I Escaped from Auschwitz: The Story of a Man Whose Actions Led to the Largest Single Rescue of Jews in World War II

Rudolf Vrba was born in Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia) in 1924. As a teenager, he was deported to Auschwitz. He was interned there from April 1942 to June 1944, when he and fellow prisoner Alfred Wetzler escaped. He and Wetzler’s report of the atrocities of Auschwitz alerted authorities across the world, eventually helping save hundreds of thousands of other Jewish people from being deported to the concentration camp. Vrba defected to Israel in 1958 and worked at the Weizmann Research Institute until in 1960 when he moved to England and published his story in a series of articles in the Daily Herald, following the arrest of Adolf Eichmann. He eventually published his full memoir in 1963 as I Cannot Forgive. In 1967, Vrba moved to Canada and passed away in Vancouver in 2006.