Rudolf Vrba was only a teenager who was shipped to Auschwitz in 1942.


 He was a Slovakian Jew and was compelled to work within the camp and what he witnessed was intolerable: a huge number of people were herded into gas chambers and murdered daily. By 1944, Vrba and one more inmate, Alfrfred Wetzler, had come to the understanding that the Nazis were planning their second mass extermination, this time of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews. In the event that no-one raised the alarm, those individuals were done.


The two men did it on April 7, 1944. The latter concealed themselves in a stack of timber when one of the counts of prisoners was in progress that lasted days. When the guards had lost hope of finding them, they climbed fences, and around guns, and started a two-week long gory trek through the mountains. Each step was death should they be detected.


They reached Slovakia alive. It was there they prepared a 32-page report, the VrbaWetzler Report. It presented maps, gas chamber details and hard evidence of Auschwitz. It was smuggled to the leaders of the Allies and made the world confront the reality. And due to it, thousands of Hungarian Jews were spared the treatment the Nazis intended to give them.


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