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Title: I Escaped From Auschwitz
ISBN: 1569802327
Author:
Rudolf Vrba
Publicate Date: 2002-07-01
Publish: 2002-07-01
List Price: $19.95
Average Customer Rating: 4.5
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $10.82
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| Customer Review: |
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1: Extraordinary testimony
Rudolf Vrba (pronounced Verba), Slovak Jewish 17 years, is deported in 1942 to Ma??danek then, quickly, Auschwitz and Birkenau. The exceptional strength of character, combined with a sense of humour extraordinary luck, fidelity in friendship, will enable it to survive until his escape from Auschwitz in April 1944. The motivation for his escape (one of the very few who have succeeded) was to save Hungarian Jews from the terrible mass deportation ahead.
The disbelief was the first rendezvous of his report, his contacts, both the secret of Auschwitz was meticulously kept, as the Great Lie operating at full. It is necessary to recall that ever the official version and therefore mediated in the peoples occupied by the Nazis for deportation meant extermination. Poland is understood faster than other countries. We know why and how history took place (including the Warsaw ghetto). Extreme poverty and weakness of humanity, Dr. Rudolf Kastner, head of the Jewish Rescue Committee in Hungary, preferred to communicate Vrba's report on the atrocities of the extermination camps (and very precise quantification of 1,765,000 killed, Eichmann rather than alerting the Jewish community so that it will revolt. In exchange, Kastner - the book teaches us - got saved his life, his family and all, that of 1,684 Jews. 400,000 were deported. The remarkable intervention of the apostolic nuncio (= pope's ambassador in Slovakia) who believed the truth of the report Vrba after having heard at length, Pope Pius XII (we are well aware of the controversy about it) and the Apostolic Nuncio in Hungary permit to stop the deportation of 800,000 other Jews.
The quality of work is exceptional. The gift of humor is sublime. Rudolf Vrba manages to show the stupidity of executioners, their stupidity mechanical, projects a beam of light on the banality of evil and makes us laugh in many pages. Laughs in misery, death, despair, but never despair. Laugh as knows so well do so in a Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago about Soviet concentration camps.
Never lose faith in humanity: Rudolf Vrba never ceases to surprise us. In the extermination camps, vermin encountered the nobility of soul, common law prisoners were killers, some kapos were real men, there was even a SS who was disgusted escape 2 Jews, is a long list of a tragic hero and low humanity who perished, often to defend it. Tribute is their record.
Thank you Mr Rudolf Vrba for this extraordinary testimony.
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2: A Page Turned and an Eye Opener
This book is a page turner from the moment you start reading. It is not as complex as the book written by Alfred Wexler that was recently translated into English. It is written from the perspective of an adolescent man. Youth and inexperience is likely what helped Mr. Vrba survive and deal with the atrocities that surrounded him: young people simply believe that they will live and maintain hope far longer than those with experience about the human condition. Plus, he had a good deal of luck, which he does not discuss but comes through. I often found myself wondering how he could remember such detail and quotes, but by the end of the book I realized that while some of the details may be somewhat imprecise, the impression and the overall truth of the testimony was both powerful and unchallengeable. Also, I was shocked at the overall readability of the prose on matters so morbid. The book sounded like it came from an optimist on life or a person so proud of his accomplishment of saving so many that nothing could mar his implacability. The one note of negativism was Mr. Vrba's attack on the Zionists. Here he was clearly enraged at the Hungarian Jewish leadership (See Zionist organization Arcvhives). Indeed the original title of this work was I can not forgive. Did he mean forgive both the Germans and their Jewish collaborators or just the former?
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3: A gripping story of one man's escape from Hell
An important account of Rudi Vrba's fateful escape from the death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Details his life right before his capture, time at Auschwitz and after his escape. Because of his and Fred Weltzer's escapse, the world was informed of the gruesome atrocities committed at Auschwitz and other concentration camps. It is a gripping and emotional read. Highly recommended.
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4: Ben Hecht was wrong
Ben Hecht was too easy on Rudolf Kastner, the Hungarian "Zionist" leader who sold his soul to Adolf Eichmann. You have to read Dr. Vrba's book to learn just how culpable Kastner was in the extermination of the first 400,000 Jews of Budapest. Until I read Vrba, I thought Kastner's greatest crime was that he saved himself and his friends and family from the Nazis, that he testified at Nuremberg on behalf of SS Col Kurt (Gold Teeth) Becher, and that he lied about it all. Now I know that Kastner got the warning for which Vrba worked so hard in plenty of time not only to warn the Jews of Hungary of what was in store for them (certainly, not "resettlement") but also to lay the groundwork for resistance. It turns out that Eichmann had only 140 Germans in Budapest to help him deport one million people. And they all got on the cattle cars willingly, sheep led to the slaughter.
None resisted. None scuffled with the SS. None tried to take one SS man's life along with his or her own. They even served in Kastner's Jewish police, which helped Eichmann load the cattle cars.
The book is a chore. Despite the title, about 95% of the book deals with the details of Auschwitz. I did not need to read all about 4,000 naked women standing for hours in the December cold waiting to be gassed and other terrible memories. I had read all that before. I borrowed the Vrba book because I wanted to know more about his attempt to warn world Jewry. He succeeded but we all failed him
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5: A Book on Every Page
When reading this book I was struck by how many human lives are mentioned in passing, summed up in a paragraph and lost. The volume and diversity of tales told in this book reflects the number and diversity of people Mr. Vrba came into contact with during his horrific ordeal. Most of them died.
Do not pay any attention to the sole reviewer who seeks to discredit Mr. Vrba's testimony. It amazes me that people seek to diminish or descredit personal testimony about the Holocaust by calling into question whether 1.5 million or 1.75 million people were brutally murdered. The simple fact is that the Nazi's and their puppet regimes murdered six million Jews for nothing more than being Jewish. There was no American, Jewish or British conspiracy to make these atrocities up, the Germans kept very thorough records. Records that help convict the remnants of the regime at Nuremberg. These records support the facts documented by Mr. Vrba and far from being a fraud, they suggest that he was a reliable eyewitness to the most horrific and unbelievable systematic extermination the world has ever seen. His struggle is an amazing story.
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