Early in March 1942, in rebellion against the deportation laws, Vrba ripped the yellow Star of David off his clothes and left his Czechoslovakian home, Heading for Britain via Hungary. Later, having been intercepted by frontier guards, he was first sent to the Novaky transition camp in Slovakia, where  he tried to escape, but was recaptured by a policeman on who had become suspicious of the young man who was wearing two pairs of socks.

 

On June, 1942, he was deported first to Majdanek where he met with his brother "Sammy". After being "duped" into volunteering for what was represented as a "Work Farm" assignment he trasferred to Auschwitz on June , 1942. After six months in Auschwitz, he was transferred to Birkenau (Auschwitz II) and had the number 44070 tattooed on his arm.

Although after being caught smuggling some goods to friends, Vrba rose to become a camp registrar, and he began calculate and "mentally record" the figures of those transported to, and murdered.

Vrba met a fellow prisoner by the name of Alfred Wetzler, at the time and the two men became close friends and try to escape together.

With the help of the camp underground, the two men climbed inside a hollowed-out hiding place in a wood pile. It was outside Birkenau's barbed-wire inner perimeter, but inside an external perimeter the Nazi guards kept erected.

The other prisoners placed boards around the area, then sprinkled the surrounding area with a strong smelling Russian tobacco to  keep the guard dogs away. This was a trick learned from Volkov, who had escaped Auschwitz but recaptured.
At the evening, the commander of Auschwitz II, was informed by that two Jews had escaped.

Eleven days after escaping, Vrba and Wetzler crossed the Polish-Slovakian border. They met a farmer who put them in touch with a Jewish doctor, Dr. Pollack, who had a contact, Adre Steiner, in the Slovak Judenrat (Jewish Council) in Žilina, which now called itself the Working Group, and regarded itself as an underground movement.

 

Vrba and Wetzler spent the night in Čadca in the home of Mrs. Baeck, a relative of the well-known rabbi Leo Baeck, and met the Working Group the next day, April 24, 1944. The head of the Working Group, Dr. Oskar Neumann, a German-speaking lawyer, placed the men in different rooms in a former Jewish old people's home, and interviewed them separately over three days.

 

Vrba believed that many of the 437,000 Hungarian Jews sent to Auschwitz between May 15 and July 7, 1944 — when 12,000 Jews were being dispatched by train every day — would have resisted or hidden had they known they were to be killed and not resettled.

 

After handing being interviewed, Vrbda and Wetzler compiled a full report. This report was turned over to the Slovakian Jewish Council.