Alfréd Israel Wetzler (10 May 1918 - 8 February 1988) was a Slovakian Jewish writer who, alongside Rudolf Vrba, escaped from the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in 1944 and authored the Vrba-Wetzler Report exposing the Holocaust to the public. The report led to Hungary ending the deportation of Jews to concentration camps. According to historian Martin Gilbert, "No other single act in the Second World War saved so many Jews from the fate that Hitler had determined for them."
Biography[]
Wetzler was born in Nagyszombat, Austria-Hungary (now in Slovakia) in 1918. In 1942 during the Second World War, he was arrested by the Nazis who had occupied his country and deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland to be murdered. Wetzler avoided death as he was deemed fit to work and was used for forced labour, unlike the majority of prisoners who were taken to the gas chambers and killed upon arrival. Wetzler and fellow Slovak Jew Rudolf Vrba kept a register of the number of new arrivals per day and the number being sent to the gas chambers, reckoning that around 1,750,000 Jews had been exterminated between their arrival in the camp and April 1944. They observed that the majority of new arrivals brought their possessions with them, meaning they had come genuinely believing that they were to be resettled, and decided they had to warn Europe's Jewish population that this was a lie and the "resettlement" was a cover for murder. With the help of other inmates, they began planning to escape from Auschwitz.
On 7 April 1944, Vrba and Wetzler enacted their escape plan. Waiting for the guards overseeing work duty to turn their backs, they made a run for it and hid inside a hollowed-out woodpile, with the hole they were hiding in covered up with a wooden plank by their compatriots. After four days in hiding, they broke out of the woodpile, cut through the perimeter fence and made their escape disguised in Dutch clothes they had stolen from the storehouse. They remained on the run for a fortnight before reaching the Slovakian town of Čadca, where they met up with Oscar Krasniansky of the Slovakian Jewish Council, who convinced them to write down their experiences.
Over the next three days, Vrba and Wetzler compiled a 40-page report on the inner workings of Auschwitz, including a ground plan of the camp, construction details of the crematoria and gas chambers, and details of the arrivals, selections and exterminations at the camp since 1942. Members of the Jewish Council translated the Slovak report into German before handing it over to Rudolf Kastner of the Budapest Aid and Rescue Committee, who initially did not pass it on for fear of disrupting negotiations to save up to one million Jews from Auschwitz. Once negotiations were concluded, Kastner sent the report to contacts in the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, who did not initially make it public; however, they did make a number of copies which were distributed amongst the Hungarian Jewish community in order to warn them not to get on the trains for resettlement.
Vrba and Wetzler discovered that deportations to Auschwitz were still going on in June 1944 when they interviewed two Auschwitz escapees and were told that 100, 000 Jews had arrived in Auschwitz the previous month, concluding their report had been suppressed. However, meanwhile El Salvadoran consular official George Mantello obtained copies of both the Vrba-Wetzler Report and two other reports from Auschwitz escapees which had confirmed the details given by Vrba and Wetzler and published all three reports under the title "The Auschwitz Protocols" in Switzerland, revealing the full details of the Holocaust to the world. Seeing that the war was going against them, and fearing that they might be held personally responsible for the Holocaust in the event that they lost the war, the Hungarian government immediately halted deportations to Auschwitz, saving around 260,000 Jews from deportation. Deportations were resumed later that year after a coup by the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross Party, but by this point tens of thousands of Jews had already been saved by the diplomatic intervention of various governments.
After the war, Wetzler worked various jobs and wrote What Dante Did Not See, a fictionalized account of his time in Auschwitz. He stopped working in 1970 due to ill health and died in 1988.