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Alfréd Israel Wetzler (10 May 1918[1]– 8 February 1988), who later wrote under the alias Jozef Lánik, was a Slovak Jew, and one of a very small number of Jews known to have escaped from the Auschwitz death camp during the Holocaust. Wetzler was born on 10 May 1918, in the Slovak town of Trnava where he was a worker in the period 1936-1940. Wetzler is known for the report that he and his fellow escapee, Rudolf Vrba, compiled about the inner workings of the Auschwitz camp - a ground plan of the camp, construction details of the gas chambers, crematoriums and, most convincingly, a label from a canister of Zyklon gas. The 32-page Vrba-Wetzler report, as it became known, was the first detailed report about Auschwitz to reach the West that the Allies regarded as credible. The evidence eventually led to the bombing of several government buildings in Hungary, killing Nazi officials who were instrumental in the railway deportations of Jews to Auschwitz. The deportations halted, saving up to 120,000 Hungarian Jews.
09 February 2011 <http://en.auschwitz.org.pl/m/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=100&Itemid=8>.
New York Times. 06 May 2006. 08 February 2011 <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/07/world/europe/07vrba.html>.
pbs. 09 February 2011 <http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/features/escape-from-auschwitz/vrbas-and-wetzlers-escape/31/>.
wikipedia. 26 December 2010. 09 February 2011 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Vrba>.
Rudolf "Rudi" Vrba, born Walter Rosenberg (September 11, 1924 – March 27, 2006) was a Slovak-Canadian professor of pharmacology at the University of British Columbia, who came to public attention during the Second World War when, in April 1944, he escaped from the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland with the first information about the camp that the Allies regarded as credible. The 32 pages of information Vrba and his fellow escapee, Alfréd Wetzler, dictated to horrified Jewish officials in Žilina, Slovakia—in which they offered extensive detail about the mass murder taking place inside Auschwitz, including a description of the layout of the camp and the use of gas chambers—became known as the Vrba-Wetzler report
Auschwitz was a network of concentration and extermination camps built and operated in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. It was the largest of the German concentration camps, consisting of Auschwitz I. Auschwitz is the German name for Oświęcim, the town in and around which the camps were located; it was renamed by the Germans after they invaded Poland in September 1939. Birkenau, the German translation of Brzezinka (birch tree), refers to a small Polish village nearby that was mostly destroyed by the Germans to make way for the camp.
The Vrba-Wetzler report, also known as the Vrba-Wetzler statement, the Auschwitz Protocols, and the Auschwitz notebook, is a 32-page document about the German Auschwitz concentration camp in occupied Poland during the Holocaust. It was written by hand and dictated in Slovak between April 25 and April 27, 1944 by Rudolf Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler, two Slovak Jews who had escaped from Auschwitz on April 7, and was typed up in the form of a report by Dr. Oscar Krasniansky of the Slovak Judenrat, or Jewish Council, who simultaneously translated it into German.The report represents one of the first attempts to estimate the numbers of people being killed in the camp. Copies of it are held in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library in the Hudson River Valley, New York, in the Vatican archives, and at the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem.
When he arrived in Birkenau, Vrba discovered that Alfréd Wetzler (1918–1988), someone he knew from his home town, was registered as prisoner no. 29162 and working in the mortuary.The men decided to try to escape together. With the help of the camp underground, at 2 p.m. on Friday, April 7, 1944—the eve of Passover—they climbed inside a hollowed-out space in a wood pile. It was outside Birkenau's barbed-wire inner perimeter, but inside an external perimeter the guards kept erected during the day. The other prisoners placed boards around the hollowed-out area to hide the men, then sprinkled the area with Russian tobacco soaked in gasoline to fool the guards' dogs, a trick learned from Russian POWs.