One day something happened that was a determining factor in everything I did after that. The boss, who seemed to have developed a certain liking for me, called me in for a confidential talk. He showed me a top-secret report written by two Slovakian Jews, Alfred Wetzler and Walter Rosenberg, later known as Rudolf Vrba. They had managed to escape from a death camp. I heard the name for the first time: Oświęcim in Polish, Auschwitz in German.
I read the report, about twenty typed pages, and experienced a paradoxical mixture of amazementa kind of shock that almost made me sickand at the same time, but on a different level, a dry insight into a macabre, absolutely clear and rock-solid logic. It was an objective, almost scientifically written description of the camp, with its history from the very beginning to the actual time of the report, the ‘medical’ selection process, the gas chambers, the usually fatal forced labor; ‘Special Commandos’ who took care of the dead, only to meet the same fate later, at regular intervals; the sadistic barracks bosses, and much more. I have never read anything after the war that in any way contradicted this report.
The boss told me that the Jewish Council was thinking of forwarding the report to the Allies as well as to Hungarian government leaders. He advised me to recommend confidentially to my family, friends, and acquaintances that they try to go underground with phony papers, if they could. This was certainly risky, but simply staying around and waiting for the deportation trains meant a more certain death.
The first person I visited after this meeting was my mother’s brother, a well-respected doctor with a still functioning rheumatology practice (for Jewish patients only) nearby. He didn’t believe a word I told him. That was completely impossible. It was completely unbelievable that anybody could invent anything so infernal. This was just hysteria among frightened people, the result of too much stress.
I went on. Visited cousins, uncles, aunts. Nobody believed me. If they were to believe me, the logical conclusion was that they should go out into the dangerous night, out into the unknown. How could anybody think of doing that? Leave behind all the property they had worked for so hard for so many years?
The family even gave me a nickname, a Hungarian expression that literally means ‘owl of danger.’ I, too, was not ready to take the step. But now I knew what I knew.
Introducing the reader to his trip through Inferno, Dante warns: ‘Tant’e amara che poco e piu morte’it is so bitter that death is only a little more so.
What is so bitter that death is only a little more so? Life, of course, the life Dante saw through the periscope of his own inferno. Had Dante been to hell? Yes and no. He had been in his private hell, no doubt, but he also escaped from it successfully, through the Purgatory and Paradise of his own creative power, to our everlasting joy. But he is not a real traveler through hell, nor is Strindberg, in spite of all his inferno. The real traveler has seen the ultimate degradation of humanity. He has faced death with more than 99 percent certainty not once but so many times that they can no longer be counted. Yet he survived, almost miraculously, to tell us about it. This conference was opened by such a man, Rudolf Vrba. As a prisoner, condemned to death like everyone else, and later as a registrar in Auschwitz, he has seen so much that only some of the dead may have seen more.
Actually, it is in no small part due to Rudolf Vrba that I am alive today. I first ‘met’ him on the cinema screen in Shoah, the monumental film by Claude Lanzmann. When he spoke about his escape from Auschwitz with his friend Wetzler and of the report he had written to warn Hungarian Jews against entering the trains for Auschwitz, I immediately realized that this was the report I had been shown by one of the members of the Jewish Council in Budapest in greatest secrecy, only a few weeks after it had been written. I still remember the feeling of nausea and intellectual satisfaction I felt when I first read what later became known as ‘The Auschwitz Protocol.’ Nausea because I realized that I was reading about the fate of my beloved grandmother, my uncles, and many other relatives and friends who had already been deported from my father’s village in the northeast. I also knew that I was reading about my own most probable fate. The paradoxical but very distinct intellectual satisfaction stemmed from the fact that this was the first text that made sense. Nothing else that we were told or were telling each other made any sense whatsoever. The dry, nearly scientific language of the report made a stronger impact than a thousand emotional outbursts. It was this report that prompted me to escape. Only the definite knowledge of what was waiting at the other end of the railway line overcame my fear of being caught and shot. I tried to warn all my relatives and friends, but no one believed me.
Apart from its historical significance as the first authentic eyewitness account from the largest death camp, the Vrba-Wetzler report significantly and perhaps decisively contributed to the survival of approximately 200,000 Hungarian Jews (out of 800,000), representing most of the Jewish population of the capital, Budapest. The information conveyed by the report both directly and indirectly contributed to the veto of the continued deportations, by the Hungarian head of state, Horthy, in the first week of July, 1944.
Translated by Peter Stenberg and Lena Karlström.