Paul McKay: The Brave Teenager Who Escaped from Auschwitz and Told the War What Was Happening There

Paul McKay, in the Ottawa Citizen (5-6-05):

A brave teenager, now a Canadian, made a daring escape from Auschwitz and first warned the world of its horrific secret. His report saved 200,000 lives.

Rudolf Vrba was once imprisoned there. After 21 harrowing months, the teenager and a fellow Slovak Jew escaped to alert Europe about the Nazi death factory in Poland.

Scholars generally agree that the escapees' 60-page report, including diagrams of the camp layout and defences, halted Nazi death trains poised to send some 200,000 Hungarian Jews to oblivion three months later.

The pair escaped in April 1944 by hiding for three days in a pile of building planks soaked in gasoline and Russian tobacco, the only scent known to thwart SS Alsatian dogs. It took three weeks to steal their way on foot through the mountains of southern Poland, freezing in the spring snow, starving and dressed in rags. At one point, they barely escaped the sniper fire of an SS patrol.

Crossing into Slovakia, the pair found a safe house. There they dictated a report that would eventually reach Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and pope Pius XII, and become one of the most important annals of the Holocaust.

As they did, Nazi police and army patrols were scouring eastern Europe with orders to execute the pair.

"The strength of the Final Solution was its secrecy, its impossibility," Mr. Vrba recalls with soft-spoken modesty. "I escaped to break that belief that it was not possible. And to stop more killings....