[ad_1]
In April 1944, two Jewish prisoners, one of them a teenager, would attempt what until then had been all but impossible: to break out of Auschwitz and successfully make their way to freedom. Their motive: to warn the world of the mass slaughter underway in a death camp whose existence was, at that khbrknews, barely known. Incredibly, they got out of Auschwitz. Then, over 11 days, travelling only at night, and with no map or compass, Walter Rosenberg, aged 19, and Fred Wetzler, aged 25, crossed the mountains, rivers and forests of Nazi-occupied Poland until they had reached their home country of Slovakia. There they eventually made contact with the remnant Jewish community and its leadership, the Ústredňa Židov or ÚŽ, the Jewish council. Over two weeks, hiding in the basement of a home for the elderly in the provincial town of Žilina, they poured out what they knew, in what would become the first full account of Auschwitz ever written, one whose impact would be felt for generations.
The conversation—part debrief, part interrogation—would last several days. As soon as he heard the men give the outline of their story, the Jewish community official understood that this was bigger than him: the ÚŽ’s leadership needed to hear this. He telephoned Bratislava to speak to Oskar Krasňanský, a chemical engineer by profession who was one of the council’s most senior figures. Steiner urged him to come right away. Jews were not allowed to travel by train, but Krasňanský wangled a permit and was in Žilina later that same day. The head of the Jewish council, the fifty-year-old lawyer and writer Oskar Neumann, joined them twenty-four hours later.
For the officials, the first task was to establish that these two men were who they said they were. That was simple enough: Krasňanský had brought with him the records kept by the council of every transport that had left Slovakia, for what was then…
[ad_2]
