In April 1944, when he was 19 years old, Rudolf Vrba did something truly extraordinary. With his fellow prisoner Alfréd Wetzler, this son of a sawmill owner from provincial Slovakia became the first Jew to break out of Auschwitz. And he did it to warn the world.
The report the two escapees would compile, detailing the horrific minutiae of life inside the most notorious of the Nazi death camps, would, through a succession of international diplomatic efforts, save an estimated 200,000 Jewish lives. To my mind it represents one of the greatest single achievements of the Second World War — one that should make Vrba stand alongside Anne Frank, Oskar Schindler and Primo Levi, those whose stories shape our understanding of the Holocaust.
