Two heroes who escaped.
(Washington, D.C.) — Who were the four real heroes who escaped from Auschwitz 70 years ago this spring, the men whose lives inspired The Auschwitz Escape?
Today FoxNews.com has published a column I have written giving their names and sketching out their dramatic stories.
I hope you’ll take a moment to read the whole column, and then share it with others. Thanks so much.
REMEMBERING FOUR HEROES OF THE HOLOCAUST
They pulled off the greatest escape in human history – from a Nazi death camp – to tell the world the truth about Hitler, but no one knows their names.
By Joel C. Rosenberg, for FoxNews.com
To misunderstand the nature and threat of evil is to risk being blindsided by it.
In 1933, the world was blindsided by the rise of Adolf Hitler.
In 1939, it was stunned by the German invasion of Poland and the Nazi leader’s bloodthirsty quest for global domination. Perhaps most tragically, most of the world did not understand Hitler’s plan to annihilate the Jews until it was almost too late.
Today, we face dangerous new threats from Iran, North Korea, and a rising czar in Russia, not from Germany.
Yet curiously, in recent weeks Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor have each warned that as we confront current challenges we must be careful to learn the lessons of history regarding how the world failed to understand the threat posed by Hitler and the Nazis and deal with it decisively, before events spun out of control.
I agree, and as an example, I would point the extraordinary events that occurred in the spring of 1944.
Four men pulled off the greatest escapes in all of human history, from a Nazi death camp in southern Poland. They did not simply escape to save their own lives. Nor did they escape merely to tell the world about a terrible crime against humanity that had been – and was being – committed. What set these true heroes apart is that they planned and executed their escapes in the hope of stopping a horrific crime before it was committed – the extermination of the Jews of Hungary.
To commemorate the 70th anniversary of these escapes, and to draw attention to the significance these unknown – or unremembered – events, and the lessons they have to teach us, I recently wrote a work of historical fiction, “The Auschwitz Escape.” I changed the names of key figures involved so as not to put words in their mouths that cannot be verified to be their own. But it is my deepest hope that the book will cause many to dig into the real history of these remarkable heroes.
Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler were Slovak Jews. They escaped from Auschwitz on April 7, 1944.
Arnost Rosin was also a Slovak Jew. Czeslaw Mordowicz was a Polish Jew. Together they escaped from Auschwitz on May 27, 1944.
Upon making it safely to Czechoslovakia….
[To read the full column — and please do — click here.]
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