Vrba Memorial Room - Wetzler

Vrba - Wetzler Memorial Room. Before the outbreak of the Second World War, Alfréd Wetzler and Rudolf Vrba (Walter Rosenberg) lived in the First Czechoslovak Republic. Alfréd Wetzler was born on the tenth of May 1918 in Trnava. Before the war he worked as a labourer, after the establishment of the Slovak state he joined the sixth labour battalion, in which mainly young Jewish and Roma boys did their labour duty. After his arrest, he found himself in the labour and concentration centre in Sered, from where he was transported to the Auschwitz extermination camp in April 1942. On arrival at the camp, he was tattooed with the number 29 162. In the camp, he worked as a clerk in the registration department, which gave him an overview of the incoming transports. This information was very important because Wetzler was planning his escape. He was in contact with the camp's resistance group, with whom he collaborated on the relevant plans. Rudolf Vrba, whose own name was Walter Rosenberg, was born on September 11, 1924 in Topoľčany. On the basis of the anti-Jewish measures of the Slovak state, he was expelled from the gymnasium. When the Second World War broke out, he wanted to actively fight against Nazi Germany, so he tried to get to Great Britain and join the Czechoslovak resistance. From March 1942, the first transports left Slovakia for Nazi concentration and extermination camps. It was at this time that Vrba attempted to escape the Slovak state and planned his route via Sereď and Galanta to Budapest. His escape failed, for which he was sent to the Nováky labour and collection camp. He also escaped from the camp in Nováky, but was caught again and put on the next transport, which left for Majdanek concentration camp on the fourteenth of June 1942. After some time, he volunteered to work on a farm, unaware that the farm meant the Auschwitz camp. He was registered there on the thirtieth of June 1942 and tattooed with the number 44 070. After doing hard labour in the camp, he was assigned to a Canada commando unit designed to sort the goods the Nazis took from incoming prisoners. He later became a block typist. He joined Alfred Wetzler in planning his escape from the camp. The Nazis turned Auschwitz-Birkenau into a death factory, with transports arriving from all over Europe. Wetzler and Vrba realized that they needed to prepare thoroughly for their action. There were many escape attempts in the camp, but most failed. They both knew that if anyone escaped from the camp, an alarm was sounded and SS patrols searched the surrounding area for three days looking for escapees. Therefore, they had to hide somewhere for three days. The escape began on the seventh of April 1944, when the two hid in a pre-prepared hiding place in the outer camp, where they had prepared all the necessary things such as civilian clothes, food, water, a razor blade, and tobacco dipped in gasoline to confuse the SS men with their dogs. On the third day they were able to leave their hiding place and begin their fight for freedom. Alfréd Wetzler and Rudolf Vrba had to take a long and difficult route on their way back to Slovakia. Above all, they were guided by the principles of trusting no one and moving only at night. They arrived in Slovakia on the eighteenth of April and on the twenty-fifth of April 1944 they were already in the Jewish old-age home in Žilina, where they met with the representatives of the Jewish community. Alfréd Wetzler described the building in the following words: 'The grey, older, two-storey building of the Žilina old-age home with its high, narrow arches is almost deserted. On the ground floor the warden lives, in the part facing the courtyard there is a kitchen and a small storeroom, next to the storeroom a small room where the housekeeper lives, on the first floor only a few rooms are inhabited and on the second floor only one, actually a bathroom, which was vacated for Karol and Valer. From the small archway in the bathroom you can see into the yard of the old-age home and into the neighbouring garden, from which you can hear the children's chatter from morning till night." At the beginning of the meeting, many could not believe their words about the industrial murder in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. "I looked around the table at the faces of our hospitable hosts. And suddenly I had the awful feeling that they didn't believe a word we said. Why should they? How could they? People's brains were not yet ready to absorb the idea of mass murder on the scale of Auschwitz," Rudolf Vrba described his feelings at the initial meetings. Eventually, however, they were believed, and the two Auschwitz-Birkenau refugees dictated the message. In it, they described in detail the camp's system, which included the registration of prisoners, their marking with coloured triangles, according to category and nationality, the liquidation process in the camp, and an overview of the transports that arrived at the camp. What was important in this case was the description of the entire killing process - how the victims arrived in the chambers, how they were killed, and what was done with their bodies after they were killed. The report was supplemented by drawings of the camp complex, the gas chambers and the crematoria. Wetzler and Vrba's report revealed to the world the killing machinery of Auschwitz-Birkenau. They both made enormous efforts, showed tremendous courage and risked their own lives to bring information about the largest