine, and Egypt. In 1946, he left the army. When he returned, we both wanted to go to South America, to Colombia. We even had visas, but then my brother changed his mind and said it would be better if we stayed where we were beaten.

I went to Prague, got married, and wanted to forget everything. I prefer not to even think about what happened during the war…

Rudolf Vrba’s friend in Vancouver, Helen Karsai (left), visited Rosin in Dusseldorf.

In the Mordowicz biography entitled The Auschwitz Protocols we are told that after Mordowicz and Rosin had crossed the border into Slovakia, “Arnost was no help.” When Rosin told the police he was born in the nearby town of Snina, “It did him no good.” In Mordowicz’ version of events, his hapless friend Rosin just happened to have bumped into a guard in a court corridor who recognized him and it was that person who volunteered to contact a local Zionist named Alex Mangel. Mangel then arranged for the pair to be only charged with currency smuggling, likely saving their lives.

In the Mordowicz biography, the reader does not learn that Vrba and Wetzler came to visit Mordowicz and Rosin after they had been arrested. As well, Mordowicz does not credit Vrba and Wetzler for bringing them their new false identification papers.

VIDEO INTERVIEW WITH MORDOWICZ (in Polish), with a rough English transcript available, via U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. (extensive, five hours)

https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn504847

ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW WITH ROSIN (in German) in which Rosin recalls Vrba and Wetzler.

https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn506776

Further information:

London has been informed– Reports by Auschwitz escapees / edited by Henryk Świebocki ; [new translations, Michael Jacobs and Laurence Weinbaum] Published by Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 1997.

Read MORDOWICZ SPEAKS