They were not the first to escape the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. What the Slovaks Rudolf Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler actually achieved was even more important. They were the first to provide a credible and detailed eye-witness account of mass murders in the camp.

On January 27, International Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorates victims of the Holocaust. The Auschwitz camp was liberated on this very day 78 years ago.

The paths of Rudolf Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler crossed for the first time at the concentration camp in 1942. After two gruesome years in Auschwitz they made the courageous decision to escape.

On April 7, 1944 Vrba and Wetzler hid inside a space they had prepared in a pile of wood stacked by perimeter fences. In order to confuse patrol dogs, they sprinkled the area with tobacco soaked in gasoline. The men hid in the pile for about 80 hours waiting for the search to end.

They then walked almost 140 kilometers on foot in the direction of Slovakia. Luckily for Vrba and Wetzler, they had boots, clothes and a flashlight. After two weeks of marching through occupied Poland they managed to get to Žilina, north Slovakia.

There they revealed the terrifying truth of what was transpiring in the Auschwitz concentration camp, resulting in a 33-page document known as the Auschwitz Protocols or Vrba–Wetzler Report. Although the Allies had no doubt that Jews were being killed en masse in the camp, it was this report that later made it possible to estimate the scale of the murders, as well as providing a description of the gas chambers used in the inhuman process.

The report was translated and in the following weeks arrived in Switzerland. Some of it even received press coverage in the New York Times. The document is also credited with helping to persuade Hungary to halt the deportation of its Jews to the camp, presumably saving tens of thousands.

The full report was published in November 1944. It is stored in the US Department of Justice & the War Refugee Board Archives and can be found on the Holocaust Research Project website.

The story of Rudolf Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler recently resurfaced, as recounted in the successful Slovak director Peter Bebjak's feature film “The Auschwitz Report”. The movie also reached the shortlist for Best International Feature Film at the 93rd Academy Awards.

The horror of the Holocaust that led to the mass murders of millions of innocent people cannot and must not be forgotten. To that end, schools in Slovakia organise trips to the Auschwitz concentration camp so that younger generations do not forget.

Slovakia has its own museum dedicated to the genocide. In 2016, the Slovak National Museum opened the Holocaust Museum in Sereď, southwest Slovakia, the first of its kind in the country.

The exhibitions are situated on the grounds of former labor and transit camp in five reconstructed barracks, providing visitors with information on the treatment of the Jewish population by the Nazi-allied Slovak state created during World War II. The exhibitions were prepared in cooperation with Slovak historians, experts from Israel and Holocaust survivors who had spent some time in the labor camp in town. The dignified atmosphere of the museum premises reminds its visitors that knowledge for the future is drawn from experience of the past.​​​​​​​