# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Rudolf Vrba on the Resistance in Auschwitz (Shoah, 1985)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Auschwitz Secrets Of The Dead , The Story Of Escapee Rudolf Vrba

# data[].attributes.body
“Remember that one day of your idleness kills 12,000 souls ... there is only one thing that may be said in your exoneration-that you do not know the truth. This is possible, The villain does his job so shrewdly that only a few guess the truth. We have told you several times. Is it possible that you believe our murderers more than you believe us?”
― Rudolf Vrba, I Escaped from Auschwitz

# data[].attributes.body
"It is evil to give an active or passive evil as his instrument, his observer or his sacrifice."

# data[].attributes.body
April 7, 1944 -- Alarm sirens announce the escape of two Slovak prisoners from a heavily-guarded camp in Nazi Germany. The escapees, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, succeed and flee more than one hundred miles to give the first graphic and exact descriptions of the operations at Auschwitz, which up to that point had only been heard about as unverifiable rumours. Their report, first punished in Swiss and then in the western press, made the reality of Nazi annihilation camps explicit and unequivocal to Pope Pius XII, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

# data[].attributes.body
This map, drawn from Rudolf Vrba’s own account of his escape, traces the two friends’ journey, from the woodpile just beyond the perimeter of Auschwitz, to the safety of Slovakia, where they finally revealed the secret purpose of Auschwitz.

# data[].attributes.body
After his eyes adjusted to the darkness, the first thing Rudi did inside the stack of planks was scrape away a message the four previous occupants had carved into the wood. The message said, “Kiss our arses,” and Rudi knew if the SS ever found it, the four prisoners, who had managed to avoid execution until then, would be killed at once. Then, he and Fred waited. It was almost time for evening roll call, and they expected the siren to sound at five-thirty.

But five-thirty came and went in silence. Then five forty-five, and six o’clock. Just when Rudi began to think someone had squealed on them, the siren wailed.

They heard boots hitting the earth and the shouts of an Unterscharfuhrer and the clicking of a hound’s nails on the wood above them and then eventually silence. They spent three days without food or drink, stiff and motionless in the cavity. Bombs from an air raid pounded nearby. Then, on the third day, a few hours after they heard the SS guards call off the search, Rudi and Fred decided to emerge. The planks above them, however, wouldn’t budge.

It took all their strength to lift the wood, but finally it gave, and the night opened above them. They had roughly eighty miles of Nazi-occupied Poland ahead of them.