I participated in the second walk of the Vrba-Wetzler memorial 2024, a few weeks after AJR 3G member Tom Horvath Neuman had finished his walk. In fact, I spoke to Tom a few days before my departure to alleviate my worries about being able to walk 130 km in six days. He reassured me that it was well organised and that the walking was manageable.
I had wanted to participate in the walk for some time, I think soon after I interviewed Prof Gerta Vrbova for the AJR Refugee Voices Archive and she told me that her daughter Zusa had conceived the idea of the walk as a meaningful way to commemorate the escape of Rudi Vrba and Alfred Wetzler from Auschwitz in April 1944. The first time I had met some of the organisers of the walk was in 2017, when I accompanied my mother, Dr Gertrud Friedmann, on a trip to Žilina, and she addressed the group of walkers of summer 2017, in the Nova Synagoga. She told them how she in April 1944, shortly after turning 15, was asked by her uncle Armin Winter, to bring food to the two escapees, who were hiding in the Jewish Old Age Home in Žilina and were beginning to write the famous Auschwitz Protocols.
I am very pleased that seven years later I managed to participate in the walk, together with my husband and two of my children, in the 10th anniversary year of the walk and on the 80th anniversary of the escape. It was a very special experience for so many reasons.
I heard about the escape from childhood, as Alfred Wetzler had married my mother’s cousin Eta after the war, and I spent a week with them in 1988. I had read Vrba’s and Wetzler’s books (‘I escaped from Auschwitz’ and ‘Escape from Hell). But the experience of being in the very places they describe in their books and listening to extracts being read aloud, was something really special. I had brought the German version of Fredi’s book along (‘Was Dante nicht Sah’), which I inherited from my mother. In the evenings after long and strenuous walks, I found myself drawn to the pages. Having seen the places, I wanted to find it on the pages of the book. I also had a desire to photograph this book in relevant locations.
We started the walk in Birkenau, on the perimeter outside the fence, where their hiding place was likely to have been, where they spent four days and three nights in a whole dug in the earth, surrounded by tobacco soaked in petroleum, so the dogs would not be attracted to them. I took a picture of Fredi’s book on the grass. On other parts of the walk, I read aloud from Fredi’s book. I asked my husband to record it, this seemed important. The act of connection and recognition. Connecting their courage and their testimony to today and recognising the importance of their escape and their testimony. It was very humbling to see that the group of Czech and Slovak participants and the British contingent, which also included Gerta Vrbova’s daughter Dr Caroline Hilton and granddaughter Zoe, was doing just that, giving recognition, which neither Alfred Wetzler not Rudi Vrba received in their lifetime.
Many walkers had participated in the walk multiple times and there was a strong sense of camaraderie in the group and a shared concern about the rise of the populist pro- Russia party in Slovakia and the rise of antisemitism. The group also included children and grandchildren of Jewish survivors, many of them did not know that they were Jewish as children. I felt that it was important for them to be together in this context and to be able to talk about their own family experiences.
One of the highlights of the walk was reaching the Polish/Slovak border at the end of the fifth day, after a very steep incline. History was tangible in the border stones demarking the border between the two countries in a forest on a hillside between the villages of Zwardoń and Skalité. When you look closely at these short grey stones scattered on the hill, you can see that they have one letter P on one side and another letter S on the other. But when you stand right in front of them, you can see that an earlier letter is still visible on the stone, the letter D for Deutschland. These stones were here when Rudi and Fredi crossed from occupied Poland to their homeland Slovakia. In Fredi’s book one paragraph is dedicated to the border stones:
‘Ducking, they ran a few steps over to the other side, below the ridge. They are on home ground, at last on native soil…Val bend down and viciously spits on the frontier stone on which there is a large black D for Deutschland’. (p. 270, Escape from Hell).
The next day, we met by the two majors of the border villages. They welcomed us near a small memorial which has been erected some time ago without any permissions. When walking further into the Slovak village of Skalité, we see a few memorial boards, recalling the arrival of Weztler and Vrba in the village and we also visit a memorial for Ondrej Čanecký erected just outside the primary school, who took Fredi and Rudi in and nursed them for a few days. After a few kilometres we reached the town hall of the village, where a reception waited for us. I was very impressed that the small village had done so much to remember the presence of the two Jewish escapees here in 1944.
The journey of Vrba and Wetzler did not end in Skalité. Ondrey took the two men to a Jewish doctor in Čadca (Dr Pollack) and he connected them to the Jewish community in Zilina. As Rudi and Fredi took the train to Žilina, we (thankfully) also took the train on the last bit of their journey.
From the train station, the group normally walks to the Jewish Old Age Home, where the two escapees found shelter. This walk was different, as the 10th anniversary evening in the New Synagogue (now a cultural centre) in Žilina started already in the afternoon, with a film screening of a film on Alfred Wetzler by Robert Kirchhoff. Although I knew that Kirchhoff had filmed my mother, I had not idea if the footage was included in the version we were about to see. But to my shock, there she appeared on the big screen, followed by me and my daughter, carrying a bag to a room in the Old Age Home and talking about her encounter with Vrba and Wetzler. It was an emotional moment, sitting in complete exhaustion in the new synagogue and encountering the previous visit from 2017 captured on film.
While I grew up with the story of Wetzler’s and Vrba’s escape, the retracing of their footsteps helped me to understand the escape in a unique way. I had underestimated the physical effort it must have taken for the two men to simply walk the distance from Auschwitz to Skalité and did not realise how difficult it must have been to stay undetected in this beautiful landscape. I also understood that without local help, Wetzler and Vrba would have not managed to cross the border and to be able to reach Žilina. It is right that the efforts of Ondrej Čanecký and his wife are now celebrated in Skalité and that the village is proud of that history.
Above all, by listening and reading the books of Wetzler and Vrba during the walk, it became clear to me that they, like Emanuel Ringleblum in the Warsaw Ghetto, understood at the time, the importance of collecting evidence of Nazi atrocities and mass murder and recording the truth as witnesses, for the then present (to save the Hungarian Jews), for the future after the war, when they hoped that the people responsible for these atrocities would be brought to justice, and for posterity.
Dr Bea Lewkowicz, September 2024
Kommentare