‘The Auschwitz Report’: Slovakian film follows real-life escapees who tried to warn the world.

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JTA) — Were it not for Rudolph Vrba and Alfréd Wexler, would the world today know the true extent of the mass murder the Nazis inflicted during the Holocaust?

The two men, both Slovak Jews who escaped from Auschwitz, secretly recorded fastidious notes about details of the death camp unknown to the outside world. These included schematics of the gas chambers, the Nazis’ use of the deadly chemical Zyklon-B, the number of prisoners being brought in to their deaths every day and the planned construction of a new rail line for deporting Hungarian Jews directly to the camp. The information the men smuggled out of Auschwitz formed the basis for the Vrba-Wetzler Report — the first time the international community had heard of much of these horrors.

The new Slovakian film “The Auschwitz Report,” directed by Peter Bebjak, somewhat clunkily dramatizes Vrba and Wexler’s 1944 escape and attempt to get their message to an outside world still largely ignorant of what was transpiring at the camps. This being a Holocaust film, Bebjak also spends considerable time (a full half of his 94 minutes) re-enacting the hell of the camp itself.

These early sequences — Nazis beating a man to death, shooting a father’s daughter in front of him, stacking naked dead bodies like meat — are stomach-churning in a familiar way, and serve as the film’s intent to align itself with more brutal siblings like “Son of Saul” rather than softer works like “Life is Beautiful.” Whether you find such scenes a necessary tool of the “never forget” philosophy will likely depend on how many Holocaust movies you’ve already seen, and how many more you feel like you can tolerate.

 
That is what is beginning to happen here. Warnings galore and it all being ignored just like it was when it "snowed" ashes on cars near all the camps. Gray snow. But...if one does not acknowlege it, then of course it never happened, right? And don't kid yourselves. Everyone knew. England, Russia, AMERICA....all the major players of war KNEW. And did nothing. After all, it was "just jews" and people they never met or knew so....*shrug*. Same mentality is happening NOW. Same shrugs.
 
JTA) — Were it not for Rudolph Vrba and Alfréd Wexler, would the world today know the true extent of the mass murder the Nazis inflicted during the Holocaust?

The two men, both Slovak Jews who escaped from Auschwitz, secretly recorded fastidious notes about details of the death camp unknown to the outside world. These included schematics of the gas chambers, the Nazis’ use of the deadly chemical Zyklon-B, the number of prisoners being brought in to their deaths every day and the planned construction of a new rail line for deporting Hungarian Jews directly to the camp. The information the men smuggled out of Auschwitz formed the basis for the Vrba-Wetzler Report — the first time the international community had heard of much of these horrors.

The new Slovakian film “The Auschwitz Report,” directed by Peter Bebjak, somewhat clunkily dramatizes Vrba and Wexler’s 1944 escape and attempt to get their message to an outside world still largely ignorant of what was transpiring at the camps. This being a Holocaust film, Bebjak also spends considerable time (a full half of his 94 minutes) re-enacting the hell of the camp itself.

These early sequences — Nazis beating a man to death, shooting a father’s daughter in front of him, stacking naked dead bodies like meat — are stomach-churning in a familiar way, and serve as the film’s intent to align itself with more brutal siblings like “Son of Saul” rather than softer works like “Life is Beautiful.” Whether you find such scenes a necessary tool of the “never forget” philosophy will likely depend on how many Holocaust movies you’ve already seen, and how many more you feel like you can tolerate.


I would really like to see this.
 
What were the Allies supposed to do? Bomb the camps? The trains? Then we would be hearing endless sniveling about how we killed the hapless prisoners. In any case, most were killed in the Operation Rienhardt death camps, some 4,5 to 5 million, and those camps were not well known at all and were finished and covered up in 1943, even before the Russian summer offensives ever got rolling after Kursk. Treblinka was the last one opened, they were all closed by October. Yitzak Arad has the best book on the death camps, with footnotes and his estimates.


Obviously they killed a lot more than 1.5 million; as Arad points out the train schedules alone prove there were a lot more than that sent to the camps.
 
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Allied forces knew about the concentration camps a year or two before liberation.

There was nothing they could do about it.
 
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I would really like to see this.

This is also worth watching:

The Academy Award®-winning feature documentary film shares the remarkable stories of five people – a grandmother, a teacher, a businessman, an artist, and a U.S. congressman – as they return from the United States to their hometowns and to the ghettos and concentration camps that once imprisoned them.

The film is currently available on Netflixand Blu-ray.

 
Thanks for this, it has allowed me to learn about another Auschwitz film that I'd never heard of, and will watch soon:

 
Allied forces knew about the concentration camps a year or two before liberation.

There was nothing they could do about it.

The only thing to do was to win the war as fast as possible.

The thing many people can't fathom is that appealing to the morality of amoral people is a pointless exercise.
 
What were the Allies supposed to do? Bomb the camps? The trains? Then we would be hearing endless sniveling about how we killed the hapless prisoners. In any case, most were killed in the Operation Rienhardt death camps, some 4,5 to 5 million, and those camps were not well known at all and were finished and covered up in 1943, even before the Russian summer offensives ever got rolling after Kursk. Treblinka was the last one opened, they were all closed by October. Yitzak Arad has the best book on the death camps, with footnotes and his estimates.


Obviously they killed a lot more than 1.5 million; as Arad points out the train schedules alone prove there were a lot more than that sent to the camps.

I always get a kick out of the "it wasn't that bad" deniers, who quibble over it being 3 million, or 6 million, or some number in between. Once you get up to the millions when it comes to determined genocide, the single digit number in front of all those zeroes really loses its significance.
 
I always get a kick out of the "it wasn't that bad" deniers, who quibble over it being 3 million, or 6 million, or some number in between. Once you get up to the millions when it comes to determined genocide, the single digit number in front of all those zeroes really loses its significance.

Pointing out numbers closer to the actual historical facts isn't 'quibbling' when they are as far off as then numbers cited in the article I linked to and others, such as the Wiki articles, and neither is it claiming 'it wasn't that bad' to post estimates tripling the estimates. We hear about Auschwitz a lot because it had a lot more survivors than the main killing camps, and soldiers 'liberating' the camps wrote and talked about them, including one of my uncles. Many don't even know the other camps existed. Only maybe 200 escaped from the Operation Reinhard camps, so there are no PBS Specials and endless documentaries on them.

Few also know the extent of Polish and Ukrainian cooperation in the capture and transport of Jews that made it possible to reach such numbers; it couldn't have happened without their enthusiastic help, which is why I'm glad we didn't lose American troops liberating eastern Europe from the Soviets, as Patton and others wanted to do.
 
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I watched "Son of Saul" last night, it was okay, nothing special. An interesting view of the life of a Sonderkommando, certainly have never seen a film shot through this perspective.
 
A big part of the problem was that FDR was apathetic about reports of mass killings of Jews. Among other books, see Rafael Medoff's recent book The Jews Should Keep Quiet: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and the Holocaust. Another worthwhile, and disturbing, book on the subject is David Wyman’s book The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941-1945.

FDR should be forever shamed and repudiated for his disgraceful refusal to help Europe's Jews during the war. He was too busy saving the Soviet Union.
 
Allied forces knew about the concentration camps a year or two before liberation.

There was nothing they could do about it.
Ever hear of the St Louis? German Jews who escaped and tried to come here, Rosevelt refused to let the ship land and of course go back. What do you think 🤔 happened to them? Yet if we don’t let illegals in we are racist
 

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