The priest looked at the two men. ‘I promise you,’ he said. ‘I will do it.’
But if they hoped for an instant and public statement from the pontiff, one that would send the word ‘Auschwitz’ around the world, they were to be disappointed. There was nothing the next day or the day after that. On 27 June, one week after the priest had collapsed in grief – moved to that state, admittedly, by the deaths of his fellow Catholic priests rather than by the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews – four separate transports arrived in Auschwitz, all from Hungary. From Debrecen, 3,842 Jews. From Kecskemét, 2,642. From Nagyvárad, 2,819. From Békéscsaba, 3,118. They totalled close to 12,500 people, in a single day . Almost all of them were gassed on arrival.
23
London Has Been Informed
N ATURALLY, THE WORKING Group always hoped that the escapees’ testimony would reach the Allied nations fighting the Third Reich. They had no clear idea how exactly it would get there; instead they cast the document upon the waters, hoping it would land on the right shore. The Auschwitz Report would be a message in a bottle.
One early copy fell into exactly the wrong hands. Oskar Krasň ansk? sent it to Jewish officials based in Istanbul through a courier who he had been assured was ‘reliable’。 But it never arrived. Krasň ansk? later concluded that the messenger had been a paid spy who took the report to Hungary, only to hand it to the Gestapo in Budapest.
Another copy, also originally destined for Istanbul, followed an especially circuitous path. A Jewish employee of the Turkish legation in Budapest passed it to the head of the city’s Palestine office – representing those who were determined to turn that country into a refuge for Jews – who, keen to get the information to neutral Switzerland, passed it to a contact in the Romanian legation in Bern who, in turn, handed it to a businessman from Transylvania who had once been known as Gy?rgy Mandel but who had now, however improbably, become the unpaid first secretary of the consulate of El Salvador in Geneva, under the name of George Mantello.
The route was bizarre, but at last the report had found the right person. Mantello was a man ready to flout convention, and if necessary the law, if that’s what it took to rescue Jews from the Nazis. And for him, the Auschwitz Report had a bleakly personal significance. As he read it, he knew that his own extended family in Hungary had already been deported. The words of Vrba and Wetzler, reinforced by Mordowicz and Rosin, confirmed that all of those relatives, some 200 people, were almost certainly dead. He resolved immediately to do what he could to spread the word.
Mantello’s copy was a five-page summary in Hungarian, produced at an earlier stage of the report’s convoluted journey by an orthodox rabbi in Slovakia, so he now enlisted the help of assorted students and expats to make immediate translations of this abridged version into Spanish, French, German and English . On 22 June 1944 he handed the document to a British journalist, Walter Garrett, who was in Zurich for the Exchange Telegraph news agency. Garrett saw the news value immediately, but he also recognised that, even in its pared down form, the Auschwitz Report was still too lengthy for easy newspaper consumption. He had his British–Hungarian secretary, one Blanche Lucas, produce a fresh translation and he then distilled the core points into four arresting press releases .
Garrett made a break from the reporters’ unwritten code, which would forbid a journalist from receiving financial help from a source: doubtless for the sake of speed, he allowed Mantello to pay for those four texts to be sent to London by telegram, costly as that was. Still, despite that departure from traditional Fleet Street practice, and in welcome contrast with Krasň ansk?, Garrett understood the grammar of news. His telegram despatch , wired on the night of 23 June 1944, led with what was his most stunning revelation:
FOLLOWING DRAMATIC ACCOUNT ONE DARKEST CHAPTERS MODERN HISTORY REVEALING HOW ONE MILLION 715 THOUSAND JEWS PUT DEATH ANNIHILATION CAMP AUSCHWITZ BIRKENAU … REPORT COME EX TWO JEWS WHO ESCAPED BIRKENAU CORRECTNESS WHEREOF CONFIRMED … FROM THE BEGINNING JUNE 1943 NINETY PERCENT INCOMING JEWS GASSED DEATH STOP … THREE GAS-CHAMBERS FOUR CREMATORIUMS BIRKENAU-AUSCHWITZ STOP EACH CREMATORIUM … TWO THOUSAND CORPSE DAILY STOP GARRETT ADDS ABSOLUTE EXACTNESS ABOVE REPORT UNQUESTIONABLE … END
As soon as those words were humming along the telegraph cables to London, Garrett acted to ensure that his story – surely one of the scoops of the century – would get the widest possible distribution. The technology of 1944 allowed for few short cuts. And so, in the early hours of 24 June, Walter Garrett rode his bike through the streets of Zurich, pushing copies of his despatch by hand into the mailboxes of the city’s newspapers . Attached was a covering letter of endorsement, supplied by Mantello, from a quartet of senior Swiss theologians and clerics, all apparently vouching for the gravity of the revelations. （In fact, none of the four had seen the report: in a typical Mantello flourish, he had put their names to the letter but had dispensed with the formality of asking their permission first.） And so the first newspaper story based on what would become known as the Vrba–Wetzler Report appeared in Switzerland’s Neue Zürcher Zeitung later that same day .
Mantello’s efforts had worked. Thanks to those ‘two Jews who escaped Birkenau, correctness whereof confirmed’， the word was out. Breaking the dam of censorship, the following eighteen days saw the publication in the Swiss press of no fewer than 383 articles laying bare the truth of the Auschwitz death camp, even if, by accidentally omitting the estimated 50,000 Lithuanian dead, Garrett had revised down Vrba–Wetzler’s death toll. Put another way, between 24 June and 11 July more articles appeared about Auschwitz in the Swiss press than had been published about the wider Final Solution throughout the entire course of the war in The Times , Daily Telegraph , Manchester Guardian and the whole of the British popular press put together.
Churches held special masses and memorial services in Basel and Zurich; there were protests on the streets of Basel and Schaffhausen . On 3 July, the New York Times ran a story from its correspondent in Geneva , headlined ‘Inquiry Confirms Nazi Death Camps’， reporting the existence of two ‘extermination camps’ in Auschwitz and Birkenau, based on the evidence brought out by Fred and Rudi. Using Garrett’s mistaken figure, it estimated that ‘more than 1,715,000 Jewish refugees were put to death’ in ‘execution halls’ by means of cyanide gas between 15 April 1942 and 15 April 1944.
What Vrba and Wetzler had dreamed of was becoming a reality. The truth of Auschwitz was at last emerging into the daylight.
It had come far too late for most of the Jews of Hungary. The deportations had begun in earnest in mid-May, becoming daily. By the time Garrett’s story was published, more than two and a half months after Fred and Walter had climbed out of that hole in the ground, hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were already dead.
Garrett and Mantello did not rely on the power of the press alone. Indeed, the reporter’s first impulse on seeing the document Mantello put in front of him had been to insist that the sometime diplomat show it to the Allied governments that very day, even before Garrett had had a chance to publish a word. With the Vrba–Wetzler Report in hand, Mantello duly went to see the British military attaché, whose staff then contacted Garrett for confirmation that this unlikely representative of El Salvador was telling the truth. They told the journalist that they found the report ‘shocking’ .