Alfréd Wetzler


Alfréd Israel Wetzler, who wrote under the alias Jozef Lánik, was a Slovak Jew.
He is known for escaping from Auschwitz concentration camp and co-writing the Vrba-Wetzler Report.

Background

Wetzler was born in Nagyszombat, Austria-Hungary. After his birthplace became part of Czechoslovakia, he was a worker in Trnava during the period 1936–1940. He was sent to the Birkenau camp in 1942 and escaped from it with Vrba on 10 April 1944. Using the pen name Jozef Lanik, he wrote up the story of his experiences in Slovak as Auschwitz, Tomb of Four Million People, a factual account of the Wetzler–Vrba report and of other witnesses, and later a fictionalized account called What Dante Did Not See.
After the war, Wetzler worked as an editor, worked in Bratislava and on a farm. After 1970 he stopped working owing to poor health. He died in Bratislava in 1988. He is buried in the Orthodox Jewish Cemetery.

Vrba–Wetzler report

Wetzler is known for the report that he and his fellow escapee, Rudolf Vrba, compiled about the inner workings of the Auschwitz camp – a ground plan of the camp, construction details of the gas chambers, crematoria and, most convincingly, a label from a canister of Zyklon B. The 33-page Vrba–Wetzler report, as it became known, released in mid 1944, was the first detailed report about Auschwitz to reach the West that the Allies regarded as credible. The evidence eventually led to the bombing of several government buildings in Hungary, killing Nazi officials who were instrumental in the railway deportations of Jews to Auschwitz. The deportations from Hungary halted after Hungarian-Romanian Jew George Mantello, then First Secretary of the El Salvador mission in Switzerland, publicized the report, which led to the saving of up to 120,000 Hungarian Jews.
The historian Sir Martin Gilbert said: "Alfred Wetzler was a true hero. His escape from Auschwitz, and the report he helped compile, telling for the first time the truth about the camp as a place of mass murder, led directly to saving the lives of thousands of Jews – the Jews of Budapest who were about to be deported to their deaths. No other single act in the Second World War saved so many Jews from the fate that Hitler had determined for them."