Customer Reviews

I Escaped From Auschwitz

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This is by far one of the most heart wrenching stories on the Holocaust that I have ever read. Dr. Rudolph Vrba recalls his memoirs of his frightening life in Auschwitz and his suceeded escape from death! This is a must read book. I was so overwhelmed that an author could transport me back in time. I laughed, I cried, I got angry, my nerves were on edge, I went through all the emotions that Rudolph Vrba encountered, as if I were there. I could not put the book down, in fact, right after reading it I reread the entire book. Rudolph Vrba is not JUST a survivor of the worse death camp ran by monsters, he's a true Hero in my heart. If you are looking for a book on the Holocaust/Auschwitz, this is the book for you. As I stated, this is by far the most profoundly written book I have ever encountered.

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.

This is an extraordinary book about a teenager's journey through the Nazi extermination camps. Rudolf managed to escape from Auschwitz and warn the Hungarians Jews about the real purpose behind the upcoming transports thus saving hundreds of thousands.

This book is near impossible to put down as Mr. Vrba recounts in a fairly matter of fact way the horrors that he witnessed and experienced first hand. It is difficult to understand how he did not give up. Curiously, even though Vrba is Jewish, I did not detect a strong religious belief as central. Rather he seems driven by a near preternatural will to live underpinned by his desire tell the truth about the Nazi death machine to the outside world.

Over the last few years, I have been trying to understand the Holocaust and the faultlines of our human psyche that were exploited to make it possible. This book helps as it details how the desire to eliminate Jews and other underdesirables was carried out as the grass root level. Rudolf is at his best describing the day to day jobs of the people who actually did the killing.

The book was near impossible to find as it is out of print with its original title "I Cannot Forgive". The demand for it will only increase as Professor Vrba just passed away.

Also German vast trove of holocaust archives are about to be released. For some reason, Germany held up for sixty years archives that detail the deaths of up to 14 million people. Maybe because they were waiting for all the important figures to die?

Perhaps those who doubt will find answers as these records are released.

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

This is a must read for any person interested in understanding not only the inner working(s) of Auschwitz, with the expected horrors and brutality, but also is, a wonderful, personal story of strength, survival, and guile. The book is so well written, and personalized, that one cannot help to "cheer" the author along, knowing that ultimatly he will escape from his personal "hell". This is a book that one will not put down until finished. It is highly recommended!

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?

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.

Rudolf Vrba passed away at the age of eighty- two in late March 2006 . He was one of five Jews who escaped the Auschwitz death camp during World War 2. This book contains the story of his heroic escape . He and a friend Alfred Wetzler, a Hungarian Jewish leader, hid three days in a pile of lumber and then using a mixture of tobacco and gasoline to throw the dogs and guards off their scent, made their escape. In spring of 1944 they described to the Allies the situation of the camp in what were called 'The Auschwitz Protocals'.
This was one of the major sources for enabling the world to know of that horror of horrors which was the world the Nazi extermination camps.
This is by all accounts one of the most powerful of all accounts of personal witness of the 'Holocaust'
Vrba went on to become a Professor of Pharmacology and build a family of children and grandchildren in Canada.

Originally, I found this book while brousing in a local north of NYC suburb library when I was 13 years old under its original title about 42 years ago. While reading it at the time, I asked my father if this all really happened. He said that it had. And, that basically was it. There were family secrets at the time that I did not understand or know about.

This book had a tremendous immediate impact on me as an 8th grader in a Catholic school that I will never forget. All this was way long before I knew of the historical impact on me personally. When I first read Vrba's book, it was just so very shocking to know human beings could be capable of doing so much harm to other human beings. Decades have passed. Only in the last several years, did I become aware that family members on my father's side were lost at Auschwitz. A memorial in France incudes my great grandparents' names.

I read this book 30 years ago in the form of a tattered used paperback entitled "I Cannot Forgive". The stories of tragedy and horror told by Rudolf Vrba left me deeply shaken. I recall having to stop reading many times because my vision was obscured by tears. This book has never left my mind. It is with some trepidation that I am about to re-read this new edition. I know that it means I will be re-entering the violent and twisted world of Auschwitz, where so many innocent lives were so senselessly destroyed. It means I will have to re-witness so many acts of cruelty and barbarity through the eyes of the author as a teen-ager trapped in a death camp. I guess it is just a small way of trying to keep alive the memory of the vanished millions....