• Escape from Auschwitz, 8-9 p.m. Wednesday, WPBT-PBS 2
From their hiding place just outside the fence of the Auschwitz death camp, Rudolph Vrba and Alfred Wetzler clearly heard the scream of a Jewish prisoner being dragged off to the gas chamber in retaliation for their breakout: ``Avenge us!'' But, as this sobering documentary reveals, that would not be so easy. And a heroic escape from the Nazis that might have saved hundreds of thousands of lives instead slid into frustration and futility.
Airing as an episode of the PBS documentary series Secrets of the Dead, this briskly paced account (narrated by Liev Schreiber of CSI) is part caper film, part exploration of the murky politics of Jewish resistance groups and their not-always-enthusiastic allies overseas.
But mostly it's a reminder that state-sponsored mass murder -- which by the end of the 20th century had become a numbingly common byproduct of regimes from Moscow to Kigali -- was once so literally unthinkable that the world rejected the very possibility, even when confronted by eyewitness testimony. The chillingly detailed accounts of what was happening in Auschwitz given by Vrba and Wetzler were discounted not only by Allied governments but by Europe's own Jewish underground.
Rulers had been killing their political enemies since the first cavemen formed tribal councils, but Nazi Germany was the first state to turn murder into an industrial process, marrying murder with technology so efficiently that by 1944, Auschwitz was pumping out 12,000 corpses a day.
But the process required secrecy: Even a world already at war with the Nazis might redouble its efforts if it sensed the dimensions of the slaughter inside the concentration camps, and Jewish victims being shipped to Auschwitz from around Europe could rebel at the most vulnerable point in the process, when they were being loaded aboard trains. The Germans even created a showcase camp inside Auschwitz where some Jews were kept under model conditions and Red Cross monitoring was allowed. (Once the Red Cross was satisfied and lost interest, everybody in the camp was gassed.)
Vrba and Wetzler, Auschwitz inmates assigned to administrative work details that gave them access to the camp's records as well as freedom to roam, knew better than anyone the magnitude of the Nazi's extermination schemes. And when they learned that the camp was being doubled in size in preparation for the deportation of Hungary's Jewish population, they decided to escape. They hid inside a pile of lumber at a construction site outside, waited three days for the search to die down, then hiked 85 miles to the headquarters of the Jewish resistance in Slovakia.
But their tales of assembly-line murder in gas chambers and round-the-clock crematoria seemed preposterous to the resistance leaders -- until Vrba and Wetzler began reciting names of Slovakian Jews executed at Auschwitz that matched up with the resistance's deportation records.
Even then, in a world without e-mail or fax machines, it took months to smuggle their report out to the rest of the world. The U.S. and British governments, while leaking it for propaganda purposes, were not sufficiently convinced to take more direct action like bombing the camps.
Worse yet, Rudolph Kastner, head of Hungary's Jewish underground, suppressed the report altogether, worried that it would derail his negotiations to ransom a million captive Hungarian Jews from the Nazis. His deal eventually saved 1,600 of them -- but another 300,000 died in the Auschwitz gas chambers that nobody could quite believe existed.
In an entire world of disbelievers, Kastner alone would be called to account. The German industrialist Oskar Schindler saved 1,200 Jews from the Nazis and became a Hollywood hero; Kastner saved 1,600 and was reviled as a collaborationist traitor. His final years were lived in a loneliness he called ''blacker than night, darker than hell.'' Thirteen years after Vrba and Wetzler broke out of Auschwitz, Kastner made his own escape: He was gunned down in Tel Aviv by a Holocaust survivor.
