Rudolf Vrba

(1924 - 2006)

Rudolf Vrba arrived at Auschwitz in June 1942 and was soon assigned the task of sorting the luggage of Jews murdered in the gas chambers. At six p.m. on April 7, 1944, an alarm sounded in the camp: two men were missing. After a three-day manhunt, at which point Vrba and his fellow Slovakian Alfred Wetzler were thought to have escaped, the two men left their hiding place, snuck past the last fence, and trekked to their homeland. They coauthored the Vrba-Wetzler Report, which, along with other eyewitness accounts, provided incontrovertible evidence of the Nazi’s mass extermination of Jews.