A feature film about Auschwitz—the largest Nazi death camp and a byword for terror and genocide for the past 80 years—is earning critical acclaim for its gripping narrative and haunting portrayal of the horrors Jews faced during the Holocaust.
The Auschwitz Report is the true story of two courageous Slovak Jews who escaped from Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland in 1944 and, against death-defying odds, managed to reach the wider world where they revealed details about the systematic extermination of Jewish prisoners inside the concentration camp.
Directed by Slovak actor, producer and director Peter Bebjak, the historical drama was Slovakia’s 2020 Oscar entry for the best international feature film category. The film opened at select U.S. theaters on September 24.
The two protagonists, Alfred Wetzler and Water Rosenberg, who changed his name to Rudolf Vrba after escaping the Nazis, were young men assigned by the camp commander to work as scribes.
Not least because they were privy to reports about the killings of prisoners that occurred at Auschwitz on a daily basis as well as other Nazi secrets, the duo became the most sought-after individuals in Nazi-occupied Poland.
The morning after their daring escape, the camp commander placed his guards on full alert. “These two Jews have seen more than you have,” he told his guards. “They must not escape.”
The guards searched all possible hiding places and scoured woodlands nearby in a futile attempt to find the escaped prisoners who, as it happens, were barely a step ahead of them. When the guards discovered that some other prisoners were part of the escape plan, they torture them for information, to no avail.
In the meantime, braving hunger and cold as they crossed mountains and forests, the two escapees somehow managed to make their way to the Polish-Slovak border. They presented their carefully documented 32-page report on Auschwitz to a British Red Cross representative, citing precise figures and victims’ names.
The representative listened patiently at first but then grew increasingly skeptical. The German Red Cross, he said, “assures us that all of these people died in the camp due to a typhoid epidemic.” Yet their information, published in June 1944 as the Vrba-Wetzler report, is credited with saving more than 100,000 Hungarian Jews from deportation to Auschwitz.
The response “seems outrageous now but wasn’t particularly surprising at the time,” wrote Tom Tugend in a September 22 column for the Jewish Journal. “It took the world several decades to grasp the enormity of the Holocaust, and even now there are those who can’t believe it happened.”
Asked by the Jewish Journal why he thinks Holocaust-themed films continue to be made. “Young people in Slovakia hardly know what happened 80 years ago,” said Bebjak. “For them, this is so long ago that they don’t feel any connection to it. It’s important to remind them that there is a continuity in our lives and that something like this can happen any time if we lose interest in public life and in policy—if we let other people make decisions about our lives.”
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